User Experience

From small local boutiques to iconic department stores, no corner of the retail sector has been untouched by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the separation between winners and losers has never been so stark. For every mall chain declaring bankruptcy, there’s a competitor that’s quickly responded to the new normal and is reaping the revenue benefits.…

The end of 2020 brought an atypical shopping experience for many consumers facing lockdown restrictions. Whether brands were prepared, unprepared or fell somewhere in between in order to meet the rapid shift in consumer behavior due to the pandemic, they all had lessons to learn and room for improvement when it came to meeting and…

The world of e-commerce is constantly changing, and we wanted to benchmark what areas retailers felt delivered the best customer experience (CX) and return on investment. We worked with Gatepoint Research to survey over 100 of the United States' biggest retailers and digitally native e-commerce brands to understand what was working and what wasn’t in…

2020 was a year like no other. The pandemic upended traditional in-store shopping habits and redirected consumers online like never before. This surge brought unprecedented growth to the e-commerce forecast, with U.S. consumers predicted to increase their spend by 18 percent. While this shows staggering growth in a space with steady momentum already, it also demonstrates…

The pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital channels — and heightened the stakes. While in-store retail sales are projected to stay stagnant, e-commerce experienced a 129 percent year-over-year growth in U.S. and Canadian orders as of April 21, 2020. As a result, online customer experiences have become the battleground for businesses seeking to secure…

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published by Total Retail titled, “5 CX Trends to Help You Win Customers’ Hearts and Wallets in 2021,” authored by Jean Shin, director of strategy and content at tyntec. The article discusses how in 2020, we learned…

While COVID-19 has brought lots of uncertainty to our world, nothing has been “certain” in the retail world for a very long time, and the current pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted anything resembling “business as usual.” However, whether you run a tiny, web-only startup, are the owner of a single small town brick-and-mortar shop, or the…

Lots of design literature has been written to document e-commerce shopping best practices. User experience (UX) and user interface strategies, like checkout flows or microcopy, matter for increasing purchases. The role operations can play with improving conversion and revenue is often ignored because of its multiple levels of difficulty. Unlike a button, whose color can…

U.S. Department of Commerce figures show that even with many retail outlets closed for several weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, total retail sales rose 4 percent between January and June 2020. Much of this was driven by a 30 percent increase in e-commerce spending. Now, a new Pollfish survey shows nearly 77 percent of…

The pandemic has changed everything in retail — and it’s not ending anytime soon. Just as stores started to adjust to the “new normal” of frequent disinfection and face masks, the spread of the virus is picking back up in regions across the country, forcing many retailers to close their doors to the public again.…