by Latoya Young | Sep 17, 2019 | Commerce Strategy, System Integrations, Web Development
No matter what, customers are always right. Today, they have more power than ever before. As you are well aware, it’s much more likely that your online customers interact with your website via smartphone than desktop. Therefore, their experiences need to be personalized, fast, efficient, and tailored for specific devices. If not, they’ll bounce to the next competitor for a better experience.
Statistics show that 40 percent of users will switch to your competitors after a bad mobile experience. A risk ALL merchants should avoid, especially with the stark rise in mobile sales. In fact, analysts predict that by 2020, 44.7 percent of all retail eCommerce sales will be generated through mobile devices.
Remember, your customers won’t stand for mediocre customer experiences. Your only job is to push them through the checkout in the most frictionless (and secure) manner possible.The digital experience should always mimic the desktop. A business buyer wants to be able to access or check inventory the same way during a commute or at an office computer. According to a 2018 Cyber Week report by Invesp, 32% of consumers changed their mind about making a purchase on mobile, abandoning carts packed with unsold products or sercives. It’s time for a change.
Why 2018’s mobile experiences left money on the table.
Last year, Black Friday’s sales turnout beat expectations by more than 10 percent. However, while many attempted to manage an anticipated mobile surge, conversion rates on the “favorite” shopping device came in dead last during Cyber Week. In the end, over $6.2 billion was spent online from Thanksgiving to the end of Cyber Monday. Mobile orders only accounted for 45% of sales. When you consider that mobile’s share of traffic was 62%, that’s a pretty weak conversion rate.
“In a world where responsive design is trying to give [customers] all the same functionality we have on desktop in mobile, there may be a divergence here where we have to start thinking about different mobile-first customer experiences.”
– Adam Morris, CEO, Redstage
Merchants and B2B companies who don’t start thinking with a “mobile-first customer experience” mentality will be left behind. Of course, it’s ideal to know and understand the buying habits of each customer, but tricky to do without the right technology. Thankfully, free data-driven A/B testing provided by the Mobile Optimization Initiative can help you overcome these barriers. Your customers aren’t going to wait for better mobile experiences, so why should you? Customers want to “click and go.” Lucky for you, implementing optimization is not only easy but the best option for B2B companies and retailers. B2B companies have a more complicated sales funnel that tends to increase aggravation and cart abandoment by 26%. With the Mobile Optimization Initiative, merchants can increase completed purchases dramatically by improving customers’ mobile experience with simple tweaks. Here’s how it works.
The Mobile Optimization Initiative is the ultimate holiday tool!
Last year, we published several articles about mobile optimization to help merchants close the “mobile revenue gap” by optimizing checkout experiences. With some of the tests we’ve run, retailers can cut mobile cart abandonment in half or more on certain devices.
“Optimizing your customer experience thorough data-driven optimization allows you to discover small tweaks that ensure you’re capturing as many sales as possible from the growing pool of mobile buyers.“
– Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer, Redstage
Those who join the MOI program with Redstage will receive a free checkout funnel assessment, custom test design, experiment implementation, and professional services during the active program. The goal of our global initiative is to help merchants get more revenue from mobile. In turn for the free services, we gather anonymized data about customer habits to create a knowledge-base for best practices in mobile. Learn more about our community proven experiments and sign up here. As the results show, it’s well worth it.
“With the current data collection and analysis tools available, we no longer have to speculate on where to put efforts to improve your site. The data is the guide in both where to focus your efforts, and where to expand after experimenting. Smart A/B testing based on data-driven analysis gives you insights that lead to successful, simple changes that can have a big impact on increasing your revenue per visitor. One recent participant – A lawn mower tire store – saw lifts of 24.9% and 7% RPV on desktop and mobile respectively through a‘sticky cart’ test.“
–Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer, Redstage
How Soon Should You Start?
The sooner you begin, the better. Participants start gathering testing data immediately, and all it takes is adding a simple tracking tag to your site (less than a minute). If you’re looking for a last-minute boost for your holiday marketing, this is it, and it packs a punch. Our latest test yielded a 25% increase in revenue per visitor.
The Mobile Optimization Initiative puts you ahead of the competition, because the experiments are proven, having been tested over millions of transactions across hundreds of merchant sites.As of December of 2018, experiments from 120 merchant sites generated a collective $22 million in revenue, averaging a 9.28% increase in RPV (extra revenue they would’ve missed without MOI testing). Today, we leverage the data from more than 200 participating merchants to ensure your tests are optimized for success. From this, we’ve created more than 130 standardized experiments to test, so now’s the time to join!
“We were struggling with mobile conversions and the MOI program helped us with the insights and adjustments we needed. This data-driven, forward-thinking program is certainly worth a try.”
– Digital Marketing Coordinator @ Lawnmower Tire Store
Final Thoughts:
Ignoring the trends means you’re missing out on your share of over $500 billion in online sales. With 95% of mobile devices being used to look up local information to visit businesses, it’s your business they should be checking out (pun intended). By this time next year, we expect the number of participants in the MOI to double again, which means it may be too late to get a leg-up on your competitors. Since the experiments work best during high-traffic periods, there’s no better time to test! And don’t worry, the tests automatically notify you if they’re not giving you positive results.
If you’re still not convinced, or don’t know where to start, check out the latest results, case studies, and strategies in our new Holiday Mobile Optimization Ebook here! Good luck this holiday season! Want to learn more about the initiative but before you sign up? Contact us here for a free consultation with our testing experts.
by Don Pingaro | Mar 27, 2019 | eCommerce Platforms
On June 14th during Adobe’s first earnings call since the announcement of the Magento acquisition, the company reported, “The addition of Magento Commerce will enable commerce to be seamlessly integrated into Adobe Experience Cloud, delivering a single platform that serves both B2B and B2C customers globally while providing the flexibility to scale to serve mid-market and large enterprise customers.” No clear details of the software giant’s Magento roadmap were divulged on the call in June, setting off alarm bells across the world of internet retail… This week, we received some much needed clarity.
Back when the acquisition first occurred, we learned more about how “Adobe Magento” (Now Commerce Cloud) will create a premiere eCommerce experience for customers. Various Adobe and Magento execs have since shed light on how we can expect the Magento-verse to fold into the new cloud offering.
Adobe: Reimagining Experience Driven Commerce
The addition of Magento to the Experience Cloud portfolio creates a comprehensive suite of integrated tech to help merchants maximize their commerce capabilities. On the other side of this coin, current Magento customers gain the added advantage of real-time personalization and optimization from Adobe Sensei (the AI behind Adobe’s “intelligent experiences”). Altogether, this makes one compelling opportunity for Adobe Commerce users to upgrade to the new Magento Commerce stack.
Now, online retailers will be able to leverage the combined power of Magento BI and Adobe Analytics as an industry leading data tool, giving them unique insight into customer buying habits. With both Magento BI and Adobe Analytics pumping data to store owners, merchants can monitor exactly what’s happening with their products online and act quickly to get a leg up on competition.
“Consumers expect every interaction with a brand to be contextual, intuitive and meaningful, but companies have struggled to consistently deliver personalized experiences across the myriad of touchpoints. The innovations we are bringing to market enable companies of all sizes and across industries to make every experience shoppable.”<span class="su-quote-cite">Mark Lavelle, senior vice president of commerce, Adobe and former CEO of Magento</span>
Adobe Cloud, Magento Managed Services Offering
Adobe’s Director of Commerce Program and Strategy, Errol Denger, explains “We’ve taken care of that primary integration between Experience Cloud and Magento.” Customers can now acquire the combined offering of Magento and Adobe Experience Cloud as a managed service. The bundle is integrated with Magento, I/O Runtime for experience extensibility and integration, Target Premium, Analytics Foundation, and 90 hours of engineering service.
“We’re excited to see Adobe integrate world class eCommerce into their suite of high-end experience platforms. Adobe Commerce Cloud will undoubtedly offer incredibly advanced B2B features backed by the firepower of best in class user experience tools.”<span class="su-quote-cite">Adam Morris, CEO, Redstage</span>
The platform is built on top of Magento’s robust cloud eCommerce platform, with direct links to all of Adobe’s powerful marketing and experience tools. “For Adobe, that’s really important because it actually closes the last mile in its Experience offering,” Jason Woosley, Adobe’s VP of commerce product and platform (and Magento’s former VP of product and technology) told Tech Crunch. “It’s no mystery that they’ve been looking at commerce offerings in the past. We’re just super glad that they settled on us.”
Delivering Best In Class Omnichannel Commerce
“Adobe and Magento provide and integrated omnichannel platform to meet every commerce requirement, unlike competitive platforms that limit control and flexibility. We believe there’s a better way…” Denger says, “the combined solution of Adobe and Magento will help merchants create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.”
Some merchants already working with the combined power of both platforms include: LD Products, Harbor Freight and Abbott Labs. And don’t worry, your Magento 2 extensions will still work on Adobe’s Commerce Cloud. However, if you’re on Magento 1, we recommend you take a look at this.
by Redstage Team | Jan 2, 2018 | eCommerce Platforms
Whether your product is bottles of lemonade or festive bikinis for the summer; if you’re new to B2B eCommerce, it’s important to have a plan when selecting the best platform for your business.
The explosion of online shopping popularity projects eCommerce transactions to out-pace in-store sales in the next few years. Nielsen confirms this with research and offers up some of the browse to buy rates for goods & services. Recent trends show B2B customers seeking more of the eCommerce experience as opposed to shopping offline. So who exactly are these customers?
B2B eCommerce has several types of customers, each with their individual requirements for how they define their success. These customer types include B2B consumers (the company plans to resell the product or service to them). Other customer types include wholesalers/distributors who will sell your products and services to other B2B companies and dealers who sometimes resell the company’s product for them.
Knowing your customers, here’s a few things to consider when selecting the best eCommerce platform for your online store.
1. What are your company’s objectives for your B2B eCommerce store?
- It is important to know what you want to achieve when you’re building an eCommerce store. Choosing the platform with the best deployment method for your store will ensure your business needs and your brand objectives are supported.
2. Is the platform best for B2B eCommerce?
- The platform you choose should have documented successful experience meeting the demands of eCommerce online stores. Conduct your own research to see what similar online stores are using and if the platforms of their choice have sufficient experience to meet the demands of an e- commerce store such as a high traffic volume, search engine optimization and mobile friendliness. B2B stores operate best on an open source platform such as Magento. The demands of an online B2B store are much greater than that of a B2C. Magento software caters to this need with such benefits as bulk order management and inventory tracking across multiple warehouse locations.
3. Is the platform customizable?
- For companies like Zoetis, it was important to have an online B2B store that provides a B2C experience for their customers. Catering to the needs of veterinary professionals in over 50 countries 24/7, they needed an eCommerce platform that provided world class customer experience, met the needs of their complex business rules, featured promotions and included 40+ database feeds. The best option for them was to use the Magento Enterprise Edition to implement their online store.
4. Can you integrate any existing software into your new platform?
- Integration is very important to the success of your online store. Large businesses that are typical users of B2B eCommerce platforms understand that integration of pre-existing software such as your CRM to your back office is critical. Building an IT environment that improves company efficiency is vitally important; if your existing software does not integrate with the new eCommerce platform it will negatively impact your overall result.
5. Does the platform provide the best user experience for your customers?
- Today’s customers expect and demand a user experience that is second to none when they visit eCommerce stores. The platform chosen for your store should provide streamlined features like one click purchasing for both software and professional training, providing an easier buyer experience. Staying up to date on how buyers utilize the internet in non B2B environments will enhance your store’s B2B experience. According to Magento, “93 percent of business-to-business buyers prefer to purchase online, with self-serve information, direct from vendors,” so an intuitive experience is key. Learn more about Magento’s B2B module here.
When choosing a B2B eCommerce platform choose a platform with a proven success rate of developing B2B eCommerce stores and can adapt to the changing needs of your company.
Here at Redstage, as a Shopify Plus Partner and Magento Enterprise Partner, we believe one of these great platforms may be the right fit for your B2B store and personally vouch for their abilities. Give us a call anytime for a free consultation on options, features and considerations for each to find the perfect platform for your business.
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