User Experience for online shops

The French digital retail is still on a growing track: +14,3% in 2015. In France, online clothing now represents more than 5,4 billion € (source: FEVAD) .In the same time, the number of online shops has been exploding: more than 180,000! Then, how to differentiate? The User Experience (also called UX) is one of the ways to make a difference: discover these new concepts!

Diverse and differentiating concepts

 

Grabble is a British start-up specialized in e-commerce. Nothing original from there… This is why this company bet on « swapping », this selection screen made popular by the dating app Tinder. The user sees personalized offers of clothes that he can accept or decline. Founded in 2013 by Daniel Murray and Joel Freeman, the company says its has more than 2 millions clothes available, from famous retailers like Zara, Urban Outfitters or TopShop, which are very popular among the youngest. More than 100 000 pounds of transactions have been gathered in 6 months, thanks to 80,000 registered users, according to The Telegraph.

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With Grabble, swipe on looks !

 

Toutcequejeveux.com (trasnlate as Alliwant.com) also tried to innovate on its UX. Here, there is no e-shop. You need something, from a brown sweater to a wedding dress? Just ask on the platform! The website is not only focused on clothing, and can satisfy all your desires, as long as they are legal J The French startup is growing quickly, thanks to this concept closer to personal concierge than traditional e-commerce.

 

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The homepage of Toutcequejeveux.com

 

Created in the UK in 2011, Shopcade launched its offer a few years ago. The specificity of this website is once again its UX, matched with a double philosophy: the founders describe the platform as half-media, half e-shop. Shopcade offers new products from the fashion universe, but also describes the latest styles from music or movie stars: once the article is finished, you get redirected to shop the looks of your favorite stars !

To find a good balance between content and online shopping, Shopcade needed and succeed to build a strong ecosystem around its business, gathering fashion bloggers and large corporations. Another revenue stream has been added recently, through customer’s data valorization.

 

After these few complicated examples, back to simplicity: http://namesdublin.com/ is a jewelry brand based in Ireland. (you could have guessed that.) Here again, its e-shop is quite original, because it is very simple: one only web page is enough to present every products from the company! Navigation is quite easy with such a basic architecture…

New uses to plug in thanks to API

 

Other actors are also taking more and more weight in the user experience. These new services, often operating as plug-ins for every retailer that would like to use it, have been made popular thanks to the use of APIs (Application Programming Interface). Those APIs allows external blocks to be embedded in your website, in order to enrich the user experience.

Some striking examples are sizing services, answering to a rather simple yet crucial question: Is this clothes I see online adapted to my morphology? Several start-ups have been working on this topic in France: Fitizzy, Fitle, but also Upfit, a company incubated at Look Forward that we already talked about here.

 

Others innovations could also change the way we surf on retail websites: the concept developed by Tiltology, a French young project, consists of creating a new king of Gif that reacts according to your smartphone’s gyroscope.


Few examples of Tiltology technology

The interest is very clear for retailers, from presenting their products easily on a 360 degrees view to engage new customers thanks to innovative communication campaigns.

Finally, some third services do a strong focus on social, which is a major driver in sales: for example, YotPo offers a fully integrated API that manages customer’s reviews and interactions between them, assess profiles certification (ensuring reliable opinions for users), but also allows reviews promotion through social networks.

The Look Forward Perspective

UX is still an amazing communication and conversion tool for e-retailers, especially with the rise of mobile commerce..

In 2002, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, imposed the creation and use of APIs on all activities of the group, in a now famous internal note. We could say he had quite a good intuition, when you see the developments of the modular bloc-based technologies. Those APIs offer extended functionalities, enriched experiences, and are often based on pay-per-use models. A real opportunity for young start-ups that do not have either the time or the resources to develop internal solutions…

 

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