As an online retailer of women’s hair care products that only sells its merchandise physically through third-party retailers such as salons, Design Essentials needs a distinctive e-Commerce presence to keep up with major health and beauty brands.
The retailer selected e-Commerce platform BigCommerce Enterprise to enhance its web site experience, generate more traffic and gain more insights into shopping activity. Thus far, Design Essentials has:
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Increased mobile conversion rates 68%;
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Introduced a “Top Sellers” product section to the site, while showcasing more content upfront;
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Integrated social sales channels and Amazon accounts under one umbrella;
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Gained both a dedicated onboarding specialist and an account manager to help smooth migration and help the brand learn more about new platform features and products;
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Introduced multiple layers of security to prevent unauthorized access to the site.
“You automatically get a boost there because the web site looks different on mobile, but we haven’t done much in terms of promoting it,” said Sholanda Armstrong, Digital Marketing Director of Design Essentials. “Our mobile users are just having a much better experience than they were having before. I think the purchasing is easier. The fact that the ‘Top Sellers’ are right there on the page makes it easier to just go ahead and drop it in their cart. Our new abandon cart workflow helps too, because we see a lot of sales now coming through that venue.”
Streamlining Content And Product Access
The site’s updated layout starts with a carousel of three rotating banners. The first two promote Design Essentials products and the third links to the company’s Winter LookBook. Below the carousel are three pictures that link to content pages: Style Guide, Videos and Professional (classes, basic hair styling tips, brochures, featured stylists, etc.).
The content is important to the retailer’s value proposition, especially given that many of the retailer’s consumers are DIYers who want to understand how they can apply products themselves.
“We have a lot of shoppers who say: ‘I’ll go to the salon but only for something that I can’t do myself,’” noted Armstrong. “‘I’ll go for a special occasion for a cut, or a color.’ As we build out our video portfolio, we make sure that we try to attach that to our product page as well.”
With the new e-Commerce presence, Design Essentials now features its “Top Sellers” and “New Products” right below these content pages, so they’re in plain view for all shoppers.
“We want you to see those top sellers right away, especially since a good percentage — approximately 50% to 60% — are returning customers,” said Armstrong. “We want them to have access to their favorites right away. Mobile users aren’t scrolling too far and we’ve seen that that helps. On our old site, people would go to the title bar, they’d select ‘products’ and then click ‘all products’ before they searched for what they wanted.”
Analytics Identifies Top-Selling Products
Design Essentials now has a greater grasp of which product pages are visited the most and how well they’re converting shoppers due to BigCommerce’s analytics capabilities. If a product page gets significant views but doesn’t often generate sales, the retailer can draw more accurate conclusions about how to improve the page. So far, the solution to many of these issues has been to add more descriptions to product pages, according to Armstrong.
“We recently had a product that showed up in our ‘Top Sellers’ and it initially caught us off guard,” Armstrong noted. “But it turned out we initially put more details in [this product’s] description box, and it let us know that we really needed to put more information about other products in the box.”
