Over the past month, we’ve been working on Pagemunk’s user experience design. These designs represent our first stab at the look and feel of the app. And they wouldn’t be possible without the incredible insights we’ve gained from the many interviews we’ve had with the brands who’ve joined our beta program. We absolutely love the fact that we’re able to build this app together with our customers. It makes our work so much more rewarding.
Here are three of the many interesting things we’ve learned from customers so far:
1. Work on the PDP is scattered among team members, tools and processes
When designing an app, it’s always important to understand your personas (i.e., the people you’re building it for). Because DTC brands are usually small, highly agile teams, the personas are harder to define. There often isn’t a single title associated with a single role, like in larger companies. Activities such as writing, proofing, researching, SEO and merchandising can all end up being done by a number of people, including the CEO at 1am!
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For this reason, the way users view and interact with product page content needs to address multiple tasks.
- Writing product descriptions
- Inventory
- Pricing and discounts
- Analyzing sales metrics
- Bulk updating
- Managing product photography
- SEO
The problem today is that most of these tasks are done using separate tools, by different people with no coordination or ability to see the combined results of all their effort until the page goes live. The result is a less-than-optimal customer experience.
The app to solve this needs to be adaptable to the many tasks of updating the PDP. It also needs to be highly collaborative. Team members need to be able to jump in and know exactly where their teammates left off and what still needs to be done.
2. “Bulk update” is one thing. “Editing in bulk” is something completely different
The Shopify app store is full of tools that allow you to bulk update product data. But they all function basically the same way: you can change a single field from one state to another across lots of products. This black-and-white way of updating product info is useful when you need to, say, change a price across hundreds of products or add a missing tag.
But most of the time, editing your product content isn’t that black and white. Often, editing in bulk requires a “theme-and-variation” approach, where the content for several products should be 90% consistent, but also needs to be 10% unique. Say you have 30 pairs of sunglasses that are essentially the same, but each has a unique lens color driven by the mood it’s designed to inspire.
The changes might not be universal or uniform, but there are enough similarities that working on multiple products at once would be a huge time saver. In that theme-and-variation mode, it’s really important to 1) see many products in a single view, 2) focus on specific areas of copy and 3) apply changes across multiple products with subtle variations. That’s the kind of task bulk editors suck at but ecommerce teams need most. We’re making sure Pagemunk excels in this theme-and-variation mode, where users tell us most work gets done.
3. Alone among ecommerce pages, the PDP is its own unique beast.
When first asked, most interviewees said they work across the whole site—on product pages and non-product pages alike. And they saw the PDP as just another page on the website. But when we dug a little deeper, we realized they spent a lot more time and effort managing their product pages. That’s because product pages are so full of important content. And that content needs to be accurate, consistent and inspiring across a whole bunch of pages.
Another thing that sets the PDP apart is its importance to the sale. Across the board, interviewees understand a better product page experience leads to higher sales. In fact, for leading brands, the product page experience has become paramount. They approach it more like a highly curated landing page for their social media campaigns.
For most, though, the PDP’s importance hasn’t yet translated into a better experience for their customers, mostly due to lack of resources. PDP content is updated along with other pages, through loose workflows using insufficient and often disconnected tools.
Given the importance of the PDP to both sales and (increasingly) brand building, along with the difficulty in keeping all that content fresh, accurate and consistent with current tools, it’s high time the product page experience took a huge leap forward. We believe that giving brands a single, easy-to-use solution that makes optimizing their product page experience more effortless will do just that.
If you have thoughts or opinions about any of the topics above, please leave your comments below. We’ll continue to gather feedback and iterate on the important features of Pagemunk. And we’ll tell you about it here.
(read a post from our founder about why we’re building pagemunk in the first place)