TL;DR
VIDEO
One of the great benefits of being a merchant on Shopify Plus is the ease with which you can enhance your user experience (UX) to build more revenue.
At P3, we've found that improving your UX in any of the four targeted areas below can produce both immediate and long-term lift for your store:
1. Product Discovery
2. Product Customization & 3D Rendering
3. Bundle & Subscription Builders
4. AOV Focused Cart Features
In this post, we'll cover 8 Shopify Plus customizations addressing these areas that we've actually used to grow our clients' profits on Shopify Plus.
With a little coding know-how, you can integrate similar UX optimizations to convert more new visitors, net more dollars per conversion, and turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers.
Or you can chat with the certified Shopify Plus Experts at P3. Just submit the contact form to the right, and we'll help you start building a UX that converts like mad with a free store audit 🚀
1. Customer Quizzes VIDEO
When shopping a product catalog with lots of highly specialized variants (makeups, shampoos, tires, fishing rods etc.), it can be challenging for your first-time customers to surface the right products for their use case. What's worse–if they can't find what they want quickly, or if they choose incorrectly, their frustration will lead to poor reviews and returns.
Customer quizzes are a perfect solution to this problem because:
1. They provide a personal, interactive way for your customers to discover exactly what they need quickly and easily, increasing the odds of both conversion & retention.
2. They generate valuable customer insights you can use to mount smarter remarketing campaigns and develop new products.
3. By tying a quiz to bundle recommendations, as we did when building this mobile optimized hair quiz for our friends at Fekkai, you can raise your average order value (AOV) and reduce the cost of new customer acquisition (CAC).
One of the most effective ways to improve your conversion rate is to give your customers a more intuitive way to surface relevant products. Another is to solve a paint point customers commonly experience on the path to purchase in your niche.
For our friends at Forever Yours Lingerie, we opted to do both–building them an intuitive fit calculator in Shopify Plus that also lets customers shop by size.
Now users can calculate their exact fit online (solving a pain point) AND call up all of the brand’s size-appropriate options in just a few clicks (intuitive surfacing).
VIDEO
Shop by size is an essential filter option for your collections page, but what if you have too many size variants to fit on a tidy dropdown?
We made this intuitive bra size chart in Shopify Plus for our friends at Forever Yours Lingerie to solve that exact problem. The chart enables shoppers to select their size from a logical graphic interface without being overwhelmed by an endless column of choices.
Intuitive size charts may not seem like a radical intervention, but helping customers get where they're going faster nets more conversions and fewer customer service queries.
Can you guess the average online return rate in 2021? It's 30%. And those returns will cost retailers almost $1 trillion. If you’re in apparel, one smart way to lower your return rate is to improve your user experience with a simple size suggester that addresses your customers’ number one pain point BEFORE the sale.
For instance, this lightweight calculator in Shopify Plus that we made for our friends at Tail Activewear. Now, new Tail customers can use the calculator to dial up their ideal fit by providing just two data points, while Tail does less restocking and refunding.
Calculators like this can be designed to use biometric data (e.g. bust or waist size), drape preference (loose, tight), or even competitor brand sizing to help your first-time customers find their perfect fit with you.
Discovery doesn't always mean helping your customers figure out what to buy. Often it means aiding your customers in deciding how much to buy. If you sell goods by the yard, by the roll, or in other custom quantities, you'll mint a lot more returning customers by helping shoppers easily calculate the quantity they need for a given application.
Case in point: this handy, lightweight wallpaper calculator we made for our friends at Hygge & West. Customers can use it to arrive at the appropriate quantity for any DIY or professional project right from the PDP, and add the desired number of rolls to their carts directly from the calculator, reducing friction to purchase.
Empowering customers to check out with exactly what they need nurtures the conversion by solving a major DIY project pain point. It also reduces consumer waste, and will help keep H&W top of mind the next time a user embarks on a home improvement project.
One of the most reliable ways to improve your USP is to offer product customization options. Empowering your fans to personalize the products they're already interested in can net you more conversions and a higher AOV, as long as the user experience is seamless and visually representative.
Intuitive customization tools like the sandal builder above are not only easy to use, they're fun. And in eCommerce, fun equals engagement. Just ask Jack Rogers's loyal fans, who can now design a unique pair of iconic Jacks in just a few clicks.
Trying to sell a tactile, big-ticket item like jewelry online is a bit like trying to sell a car without a test drive–tricky. When it comes to highly personal luxury products, the closer you can come to replicating the in-person shopping experience, the higher the likelihood of making the sale. And one of the most effective ways to virtually put products in your customers’ hands is with 3D rendering.
Our friends at The M Jewelers make customizable statement jewelry for the bold, so we built them a lightweight 3D previewer from scratch that allows customers to visualize their unique designs before ordering. When you're about to drop a few hundred dollars on one-of-a-kind drip, seeing is believing.
3D technology like this has been on the breakthrough bubble for a few years, but now that Shopify has acquired Primer, a company that specializes in nifty "preview-in-your-space" technology, we expect enhanced product view capabilities to roll out to tens of thousands of Shopify merchants soon.
Bundle & Subscription Builders
One powerful way to raise your average order value is to give your customers a convenient way to bundle your products. But bundling isn't just about giving customers the ability to easily adjust quantities. The key to offering revenue-generating bundles is to understand the products your customers are likeliest to purchase together.
If you're selling pajamas, like our friends at BedHead, the most obvious use case for bundles is the matching family pj set. We created the intuitive bundle builder above to make it easy for BedHead customers to build sets for the whole family without ever hitting the back button.
Bundles significantly reduce friction to large conversions, which can improve your AOV. Plus, as we'll discuss below, when paired with subscriptions, bundles can greatly increase your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
In eCommerce, your CPG brand can generate more MRR just by offering convenient bundles and subscriptions. And subscriptions won't just boost your MRR, they'll also reduce the cost of customer acquisition by turning one-time buyers into coveted repeat buyers–the most valuable customers your brand can win. That's why it's so important to get subscriptions right.
We created a subscription bundle builder with all the bells and whistles for our friends at The Good Patch. TGP sells plant- and hemp-based wellness patches with a variety of applications, an inventory perfect for the build-a-box style subscription program we designed for their store. Now customers can mix, match, save, and subscribe from a single interface, building their perfect blend of wellness patches in just a few clicks.
8. Gift With Purchase Progress Bar VIDEO
Offering a relevant, desirable gift with purchase at a target order value is a great way to raise your AOV. Especially if you can gamify the experience for your customers with a prominent progress bar.
That’s why we created this flexible gift with purchase interface in Shopify Plus for our friends at CVG. Customers can track their progress toward unlocking a free gift every time they add to cart, and select the desired style and size of their gift right from the sidebar cart.
Fun, seamless gamification features like these improve your AOV, reduce the relative cost of customer acquisition, and upsell your buyers in a way that adds value to their shopping experience.
Ready to Raise Your Revenue? The optimizations above are all proven methods of raising your conversion rates, AOV, and LTV. But they're also just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Shopify Plus can do. For a free store audit, and to discuss the most effective customizations for your store, get in touch with P3 today.
