Staff Augmentation
Staff Augmentation adds UX researchers to your product team to run usability rounds alongside your sprints.
What does usability testing in ecommerce actually show you?
Say your funnel report shows people leaving at the shipping step. Usability testing in ecommerce tells you why. You watch real shoppers try real tasks on your store, like finding a product, comparing two options, and checking out. You note where they hesitate, misread, or give up.
In a session, you might see a shopper scroll back up the page, hunting for the delivery date they expected to see much earlier, near the price. That gap between the number and the reason is where our ecommerce usability testing services start.
What a typical session asks shoppers to do
The patterns below show up again and again, across product types, price points, and devices. Finding them takes a few hours and the discipline to watch without explaining.
- Find a specific product from the homepage or from search.
- Compare two similar products and pick one.
- Check out as a guest on a phone.
Where do shoppers get stuck most often in an online store?
Three places come up most. Search and filters, the product page, and checkout. Search comes first. People type their own words, not your catalog's. Picture a search for couch on a store that only says sofa. It can return nothing at all.
Filters cause the next stall. A shopper sets three filters, opens a product, taps back, and finds every filter cleared. In session after session, the reaction is the same sigh. Plenty of shoppers don't rebuild the filters. They just leave, and your analytics only ever shows a bounce.
Product pages and checkout
Product pages and checkout have their own repeat findings. None of them are exotic, which is exactly why teams stop seeing them. The next section lists the ones that turn up most.
What goes wrong on product pages and at checkout?
Suppose a shopper has picked a product and is ready to pay. These are the stalls most likely to stop them.
- Delivery hidden until late. Shoppers look for cost and arrival date on the product page. When it only appears at checkout, they open a new tab to compare.
- Forced account creation. A required sign up before payment makes first time buyers pause, and many go looking for a guest option that isn't there.
- Promo code field. An empty coupon box sends shoppers off to search for a code, and some never come back.
- Errors that wipe the form. One wrong field that clears the whole address form is among the fastest ways to lose a buyer.
- Wrong mobile keyboard. A phone number or ZIP code field that opens a full text keyboard slows every mobile checkout.
Size and fit need their own mention for fashion stores. Shoppers hunt for the size guide, then the returns policy, in that order. If either is buried, they hesitate. At that point, hesitation usually ends the visit.
Most of these fixes are small. The hard part is noticing them, because the people who built the store know where everything is and never stall.
Which usability methods fit an ecommerce team best?
Small, frequent rounds on your busiest tasks usually give the best return, moderated or unmoderated. The common advice is to skip usability testing and A/B test everything, because data beats opinion. We see it differently.
An A/B test tells you which of two versions won. It can't tell you why, and it only tests ideas you already had. Watching a handful of shoppers, even for one afternoon, is how you find the ideas that are worth testing at all. Run sessions to find problems, then use A/B tests to confirm the fix.
Mixing methods
Each method answers a different question, so pick by what you need to learn this week. Picture a team with a big release next month. Moderated sessions give depth now, and quick unmoderated rounds can check fixes between releases. Most teams end up mixing two or three.
Ecommerce usability methods compared
Here's how the common methods differ, so you can match one to the question in front of you.
- Moderated remote sessions. A facilitator watches and asks follow up questions. Best for understanding why shoppers struggle.
- Unmoderated remote tests. Shoppers record themselves doing tasks on their own time. Faster and cheaper, with no chance to probe.
- In person sessions. Useful for physical context, such as a store kiosk or a scan and go app inside a shop.
- Tree and first click tests. Quick checks on whether your category names and menus match how shoppers think.
- Expert heuristic review. A specialist audits the store against known usability principles. Cheap, but no substitute for real shoppers.
Pair sessions with interviews when the problem is motivation rather than mechanics. Say shoppers abandon carts to compare prices elsewhere. That's where qualitative research adds depth that task based testing can't.
Recruit shoppers who match your real customers. Imagine testing a premium skincare store with bargain hunters, or a B2B parts catalog with general consumers. The findings would mislead you. Screen out people who work in UX or marketing too, since they review the store instead of shopping it.
How do you turn what you saw into ecommerce fixes?
Log every stall point with where it happened, what the shopper expected, and how badly it blocked them. Then rank the log by severity and traffic. Without a log, findings sit in a slide deck and fade.
Imagine a team that runs excellent sessions and changes nothing, because the results arrived as a long list of opinions with no order. A stall that blocks checkout on mobile outranks a confusing footer link, however strongly someone feels about the footer. Fix the top items first, then test again with a fresh group of shoppers.
Why we keep it plain
We keep the process plain on purpose, so a product manager can run it without a research team. We call it the Stall Point Log, and the steps follow below.
The Stall Point Log, step by step
- Choose the core tasks. Pick the few journeys that drive revenue, such as search to product, product to cart, and cart to paid order.
- Recruit real shoppers. Match your actual segments and devices, with mobile users in proportion to your traffic.
- Log every stall. Record where it happened, what the shopper expected, what they did instead, and whether they recovered.
- Rank by severity and reach. A blocker on a busy page goes first. A minor annoyance on a rare page waits.
- Fix and retest. Ship the change, then run the same task with new shoppers to confirm the stall is gone.
- Compare with competitors. Run the same tasks on rival stores to see which friction is yours alone.
Step six changes the talk with leadership. When a shopper breezes through a task on a rival store and stalls on yours, nobody argues about whether the problem is real. Our competitive benchmarking services run exactly that comparison.
Keep the log in a tool your developers already use, like your issue tracker, with a session clip on each item. A ten second clip of a shopper sighing at a cleared filter persuades faster than any written summary.
Pattem Digital runs usability testing in ecommerce for retailers and B2B sellers. We plan the tasks, recruit shoppers, moderate sessions, and write the stall point log. Then we work with your designers and developers on the fixes and retest them, so the loop actually closes.
Accessibility belongs in the same loop. Recruit shoppers who use screen readers or keyboard navigation, and check contrast, focus order, and form labels in every round. These issues block real buyers, and they're often the easiest to fix.
One note on moderation. Resist the urge to help. Say a shopper asks where the size guide is. The useful reply is a question back, like where they'd expect to find it. Every rescue hides a stall point you'll otherwise ship.
Expect the first round to surprise you. The surprise often lands on a page the team thought was finished, and often on a phone. So include mobile shoppers even when desktop drives most of your revenue.
Hire Usability Testing Experts
Work with UX researchers and ecommerce specialists who plan shopper tasks, recruit the right people, and run sessions on real devices. Every stall point ends up on a ranked fix list your team can act on.
Build Operate Transfer
Build Operate Transfer sets up and runs a usability research practice for your store, then hands it to your team.
Offshore Development Center
An Offshore Development Center gives you a dedicated UX research team that tests on your release schedule.
Product Outsource Development
Product Outsource Development takes an ecommerce redesign from research and testing through changes and launch.
Managed Services
Managed Services run usability rounds after each release and keep your stall point log up to date.
Global Capability Centre
A Global Capability Centre gives you your own UX research and testing hub, staffed with researchers.
Capabilities of Our Usability Testing Team
Moderated and unmoderated tests on real phones
Shopper recruiting matched to your segments
Task analysis for checkout, search, and product pages
Ranked stall point logs with session clips
Our researchers watch real shoppers use your store and hand you a ranked list of what to fix first.
Watch Five Shoppers Try to Buy From You
Tell us which journey worries you most. We'll plan a small round of sessions and show you exactly where shoppers stall.
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