PRWD

Over the last few months, we’ve begun using the Magento e-commerce platform. As leading suppliers of usability analysis, training and evaluation, as well as software development, we’ve worked with a wide range of e-commerce platforms and technologies and are now focusing on Magento as our primary e-commerce platform.

What is Magento?

Magento is an enterprise-ready open source e-commerce platform. What that means in practice is that it provides an equivalent feature set to big-budget e-commerce platforms, but at a substantially lower cost. In place of a single vendor selling licenses and support, there is a global network of providers with skills and knowledge necessary to create and maintain new sites using Magento, headed up by Varien Consulting, the founders of Magento.

What does PRWD bring to Magento?

What we bring is our relentless focus on creating effective user experiences. We’re the North West’s leading usability company – the only North West company to be listed in Econsultancy’s buyers guide – and we’ve also provided training to other digital agencies based here. Visitors to your site might not know anything about the technology you’re using, but they will care about how easy the site is to use. Our usability work ensures that once people are on your site, everything is set up for them to buy as much as possible, as easily as possible.

PRWD’s User Experience Director, Paul Rouke, has written extensively about best practice for online retailers, and gives a training course in that subject. You can find Paul’s blog here – be sure to check out the ‘Most Popular Posts’ in the top right-hand corner for some instantly applicable insights for retailers.

We also bring the technical expertise necessary to get the best out of your Magento site. We’ve begun developing Magento modules which extend the functionality of the system. Having the design and development capacity in one firm means that we can work quickly to update and improve websites once they’ve launched.

How flexible is Magento?

Whilst there are certainly best practices to stick to in e-commerce site design, there’s nothing worse than a fashion site that looks like it should be selling fridges, or a cookie-cutter e-commerce store that fails to build on a company’s brand and marketing strategy. Magento’s modular design means that we can customise design and functionality without limits. Custom shipping charges? Discount vouchers? Twitter or Facebook integration? Advanced analytics and CRM? All of these are possible with Magento, often much more easily than they would be on any other platform.

How can I find out more?

If you want to know more about Magento, or about our e-commerce usability training and consultancy, give us a call on 0161 918 6729 or contact us via our website. Our offices are in Manchester so we’re well placed for anyone in the UK, especially the North West.

Econsultancy have published a new usability article of mine entitled:
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers – who values usability more?

In the article I’ve taken a look at the following high street and pureplay retailers from a usability perspective…

The pureplay fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• ASOS
• Net-a-porter
• My Wardrobe
• The Outnet
• Koodos

The high street fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• Harvey Nichols
• Miss Selfridge
• Topshop
• Next
• New Look

The five questions I posed to each of these retailers are:

1. How seriously are they taking cross-selling and up-selling in order to encourage higher average order values?
2. Do they make standard delivery costs clear before you get into the actual checkout process?
3. Are payment options and cards accepted clear prior to checking out?
4. Have they enclosed their checkout as a way of potentially reducing checkout process abandonments?
5. Do they provide clear customer service contact details during the checkout process?

Take a look at the article and see how these retailers stack up!

If you are a fashion retailer you might also like to read about the Online Fashion 100 event on the 17th June in London, organised by Leon Bailey-Green.

The Scout Association Choose PRWD For In-house E-commerce Usability Training

In order to deliver the system within budget, my objective was to build “usability” into the design of the new web stores, using industry best practices, rather than have to rework at a later stage as a result of usability testing.

Mark Selwyn, E-commerce and ERP Project Manager

The Scout Association E-commerce & Project Background

Scout Shops Limited (SSL) is the trading subsidiary of The Scout Association (TSA). Scouting’s aim is to give it’s 500,000 Members a taste of everyday adventure. To support this aim Scouting supplies a wide range of outdoor activity products to both retail and wholesale customers via online and telesales/mail-order channels.

www.scoutshops.com is the leading website for Scouting merchandise in the UK, and www.outdoors.co.uk is a more recent venture, targeting the outdoor activity and camping markets.

Both sites, although functional, have been limited by the underlying technology upon which the websites have been developed, and this has constrained the business in a number of areas. Additionally, a significant amount of effort is involved on an ongoing basis in keeping both the content and the data current and correct.

Having made a decision to replace a ten year old retail ERP system, it made sense for Scout Shops to also seek a replacement for their websites, and incorporate the currently unfulfilled and planned functional requirements into the new systems.

After looking at a number of potential suppliers, Scout Shops chose a Multi Channel Retail solution from Omnica, comprising a web store integrated with a back end ERP based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. These new systems are planned to go live towards the end of 2009.

The Scout Association Objectives for the Training

Having a strong in-house design capability, along with a relatively new corporate branding for The Scout Association, the decision was taken to bring the design of the new web stores in house, and a small cross-functional group was formed to own the design.

E-commerce and ERP Project Manager, Mark Selwyn, recognised that this group had a variety of skills, ranging from retail to marketing to design, but that each person had differing levels of knowledge of best practice in E-commerce and web store design, and he asked Paul Rouke at PRWD to deliver a tailored version of his “E-commerce Best Practice” training onsite. In order to deliver the system within budget, Mark’s objective was to build “usability” into the design of the new web stores, using industry best practices, rather than have to rework at a later stage as a result of usability testing.

Having set some challenging deadlines, and having to work around staff holidays, there were a limited number of dates that the training could take place on. Despite busy schedules, the whole group committed to the training date as an essential part of the development process.

Using some recommendations from his network, Mark contacted a few suppliers of similar training courses and consultancy, but PRWD were the only consultancy able to deliver the training course on Mark’s timescales. Paul’s ability to tailor the course to meet the specific requirements of TSA re-inforced the decision to go with PRWD.

What did PRWD and Paul Rouke do

Paul developed a bespoke 1 day training course and training manual to fit with The Scout Associations objectives for the training.
Usability and best practice recommendations where provided in the following areas:

• Homepage
• Search
• Navigation
• Category page
• Product page
• Persuasion architecture
• Cross-selling and up-selling
• Shopping basket
• Checkout process
• Web forms

Paul provided a full day of in-house training and consultancy, where all 7 attendees where encouraged to ask questions throughout the day in order to maximise the amount of learning and insights they gained.

At the end of the training day each attendee took with them the comprehensive 100 page training manual for on-going reference and support.

Benefits and Impact for The Scout Association

The effectiveness of the session can be judged so far by the limited number of changes being suggested to the designs being produced, and the speed that any proposed changes are being resolved – both the designer and the team refer back to Paul Rouke’s “Best Practice” training manual and a consensus is quickly reached.

The primary benefit of the course is that it has created a “level playing field” across departments in terms of E-commerce design. Requirements are now based on “best practice” rather than “gut feel” or “I know what works best”. The interesting discussions now revolve around where we recognise what the “best practice” is, but some compromise is needed, for example for reasons of technology or cost.

Testimonials from The Scout Association

The course content was excellent, and the delivery showed that he “knew his stuff”, and I would have no hesitation in using Paul again in the future.

Mark Selwyn, E-commerce and ERP Project Manager

What aspects of the course did you find most beneficial and why?

Clear examples of good and bad approaches. Made impact of decisions very apparent.

Scott Phillips, Head of IT

Re-enforcement of opinions previously held in respect of product and customer focus. Pointers as to best practice and pitfalls to avoid.

David Markwell, Managing Director

Best and worst practice print outs. Thought this was great having them at hand to point out the best/worst practices. Thought it was neatly structured and was good for all levels of knowledge.

I thought the course was very good, and I thought it was presented excellently as I think Paul had quite a tough audience.

Richard Chambers, Senior Graphic Designer

Training Course Feedback

Overall quality of the training

Quality of the course material

Trainers knowledge of the subject

Effectiveness and practicality of the course

Company Contact

The Scout Association
Mark Selwyn – E-commerce and ERP Project Manager
020 8433 7240

Update: you can find more information about our Magento services here

We’ve recently delivered an e-commerce site using the Magento e-commerce platform, which has been very enjoyable to work with. But one key concern for us, with our focus on usability best practice (PRWD’s Paul Rouke delivers a regular training course on exactly that subject), is to ensure that the sites we deliver meet the same high standards that we would recommend to others. Fortunately, Magento provides excellent usability in many of its features and with some careful work on the site design and layout, building a high-usability site proved fairly straightforward.

However, we did encounter one serious usability issue. One of Paul’s recent tips for increasing e-commerce conversion rates was to ensure that delivery costs are displayed to the customer before the checkout process has begun. A last-minute shock during the checkout, as the price leaps due to shipping costs and taxes, can be one of the key factors causing a high drop-out rate during checkout. And Magento does not, by default, show shipping costs on the shopping basket page. What it does show is a ‘shipping cost calculator’, but this is much too complex for ordinary customers, and is unnecessary in most cases. For the case of a retailer shipping within a single country, the standard shipping costs are likely to be predictable and there is no good reason for not showing a standard shipping cost on the basket page.

With that in mind, I set out to create a Magento module that automatically applies the most suitable shipping charge to the customer’s order before it has been placed. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I imagined, but it has been very educational for me and has resulted in our first open-source module for Magento: the PRWD Auto Shipping module.

How it works

What now follows is a fairly technical description of how the module actually works. If you’re just interested in how you can use it on your own sites, follow the link to the module and read the instructions there.

Magento provides an implementation of the ‘observer pattern‘, a software design pattern which is used to allow different elements of a piece of software to ‘observe’ events that occur elsewhere in the software. In my case, I was interested in observing the events that occur when a customer adds a product to their shopping basket, or updates the contents of the basket. Only once we know what’s in the basket can we calculate which shipping option to use.

Setting up an observer in Magento involves specifying the class and function to call in an XML configuration file and once this has been done, that function will be called every time the event occurs. The Auto Shipping module has a function set up for precisely this purpose; when either a new product is added to the basket, or the contents of the basket are changed, the function is called and the shipping costs are calculated. Thus, when the user visits the shopping basket page, the costs are ready to be displayed.

Magento includes a system for specifying shipping methods and for ranking these shipping methods in order of preference. For example, a ‘Free Shipping’ method may exist for orders over a certain price, and if this method is available (that is, if the order qualifies) then we want to apply that shipping method. We therefore rank Free Shipping as #1. The second option might be a default Flat Rate, a standard shipping charge for normal deliveries. If we rank this as #2, it will be applied only if Free Shipping is not available.

Let’s assume that we’re applying free shipping to any order over £50 in value. If the customer adds £40 worth of goods to the basket, free shipping does not apply and so the standard flat rate for shipping is displayed. However, if the customer adds an extra item to the basket, taking the total over £50, free shipping is then automatically applied. Conversely, the customer then removes an item from the basket and takes the total value below £50, the free shipping will be removed and the standard rate applied in its place.

It’s not a hugely complicated module, but it takes good advantage of Magento’s object-oriented and patterns-based design to provide a usability benefit which should help to boost conversion rates. If you’ve used the module yourself and find it useful, it would be great if you could leave a comment or give some feedback. And if you’re interested in talking to PRWD about Magento-based e-commerce sites, or e-commerce usability needs, you can contact us to discuss those further.

Along with being asked to present at an up-coming conference that Google are keynoting, I was also invited to take part in a How-Do Retail forum with people from Wynsors, Shop Direct Group, BooHoo.com and Brilliant Media.

The set-up for the forum was as follows:

In the first of a new series examining the unique challenges and opportunities presented to marketers in specific economic sectors, How-Do examines what’s going on in the world of the retail marketer. This first report has been prepared with the support of Brilliant Media.

While the economic downturn has left many high-street chains floundering, savvier retail marketers are bucking the trend and finding new ways of engaging with customers. How-Do checks out the changing marketplace.
In the first of a new series examining the unique challenges and opportunities presented to marketers in specific economic sectors, How-Do examines what’s going on in the world of the retail marketer.
The year so far has been torrid for many retailers. Despite a blip in January when trading in the sector increased as shoppers took advantage of big price cuts, the vast majority have struggled to counter falling sales and lack of consumer confidence.

It was a really engaging couple of hours with everyone joining in to provide valuable insights into the retail sector, both on and offline. You can read a full write-up of the forum on the How-Do website.