Online path to purchase research: Everything you need to know

If you have a product sold online on retail partner websites – this blog is for you. Have you optimized every step of the online experience of shopping for your products? If not, this intro will help you start with online path-to-purchase testing, and if you are already doing e-commerce research, you will learn how to ensure your insights spill over onto other valuable areas and affect your ROI.

Everyone is eyeing a share of the ever-growing e-commerce pie – that is, over 2 billion global digital buyers. With new features, platforms, mergers, quick commerce, social commerce and way too many acronyms to count – tackling online path to purchase research is not easy for the brand or portfolio managers who yet have to understand the new rulebook of online commerce. This guide will help you navigate that process using the unique benefits of behavioral research.

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Where should you start with e-commerce testing?

There are so many moving parts to e-commerce testing that sometimes, it can be hard for researchers and stakeholders to take the plunge. That’s why we built a pyramid describing different levels of studies – to help structure this abundance of research questions for more effective research:

Level 1 – Looks into the online shopper strategy, including motivations and complete journeys

Level 2 – Goes deeper into online shopper behavior on specific websites: how do shoppers navigate the site; which pages are visited; and what are the critical shopper marketing assets

Level 3 – Tactical impact studies for optimizing shopper marketing assets (that can then be applied to most websites), discovering what are the best practices for the shopper marketing assets (e.g., online package design) to maximize their impact on purchase decisions.

Typically, the 3 levels demand a different research methodology framework. Surveys will be sufficient for Level 1 (online shopper strategy) that cover who visited which sites and why.

On the other hand, for Levels 2 and 3 – so shopper behavior on a specific website and tactical impact studies – we need to combine survey with behavioral methods.

Furthermore, the Level 3 tactical studies require a design experiment (e.g., A/B/C test of package design, different PDP layouts, or ads) to understand the impact of the variable on sales uplift.

To wrap up, here is what we suggest to everyone:

Your first priority would be to go ahead and pick the level of your study: online strategy, shopper behavior, or tactical impact studies. To do this, there are two different approaches: top-bottom (strategy to tactical) or bottom-up (that is, making sure your ads, product image, and PDP work first).

Although it might sound logical to follow a top-down strategy the bottom-up approach might be more beneficial. Even more so in a turbulent situation like this – you will have quick wins that demonstrate the impact of e-comm research to your stakeholders, but also because these studies are the easiest. Certain marketing assets are essential on all sites (e.g., online package design), so you don’t need to have higher-level studies for information on this. Investing this way will ensure you get results faster and provide you with leverage to dig even deeper into strategic questions.

Secondly, depending on the research level you pick, you should combine the suitable conventional and behavioral methods. The complementary mixed-method approach will provide you with +30% higher predictive insights and, more importantly, an understanding of the full picture.

Lastly, you should pick the most appropriate specific retail website/websites to test on and make sure to test in context. Being able to expose respondents to testing environments that are visually and functionally the closest to the actual retail website ensures a higher correlation with genuine purchases.

What are some of the touchpoints along the online consumer journey?

The online path to purchase sounds a bit complicated, doesn’t it? Still, if you have a good framework, with the right structure, validated KPIs, understanding of the business context and empathy for consumers and their experience it’s easy to map out Consumer Journey.

In e-comm, we start with the moment when a person lands on the website, then we track how person navigates through the live page (so it’s a real behavior, or as close as it can be), and we also expose consumers to some relevant static pages, usually Product Listing Page (PLP is similar to a shelf in a regular BM store, it’s just much more cluttered and pictures of products are smaller, imagine a PC or mobile screen with a list of hundreds of products that you scroll through) and Product Details Page, but it can be anything else, such as Search Result Page, Add to cart/Checkout process, A+ Premium content (or any Promo content), whatever we think might be relevant to investigate or have indications it might be a bottleneck (e.g. manufacturers might already have some internal data that can generate hypothesis where to deep dive). On static pages we want to know where consumers’ attention goes, for how long, how visible or engaging the products and website elements are.

Around 70% of the e-comm shoppers abandon the cart without completing the purchase and there are many reasons for that – maybe they just investigated online and will shop offline, maybe they need more time to decide, but it can also happen that the process of checking out is too complicated and not easy to understand, so by fixing it you directly increase conversion rates.

So knowing how the platform works, after doing so many e-comm studies with various Clients in various categories and all around the world, makes it quite easy for us to map out all the relevant touchpoints and identify potential bottlenecks. We also complement Navigation on live pages and Eye Tracking on static pages with traditional survey where we ask consumers about their experience and how much did they like or dislike some website elements. All that gives us a 360 view of the consumer experience on e-comm and it’s so easy to identify areas for improvement of UX and consequently conversion.

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What is a website navigation map & a UX conversion funnel?

The tool that gives us the full picture of e-comm performance in a certain category is called Path 2 Purchase, with some great and eye-opening outputs. One of them is the Navigation map, where you can easily see what are the most common routes people take to find a defined product category (or to complete a given shopping task), do they use search or menu more, do they click on promos, where do they get lost or confused (so called dead-ends when they just give up and leave the page, possibly irritated), how long does it all take and the most important – which route brings the best conversion.

Another great thing is a Conversion Funnel, where with the help of Eye Tracking and Interaction Tracking we can see the performance from Visibility to Purchase and very easily identify if there are any bottlenecks to fix. As we all know, visibility and position are king on e-comm – without that, the chances of consideration and purchase can be really low.

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What does the study setup look like for e-commerce research?

Clients usually come to us with a certain topic – before venturing into the study they already know whether they want to do the UX study (if they are launching a new website or redesigning an old one), or they have some issue on the website (e.g. high bounce rate on cart review & payment page/touchpoint), or they want to know how the category of interest is purchased online – which is the online path to purchase.

When it comes to the online P2P, most frequently, clients don’t know much about the online shopping journey for their category, so they have a hard time narrowing down the testing on a few static pages/touchpoints. Luckily, this is where the agency’s expertise is of high value – we know what the most frequent pain points are, so we, together with the client, discuss and brainstorm the best approach for their business questions and KPIs. Sometimes this includes a full suite of methodologies (navigation + Eyetracking & Interaction tracking + survey) and sometimes only some of them. Of course, the broader combination of methods ensures higher predictability.

To run a P2P study, we need just 2 things from clients:

1. to tell us who is their most important or multiple online partners

2. to agree on the most important touchpoints

So, the client is responsible only for providing the information, while we do all of the following steps – stimuli preparation, questionnaire preparation and study programming.

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What type of stimuli is used in path to purchase research?

When it comes to the live stimuli meaning the navigation on the particular website, there is no stimuli preparation since respondents are redirected to the real, live websites in order to make their purchase. This online shopping simulation provides a real-life experience and consequently higher predictability. Respondent’s journey is tracked from the moment he enters the website till he leaves.

In the case of static stimuli, after we have selected the relevant etailers with the client, we start with the stimuli preparation and thanks to our in-house design team and their speedy support, we are ready to launch in less than 2 days.

These stimuli are called static since they represent the real pages but are not interactive, meaning that if the respondent clicks on the home button, he will not be redirected to the home page; still, we collect all the data behind their clicks to do further analysis. Don’t worry, although static, these pages provide real experimental environment together with all relevant data. In this case the less is more. The best part is – this all goes the same way, not depending on device type – so both desktop and mobile stimuli are prepared in the same way.

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What are the most common pain points for clients in e-commerce research?

EyeSee’s data shows that online shoppers browse the product list page between 15s and 20s searching for the right item, spending approximately 1.5 seconds per product, deciding subconsciously what to buy. It is pretty challenging to first grab attention and then convert into purchase among increasingly more competitive products and retail options, so here are some of the most common client questions which reflect their main challenges of understanding the path from a visitor to a shopper.

A lot of the client’s pain points can be summed up into 2 or 3 topics:

• The first one (and the broadest one) is when the client knows a lot about B&M shopping but is interested in learning more about online shopping patterns for the specific category. The most important thing to uncover here is how easy it is to find the right product and what’s the role of different features (search bar, taxonomy, filter & sorting options) in that process
• The 2^nd topic concerns more the client’s product presentation on the retailer – can shoppers find the particular product? Does it stand out in a highly competitive context of a retailer’s product list? What drives consideration the most (is it a price, product placement, product image format…)?
• The last category refers to more specific, that is – more tactical – questions that focus on client’s product performance once certain changes are implemented (for example hero image testing, A+ content on PDP). These questions aim to uncover what’s the impact of such changes on product performance and whether they trigger substantially higher conversion

Now that we’ve gone over the three most common categories of questions, what are some of the tools that we apply to help address these challenges?

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What methods are used in e-commerce research?

Let’s juxtapose the most frequently asked questions from clients have with corresponding EyeSee methodologies:

• When we are exploring how the specific category is bought online, we start with our Navigation tracking approach. This tool unravels the spontaneous behavior on the retailer website and enables us to map each step that shoppers make in that shopper journey. Now, in terms of how easy it is to find the right product (easy in this case means not having to put in extra effort in finding a product: so, not making additional steps, not going back and forth, not being redirected to other pages, etc.) our navigation tool can tap into actual obstacles or bottlenecks that may exist on shoppers’ path. Our navigation output also pinpoints visitors’ most typical routes and tells us how people use website features like search, menu, filters, etc.
• As for the product presentation on an e-tailer – its visibility and overall findability – we rely on a combination of navigation and eye & interaction tracking. Navigation helps us uncover how much time and effort shoppers invest in finding a particular product (usually the client’s product). At the same time, ET gives us an additional perspective on how noticeable that product is on the retailer’s list and how much potential a product has to capture the shoppers’ attention.
• When it comes to more specific questions concerning the impact of different optimizations (category-wise or product-wise) we predominantly use Eye & Interaction tracking. Here, our focus is on specific areas of product presentation. These include hero image vs. regular image/ products with discount tag vs. products without discount tag/ PDPs with A+ content vs. those without and our eye-tracking /interaction tracking tool tracks how these areas perform in terms of noticeability and capturing shoppers’ attention. Furthermore, this approach identifies key conversion triggers in this optimized context – meaning, how each of the introduced features affects purchase intent (and to what extent)

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Short term and long-term goals to strive for on retailer websites

There are certain steps clients can make in a very short time and yield highly positive outcomes. First things first, you need to be present on the retailer’s product list, preferably on the 1^st page. Although it sounds quite obvious, this is one of the frequent challenges we uncover when conducting a study. This is especially important knowing that almost half (45%) of shoppers say they typically don’t scroll past the second page of results.

Once you’re present, you should secure good product placement near the top of the list. The average product has approx. 1.4s to keep shoppers’ attention and items placed above the fold have a substantially higher chance to be seen and, consequently, considered than those in lower rows.

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Complementing e-commerce research with omnichannel thinking

Everybody’s talking about omnichannel and consumer-centricity today, which is a consequence of the 4^th Industrial revolution and Digital transformation. There are so many channels today and consumers are more informed and in more power than ever.

To be fully consumer-centric, E-comm P2P is just one piece of the puzzle, which should be complemented with Brick & Mortar studies (e.g. how people move through the store and what catches their attention). Lately, we have been experimenting with so-called Passive Tracking – looking at what people did before they landed on a certain online retailer. This can nicely wrap up the entire story and give us an even deeper understanding of the consumer journey, but this can never replace any experimental design where we need a controlled environment to be able to conclude how a specific change in the content impacted the KPIs, like in the case of famous A/B tests.

Interested in how online path to purchase research can help your brand stand out on e-commerce? Reach out to us to get advice about which study type would work best for your current goals!

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Interested in making your online presence truly consumer-centric? Check out the comprehensive online path to purchase demo!

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