How To Understand What Your eCommerce Clients Really Want
I used to make a living on 99Designs. Or I tried to at least. It’s a hell-hole for designers, designed to get work out of you for free. But it was a learning experience for me.
There was a time when an eCommerce store wanted a redesign. They sold clothing and in the design brief they said they wanted a ‘Bohemian’ theme.
So, I got to work on the design. I created Bohemian themes for them and they loved it. I made it through to their final shortlist. The other designers weren’t even close to Bohemian. I was sure to win.
I didn’t.
They picked a completely different design because they realized that Bohemian didn’t actually work for their brand. I learned something important that day – The client has no idea what they want! To win in this game, you can’t simply take their requirements at face value.
You need to dig deeper.
Identify Their Pain
What your eCommerce clients say they need, and what they really need are usually two very different things. But that’s why they’re coming to you. You’re the expert in design and development. It’s not up to the retailers and business owners to identify what’s wrong with their store’s design.
So if your clients aren’t responding to your proposals after they contact you with a problem, it’s probably because you haven’t identified their real pain and are solving for something else.
The first thing you need to do when a client comes to you is ask why. Why do they want to redesign their store? Why do they need to change their logo? Why do they want a loyalty program built for their shoppers?
So if I had to do it over with my “bohemian” client again, I would have asked them why they wanted to redesign their site. I would have asked why they wanted a Bohemian design in particular. Maybe what was really happening was that shoppers were landing on their homepage and then bouncing immediately. The solution to that would have been running some optimization tests on the homepage instead of making it look Bohemian because some executive thought it was cute.
You’ll never get to the bottom of it if you don’t talk to clients and ask them questions. Instead, if you simply accept their initial assumptions, you’ll just come up with a solution that might satisfy their requirements doesn’t fix anything. And then the client stops responding to you because they feel like you don’t understand them.
So keep asking questions till you find their pain.
Offer A Solution
Now that you know what the client really needs, you can offer the right solution.
Going back to my “bohemian” client, if their real problem was homepage bounce rates, I could have suggested making small design changes to optimize the page. This would have made an immediate impact on their conversion rates, and that would have lead to a happy client and follow-up work.
Another thing about digging deep and offering the right solution is that your agency stands out. If none of the other agencies are doing this, then their solutions are all the same – a design that fits the clients’ initial assumptions. On the other hand, you come off as the people who “totally get” them, and that puts you miles ahead of everyone else.
Start Digging Deeper
If you want to close more deals with eCommerce clients, then start digging deeper. At the end of the day, retailers want to sell more products and they come to you for your expertise. As an eCommerce agency, it’s up to you to find out what’s killing sales and to fix it.
