Improving the international shopping experience
Background
RevZilla began a partnership with Flow, a software company, created to improve the management of cross border e-commerce. Flow would allow us to display local currency for riders around the world while offering them more familiar payment options and direct shipping through DHL.
Problem
Our product team lacked qualitative data on the international shopping experience, making it difficult to fully understand the current challenges and identify potential opportunities. We also recognized that integrating with Flow would affect the user interface, necessitating design adjustments for elements like a country-picker feature, as well as modifications to accommodate currency conversions across different components and pages.
User testing showed the importance of focusing on “deliver to” language, rather than simply where the user was located
Testing and understanding our international customer base was new territory for the tech team. To reduce risk, I ran dozens of user tests on riders from countries we receive a high amount of traffic from, like Canada and Australia, along with users from Europe and the Middle East where shipping may be more difficult and english may be a second language. Watching users interact with our site revealed several areas to focus on outside of the Flow project that would continue to improve the shopping experience globally.
User testing findings and ideas:
High Priority
Inability to ship restricted items (due to brand, product size, or product materials) causes major confusion and frustration
Giving context as to why an item is restricted will help answer user questions like: Is this item restricted because of the brand? Or is it the product type or size? Or are all items unavailable to ship to my country? This could be addressed through targeted notifications depending on the product type
Allow users to sort items by availability to deliver to their country
Allow users to quickly transition into the U.S. experience to deliver to a reshipper
Determining how currency conversion would impact our complex part product pages
Various options for currency conversion on mobile product tiles
Restricted item notification added to Product Display Pages with the goal of reducing the number of users progressing to the checkout with an item ineligible to ship to their location.
Research recommendations for business strategy in international markets:
Create an international-friendly experience
Provide live chat hours in international time zones (often a preferred means of communication for riders who are not comfortable speaking english)
Make shipping policies and pricing visible and easy to access to give users more confidence while browsing
Improve shipping policy page to give country-specific information; users would end up on these pages looking for shipping information, but could never find their location mentioned.
Use targeted promotion capabilities internationally
Our merchandising team currently provides targeted marketing for different regions of the U.S. I asked the team to consider how seasonal promotions, such as messaging around cold-weather gear and winterizing your bike, would be interpreted by a user experiencing the opposite season in the southern hemisphere
Create trust for parts shoppers
There is an opportunity to mitigate concern around parts not arriving in time or could end up being faulty, which they wouldn't realize until they went to install it or use it
Reduce customer fear that items would be inconvenient to return
A final warning is displayed to users upon clicking the “Proceed to Checkout” button to ensure that users do not invest time in the checkout process with items ineligible to ship to their location.
Impact
Utilizing Flow technology improved the international shopping experience with accurate currency display. The user research conducted with international shoppers also revealed several areas of improvement outside of currency considerations.