In an attempt to attract and retain more customers, e-commerce platforms are getting more and more sophisticated. Purchases are shifting from the physical to the digital stores and providing an outstanding user experience that adds value to the customer journey has become of paramount importance. In an attempt to meet that need, we saw a wide array of new features and design differences. We thought it would be a good opportunity to look at what were the most common choices and help you design product pages that stand out while complementing the digital shopping experience.
We decided to focus on one of the most important sections of any e-commerce website: the product page. To standardize our analysis we picked a specific product (the Samsung s10) and looked across 100+ Telco’s websites.
Collage from the 100+ Websites that we sampled for our analysis
We grouped our findings based on three main aspects:
- Visuals: how the product is visualized
- Product Specification: how the product specifications are visible and accessible by the user
- Additional features: what extra features were present on the page
For each one of this category, you will find our findings and a brief summary of the interpretation of the results based on our experience of working with Telcos worldwide.
1. Visuals
To differentiate themselves, manufacturers are launching products with sophisticated colors and materials more than ever. Being able to pick a color for your mobile device is crucial and is reflected by the wide adoption of color switching on the product pages (84% of the 111 pages we analyzed). When it comes down to having “color-switching done right” we observed a clear split in behavior. 53% of the product pages in fact reloaded after the color of the device was changed wasting precious seconds of the users. This delay gets even more cumbersome on the mobile experience and might result in the user leaving the page.
A distinguishing feature appearing on 27% of the product pages was the interactive 3D visualization of the mobile device. This allows users to inspect the device, look at the type and number of ports available well as having a life-like experience of how the device will look like in their hands and be more confident when making the final purchase decision.
2. Specifications
We saw remarkable differences in how product specifications were displayed on the page. In 66 % of cases, the users have to scroll down to have a comprehensive look at the product specifications. Moreover, for 69% of the platforms, the full list of specifications was accessible after clicking a drop-down menu. Both these observations suggest that other pieces of information such as pricing or data bundles have a higher priority and are consequently moved to the top of the page. On the other hand, we saw a more recent trend where a subset of key information was clearly stated on top of the page and in some cases highlighted with a distinguishing icon. Consequently, we picked six important device characteristics and we saw if any of those were clearly highlighted on top of the page (orange + red) and in how many cases that was done with an icon (orange). Below you can see the results:
The information regarding display, camera, operating system, and battery appeared progressively less often in precious areas of the page (close to the product price or the buy button). We were surprised that information regarding the size of the device or the ports available (3.5 mm jack, USB-c, micro-USB port etc) were often neglected and would require the user to dig on the page.
For the four key specifications mentioned above, an average of 43% of the pages used a distinguishing icon to attract the attention of the user. We have seen recently giants like Google changing their main interface and adding icons to their search result bar.
We can only imagine that such changes would be beneficial but speculating on the reasons or effect would only be an exercise in guesswork.
3. Additional Features
Besides the product visualization and specifications, we looked at additional page features that would be beneficial to the user.
A whopping 38% adopted live chat on their pages and based on our experience this percentage will just go up in time thanks to the recent developments in chat-bots and AI. A review section is also becoming more present on Telco’s e-commerce website driven by the Amazon successes and by the ease of implementation with several companies providing an easy plug-in solution for digital platforms. Pop-ups are still present on 20% of the website and we saw a steady decrease in adoption over the last years. The feature that was the least adopted was the ability to compare devices. Only 18% of the website gave this opportunity to consumers. You can learn more about the importance of comparison and some solutions available in a recent article we posted here.
Here is a short summary of what we have learned:
1- Product visualization in 3D has been adopted more often than traditional “extra features” like a pop-up or a review system (27% Vs 20% and 22% respectively)
2- Despite the wide adoption of color switching on the product page, only 46% of platforms went the extra mile and didn’t add wasteful seconds to the user experience.
3- A significant amount of websites started adopting icons to attract user attention to key product features.
If you want to have access to the full repository of screenshots from the websites that we looked at as well as some data on loading speed and performance do not hesitate to get in touch via email address –> letstalk@binkies3d.com
