Improving the Wine Ecommerce Experience

When you sit down to build a new website do you consider the needs of your customers? Frequently as managers, designers, and developers we come up with a list of features without thinking about who our customers is. Or we focus more on our brand story rather than the customer experience.

A great way to make customer centric decisions is to develop personas around your customer. Who is your customer? What is their age, education, personality, interest, etc? Give that persona a name.

Let me introduce you to a few personas. For the purpose of the blog these are pretty short - if we were doing them as a company thought process we would expand them significantly.

Mary Jones. She’s a young working mom (age 27), has two kids in elementary school. She loves a good glass of chardonnay in the evening after she puts the kids to bed.

Our analysis - Mary is probably interrupted often. She will start the buying process and then be interrupted and need to come back later. It’s important that her shopping cart doesn’t disappear. She may need a reminder that items have been left in the cart. She needs the ability to access her cart from any device to ensure convenience.

Jack Wong. Jack is a business man, (age 35) from Hong Kong. He loves California culture and wine. It’s not always about status for him, but he does brag to his friends about his “foreign” wine.

Our analysis - Jack needs to be able to visit your website from Hong Kong. It should load fast across the ocean. The site needs to handle international addresses. He should be able to understand duty and taxes. He should be able to use WeChat or Alipay to pay.

Joe Johnson. Joe lives in Walnut Creek and commutes to San Francisco where he works in technology. He used to be a developer but now he is managing a team. He’s fairly savvy and used to buying online. He belongs to a lot of different wine clubs.

Our analysis - Joe knows what he’s doing online but does your website know Joe? Joe’s going to be purchasing from his phone while he commutes - that needs to be easy. It should remember all his information. If he needs to enter an address it should be simple.

Carrie Roy. Carrie lives in Washington. She belongs to your club. She’s a bit older and not considered tech savvy. She loves her wine and she belongs to a few book clubs where she always talks about her wine. Recently Carrie switched banks.

Our analysis - If Carrie is in your club we need to get Carrie’s new credit card information but we can’t be creepy. We know the card on file doesn’t work. We send her a few emails - and if she clicks one we need to take her to her profile. The most important thing (getting her new credit card info) should be up front.

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If you're going to develop a customer centric ecommerce experience you will want to research developing personas. You probably should look at developing customer journeys as well - but that's for a different blog pos.