Research and conceptualization

Problem

Capturing and holding your audience’s attention is always a top priority when you’re building an online experience, but it’s probably most crucial if you’re catering to shoppers. After all, what good is a shop if no one’s buying anything? If it’s hard to find the right product, and even harder to check out, chances are your customers aren’t going to stick around for long.

That’s exactly the problem Cycle Central encountered with their customers. How can we improve the retention and conversion rates of CC’s online shopping experience?

Research

The problem is twofold:

• 50% of users open on average 7 item pages and then abandon the site without moving any items into the cart. Users are probably unable to determine which bike is best based on relative features.

• 70% of users who place an item in the cart do not purchase. Data shows that users abandon the cart at the registration page. Right now, users must make an account to purchase. A guest checkout would be the ticket for this! The guest checkout must capture the user’s email.

Persona perspective

The userbase for Cycle Central (CC) is mainly composed of men, about 24-38 years old, who are high earners, and are picky about bikes. Additionally, a few key descriptors about the brand were presented: “savvy,” “focused,” “serious,” and “dependable.” These cyclists did their homework before settling on any one bike, and it showed—each of them had ridden their “daily drivers” for at least five years. Through my conversations with them, it seemed neither browsing nor checking out were problematic experiences in any one of the popular bicycle shop websites. Big names like Cannondale, The Pros Closet, and Canyon were thrown around as exemplars for their sleek designs and seamless flows. The criticisms were actually targeted towards such semantics as whether a given bike actually fit in a given category, or how sizing a bike was a more involved process than the seemingly simple options shown on some of the sites.

Competitive perspective

Some industry giants to look out for include Amazon, Target, and Trekbikes. While Amazon and Target are giants in their own right, they lack the “commitment” a site like Trekbikes has towards a specific customer base—one that rides bikes. The first solution was almost immediately apparent across every bicycle retail site in the form of a “bike rack” that users could add to as they browsed through the catalog. As users added to the bike rack, they could view practically every detail about each bike side by side.

The guest checkout was similarly simple in implementation: give the user the option to check out either as a guest or sign up/in, and initiate the checkout process for guests with only an email as a requirement.

However, the checkout process itself deserved closer scrutiny. Each site presented a different format and visuals for their checkout flows. Cannondale had a consistent side by side look that evolved as the user progressed through the flow, while Trek and Canyon followed a more traditional paged flow. Before finalization, however, some consideration was again given to other online retailers. Target and Amazon had been listed as competitors and observed accordingly, but didn’t have the same “focus” the bicycle sites did. 

Further analysis into online retailers returned Ikea as an exemplary competitor--it had a similar level of detail in the browsing experience, and its checkout flow stood out even among the existing choices. For example, Ikea also had a comparison feature, not to mention having an unlimited number of slots for product comparison. The checkout flow had a convenient “guest or registered user” pop-up prompt. 

The final design incorporated the segmented Cannondale flow, but with a cart and the checkout prompt from Ikea. The Ikea prompt was chosen for its responsiveness, and the Cannondale flow had a compact yet legible format that fit the serious, “made for discerning pros” look at the heart of CC.