How e-commerce brands stack up on user engagement & optimization

e-commerce is growing at a brisk pace. Most the companies are backed by multi-million investments. The growth in the traffic has been fueled by marketing spends undertaken by various companies. Spends are helping to grow the category and not just the brand.

Current strategy of attracting customers by giving discounts may not be a long term strategy. Acquiring customers (via paid channels) may be a simpler task, but retaining them requires a deep understanding of the user behavior & expectations.

The brands which are able to differentiate themselves with unique user and product experience would rule the market. They would, in the process, also create better customer loyalty leading to sound business models.

Mobile dominance is the current battle as mobile traffic has overtaken desktop for most ecommerce sites. Sites which take leadership on mobile would be able to rule the market. Proving the best user experience on mobile is challenging due to the following:

1. Multiple browser support: Unlike desktop, handheld devices have minimum 6-7 browsers where 95% of traffic is concentrated. All the browsers behave very differently to process a page
2. Bandwidth available: India is still a 2G market with 3G trying to make inroads. Bandwidth available is unreliable and fluctuates a lot. Hence, adapting the site to user bandwidth is very important. Optimizing the site for performance becomes key to success.
3. Tab based navigation is difficult: Unlike desktop, opening and browsing in multiple tabs within a browser is difficult. Also, the time it takes to open a new page (4-5 sec) is a dampener.
4. Typing is tedious: Users find it difficult to find the search box and type. Icons and visual navigation is preferred
5. Limited Real-Estate : Limited screen sizes forces UI designers to prioritize the features that can be enabled

Below is the ranking of the top players in the industry on various parameters:

Surrogate measures of website’s User engagement and experience are Avg. Time Spent, % conversion, Visits/visitor(% returning users) and optimization of site. Pageviews in the current Web 3.0 has become irrelevant as most of the sites now have dynamic loading of content. % conversion and % returning users trends/estimates are not available publicly.

Important observations:

• Flipkart has 33% higher traffic as compared to snapdeal and 50% higher traffic as compared to Amazon.in. Flipkart also has better user engagement with 30% higher time spent as compared to Snapdeal. Amazon is doing better in terms of user engagement and can catch-up fast if they implement some features that were highlighted in earlier article
• Jabong, Zovi and Myntra are in the same sub category of fashion, but Myntra wins this battle because of their superior user engagement. Could this leadership on user engagement from Myntra be because of the rub-off that they have from Flipkart?
• Paytm seems to be attracting a lot of traffic but for a product which is half baked.
• In terms of optimization Zovi leads this space followed by Snapdeal on both Desktop and mobile. There is a lot of scope for improvement specifically on mobile.

So, in conclusion Flipkart and Myntra are leading their own categories and seem to have the highest focus on user experience. In the comment section, please do share which website as per you provides the best user experience.