The homepage is the showroom for your brand, and this home page is beautiful! Their detail orientation is amazing, which makes us see the value they place on the artistry and perfection of the product. Shoppers place a lot of value on the quality of your website and site imagery, and this site shows a lot of pride in the product. The color palette of the page compliments the colors of the product in a way that really emphasizes the beauty of the chocolate.
However – on the home page we see no mention of an upcoming Holiday sale! That’s interesting. For a site that specializes in gift purchasing, that’s a strange choice. During the holiday season, gift cards can be a marketing offer even if you don’t normally offer or emphasize that. An add-on gift card is a great motivator to drive people to a higher purchasing level.
Taking a moment to check out the tech stack – they have pretty advanced marketing technology but a lot off their tools were actually turned off in 2018. When we see that it can be due to a change in site management or marketing strategy. They use Shopify, which we’re big fans of. The size of their tech stack can actually lead to challenges managing it all.
They DO have a holiday themed product category. Remember that product and product category pages can be a destination/landing page for incoming customer traffic. It’s good to include some copy on this page to convince the visitor who has bypassed the home page. But it’s great not to have to scroll below the fold to find the product! There’s a slight movement of each product image with the rollover, which makes the products pop from the page. That provides a great psychological stimulation but it’s a little distracting too. A little marketing copy on this page could help trigger more gift buying. Did you think about your dog walker, your co-worker, etc.?
Product detail page – at the top we don’t have tabs, everything fits on the page. But the lipstick product detail page does have tabs. Tabs are great when you have to share a lot of product detail, but these don’t have much copy behind them, so it’s a little disappointing and weird.
They have Buy with G-Pay on the product page. This is a mobile first design and they’ve emphasized mobile payment methods, which is great! Make it easier for customer to buy regardless of how they are shopping.
If we scroll below the fold on the product page, we find the “about us” type of content below the cross-sells. So if you want that content, it is there. Product detail pages SHOULD be treated as landing pages, so putting content there that gives the customer confidence is a good thing. But if that’s at the bottom of every product detail page, it’s weird and repetitive. If you know a user has been on your site before, maybe suppress that on the product detail pages for their future visits.
The checkout process – make sure that your hosting company is prepared for your holiday rush so that your site doesn’t fail on your biggest selling day of the year. We’ll go through the checkout process to see if it’s smooth, and as a bonus, we get some great chocolate! Ah, add another item for free shipping is a really nice touch. Here’s a product at a $5 price point that I can add on to get my cart to $75+, and I’m all in for some of those. That’s very effective.
In general, this is a very strong site, lots of positives, we really didn’t find a lot to criticize. Good job!
If you want to watch the recording, check it out here.
