Summary of Jam Session:
In this session we did 3 critiques. Ol Ya – Furniture Rental/Purchase business. Greg Morehead – Baby Apparel. Charles – Beauty/Acne store. Additional topics covered: Deep Homepage critique, Product Page critique.
Critiques:
Critique 1
0:15:00 – Critique number 1 is for Ol Ya. This is a furniture business based in Manhattan. There are two sides to this business, furniture rentals and selling furniture. Offering different quality of furniture from student level to high budget furniture.
We open the discussion with how Ol can nurture low budget customers as well as high budget customers and even some gamification options that could serve as a lead gen on the homepage.
Homepage: Taking a look at the homepage, because this business model servers buyers/renters/staging and developers, navigation has to really be on point. Clear navigation and clear CTA’s to get a customer through the funnel. Starting off with reducing the amount of options/links and hone in on what’s absolutely necessary. Adding reviews to the homepage for increasing trust and so potential clients can easily see peoples past experiences.
Critique 2
1:04:00 – Critique number 2 is for Greg Morehead, coolstylebaby.com. This is a baby store selling stylish clothes for baby boys and girls.
Homepage: First, the banner is taking up too much prime real estate. As well as the accounts sign up/sign in options should not be in the header. If these are important to your store then they should be in the footer. Also, search bar needs to be much more prominent, increase the size of the search bar. We know backed by data that customers who use the search function convert much higher. Removing ‘Shop’ navigation and putting the collections on the homepage instead of having them in a dropdown.
Product Page: Change the ATC text from ‘Buy Now’ to ‘Add To Cart’ since customers are not making a purchase right then, they are simply adding an item(s) to cart. Remove the payment icons under ATC button and replace with 3-4 value propositions that will entice a customer to add to cart. Payment icons serve no purpose on a product page.
Cart: Update the cart to BGS standards. Change to slide out ajax cart and apply our best practices. Ensuring hierarchy of focus is on the checkout button.
Critique 3
1:29:40 – Critique number 3 is for keevaorganics.com. This is a skin health/beauty store that sells creams and serums to help with acne.
Homepage: Right away there was a popup, this is very distracting for customers since they haven’t even started to navigate your store yet. The only time there should be a popup is on exit-intent, so before a customer is about to leave. Also, social proof apps are very overused and can be faked so we suggest not using this, because it can have the opposite impact on your customers. There are other links in the navigation that should be in the footer such as Contact, Wholesale, Reviews.
Product Titles: Shortening the product titles from Amazon titles to normal product titles. If you have a unique value in any of your products (organic), include that in the title but keep it short and sweet.
Product Page: Change all the product resolution to 600×600 or 1000×1000, so the page doesn’t jump up and down when a customer looks through the images. Also reduce the amount of product images, less is more. Typically you would have an image of the product, then the ingredients, then a lifestyle shot. Remove all the payment icons under the cart button, also remove the spammy countdown app, this may improve your CR a little, but hurts LTV and other important metrics!
Cart: Remove the grey background otherwise you will need to remove the white background on all your product images. They will show the white background which does not look good. Remove the alternative payments from the cart and move them to the payment page in the checkout.
Noteworthy Topics:
1:30:40 – Homepage Critique – Team goes deep into this homepage and really breaks it down. This is a must-see if you haven’t optimized your homepage to BGS standards!
1:48:48 – Product Page Critique – What size your product images should be and how many images you should have. Also removing payment icons and unnecessary apps.