Case Study: E-commerce for local Pet business.
In this case study, I will take you through the process of both building and improving a local business’s online presence, providing e-commerce that would match the client and user’s needs.
Local shops and practitioners are suffering a decrease in the demand for their services and products due to the extreme situation COVID-19 pushed worldwide. This can affect local economies and many families. Alongside this, we can see true intent and a growing trend to support local businesses in many communities.
Online presence is a good way to hijack the issue. More and more professionals are on the verge of their digital transition.
Our goal is to assist a local Pet Store to improve its online presence to be more competitive in the real marketplace.
The client
Super Pet is a local pet store based in Minas Gerais, Brazil, since 2016, when they opened the store, they have chosen to focus on providing personalized service, prioritizing quality over quantity.
Super Pet wants a new e-commerce site displaying their products while maintaining their “small store” appeal.
Research & Market Analysis
Why do I love UX? You can always learn something new, about a product, or a user for example. My first assignment here was to understand what was currently being performed in the market by competitors.
What exactly competitors were offering? I had to get a sense of it.
A quick search on online pet stores led me to Petz the largest pet shop in Brazil and one of our main competitors. I have to admit that I was surprised.
They are giants in the industry, they have thousands of products, with a wide variety of options, however with so many options, the search filters don’t work as well and the layout doesn’t seem to have been developed to make this easier.
After this research we gathered some important insights, our challenge was to bring a simple and intuitive layout, that makes the search for products easy, and that keeps the brand identity, quality before quantity.
What do pet owners want?
In order to get into the shopping habits of pet owners, me and Luisa Koyama conducted many interviews, where the following common perceptions came up.
- They buy pet food regularly, 60% of the interviewees usually buy both online and in local stores. However, specific items such as toys and accessories are purchased online most of the time, and pet owners like the convenience of comparing prices, low cost, and variety.
- They like the idea of supporting a local business, but the convenience of buying online and having the product delivered to your chosen location is appealing. They value convenience above all else. They have no problem paying more if it offers better quality or amenities.
- Customers are loyal to specific brands and do not usually switch, for fear of being disappointed with the purchase.
- With the rush of everyday life, owners often forget to buy pet food, and only realize when the food is already gone. They then have to run to the nearest pet shop to buy more.
Validating our ideas
From the findings of the previous research, we created together with a persona that would allow us to validate the ideas we had about the users and their needs.
Sandra has two pets, which are part of the family to her. She doesn’t mind spending more as long as it is high-quality stuff for her pets.
She has always shopped at the local pet shop, but she likes the idea of shopping without leaving her home, after all, she makes recurring purchases of hygiene products and food for her pets every month.
Sandra needs a practical way to continue buying her pet’s products without leaving home.
We believe that by offering a subscription service for pet owners who shop at small pet shops, we will decrease stress, time consumption, and make the purchasing process effortless.
Site Navigation
I would like to say that this step of the process was very challenging, we all have a mental model, and a way of organizing information, right? How then could we predict the best way, which would work for the vast majority? Particularly when we want the products to be easy to find.
What we found out after a lot of research is that users are used to a category model, and we decided to go with this option that is already confirmed and currently practiced in the market.
Prototyping mode on
By bringing in the subscription service, we keep the focus on the quality of products and service rather than quantity and price, we got really excited with the results, to validate our ideas we still need to test.
For our usability test we asked users, to browse the website, and subscribe to a monthly product subscription.
And the testing process was tricky, directing the user that is going to be tested I would say is the main challenge, many of them were afraid to answer something wrong.
Just as the design process is iterative, we had to adjust our introduction many times until we could get the interviewee relaxed and oriented.
We discovered some interesting things:
They liked:
- Product Page — easy to navigate
- The layout of the website, clean and cute- Brought the idea of sweetness that we wanted.
- Flow — they were able to click through and complete purchasing task
That said, there were of course several negative sticking points for users:
They struggled with:
- Sign-up page, they found it confusing.
- The placement of some buttons
Feedback is our best friend, after the tests, we had a lot to work on, we had important changes to make.
Our goal with testing was to ensure that users would be able to accomplish the purchase task, it was very exciting to know that even though we had improvements to make, they were able to successfully complete it.
What would be the next steps?
- Use AI for product search.
- Voice and image search
- Create a loyalty club, where customers can sign up and receive special offers, discounts, and rewards.
Takeaways
It was interesting to be able to not only understand the user, but also the stakeholder and their business vision.
Designers are not just artists, we have to be business people, and have in mind market data, and how that product besides being functional will be desired was an excellent learning.
Thank you for reading this far, and please leave a comment if you can, feedbacks are more than welcome.
