Introduction
While consulting with Conversion Sciences, I got to work with Stewmac, one of the largest guitar parts retailers online. I also worked with their new acquisition, Madinter, Eruope's largest wood supplier for custom guitar building. For both of these e-commerce experiences, I worked on carrying out tasks to help improve the overall customer experience. Below is a highlight of some of the additions to Stewmac's website around wholesale shoppers and fees for heavy items.
Wholesale customers are a very important segment for Stewmac, as they purchase large quantities of products. Before our pass through the site, there were very few indicators to tell where discounts were coming from and if you, as a user, were logged in correctly to get your wholesale discount.
We looked at these issues by adding moments after logging in to reinforce the wholesale discount and how the program works. We added vital messaging and banners across the site and highlighted discounts in the cart and checkout process to understand better when a discount is coming from the wholesale program.
Above is a look at some select screens on a desktop browser.
As mobile traffic is just as crucial for their wholesale buyers as an ordinary customer, we looked at how we would treat this messaging across the site for mobile as well.
Another confusing issue for consumers was being charged extra fees for heavy or oversized items even if they were subscribing members to receive free shipping. So, we added information callouts with clickable items on the product description pages and through the checkout process to gain more information.
We did need to do a little testing before moving this into the longer form testing with Conversion Sciences to gain a better understanding of how users perceive the fee being applied, either to the item or the total. As you can see, we tried to keep it attached to the item as long as possible, as that was the clearest for the user, especially if they had multiple items in their cart.
*Note that we were discussing branding of the Wholesale partner program as this feature was being developed, so some screens may not be consistent.
Heavy/oversized item touchpoints in a mobile view.
Conclusion
Stewmac really understands the process of macking incremental improvements on their existing foundation. The data that Conversion Scientist Data Scientist and I analyzed helped us find various performance problems with their site and their other site, Madinter, But because the client understands the process and understands their user so well, it makes improving on key issues like the above easy wins to improve understanding, conversion, and retention.
