The Perspective #7

Welcome to the seventh edition of The Perspective by Oddit! 

Twice a month we send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this edition 🗞:

• Brand-first breakdown with snack brand Tosi

• 5 questions with Junip Founder Stuart Landis

• How to build your first homepage

• A playlist for daytime walks

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If you missed our last editions, you can read them here! 

Brand-First Breakdown: Tosi

Tosi creates plant-based, organic, and low-sugar snacks   

For this edition, we're breaking down their product page. Let's jump in!

Product Page Header & Key Actions

 Suggestions to test: 

• Make sure your images are super easy to swipe and move through (both on mobile AND desktop). Right now it’s a bit difficult to get through.

• Use dot indicators to help reduce the whitespace, it also gives users a quick idea of how many images to look through. Allow image scrolls to loop (the last image should swipe to the first image).

• Pull your price and reviews up the page so they are in full view and easy to find.

• Test out some more descriptive product titles. For instance, state the flavor, type and size!

The Details

Suggestions to test: 

• Keep your description short and sweet, and place it underneath your price. Other details can be added below your key actions.

• Make sure your button UI is consistent here. Use your more squared buttons for larger actions.

• Test removing your flavor selection. Making customers choose too many selections at once can cause option paralysis. Allow customers to browse more in a cross-section below.

• Highlight your subscription savings and keep relevant information grouped together. It should be informative and concise.

• Make your add-to-cart button the loudest element on the page and move the price into the CTA so your user doesn’t need to validate by scanning back and forth.

Combine more product details and relative information in a simple drop-down under the Add to Cart button.

Suggestions to test: 

• Convert all of this content into a more clear hierarchy of information. Lead off with some of the simple highlights and benefits of your product!

• Add a section where you can house your product's ingredients. If there are any other details you think are necessary to include (ex., allergy-free details) you can mention them here as well.

• You can include your nutrition facts in a “Nutrition Facts” drop-down section as well.

Sticky "Add to Cart" 

Suggestion to test: Add a sticky ‘add to cart’ piece to bottom of page once users have scrolled past the initial Add to Cart button on the PDP header – you don’t want to confuse them with a duplicate.

Giving users easy access to add can be the difference between purchasing, and them closing the window.

More Products

Suggestions to test:

• Surface a few options that make sense to pair with the product page your customer is on.

• Make sure the price point is clear. Right now you are displaying two prices which can become confusing and cause distrust in customers.

• Again, make sure they are super easy to swipe through on mobile!

If you enjoyed these tips, reply to this email and let us know. We love feedback :) 

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Stuart Arsenault is the co-founder and CEO of Junip, a platform enabling 3,000+ eCommerce businesses like Kellogg’s, Homesick, Olipop, and Oddit to collect product reviews.

Oddit: In the early stages of Junip, what did your feedback loop look like in order to improve the product? 

Stuart: There are 3,000+ brands using Junip & we still have no dedicated support reps. Obviously, we offer support (average sub 5 min response time!), but it’s staffed by the same folks developing & designing Junip each & every day. So the feedback loop is literally all of us talking to customers, building products… then rinse & repeat.

Every month folks on our team make new demo stores & go through onboarding with Junip, we try to make sure to buy from brands using Junip every month or so, we meticulously tag our support tickets with every pain point & request each brand has… it’s a grind sometimes, but there’s really no other way to do it. And this can’t just be for the “early stages” - if at any point in time the people building a product lose touch with the people using the product, everything degrades.

Tech has radically over-intellectualized product development because we’re just straight-up lazy. Yes, there’s some basic theory & an incredible amount of craftsmanship needed in building a great product experience, but all of that is useless if you don’t get into the weeds. You need to ask “why” 1000 times, understand every nook & cranny of the problem space & build a wonderful team of technologists who take the same approach. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Oddit:  What does the customer feedback landscape look like in the next 5 years? Do you see it expanding beyond just customer reviews? 

Stuart: The “customer feedback” landscape is obviously giant, with a lot of different flavors to it - we’re pretty squarely focused on reviews for the foreseeable future & trying to take that to a better place.

The landscape as a whole will certainly evolve though & there are a bunch of other people doing great work. I often see brands have almost “two halves” of their feedback stack - with Junip owning reviews/public feedback & something like Enquire Labs post-purchase surveys & question stream products owning the private feedback. 

The lines obviously blur from time to time (such as with our “private custom questions” feature), but we think at their core these are two pretty different problems that both have huge potential to be improved.

Oddit: You see a TON of websites every day, what’s one of the biggest mistakes brands make when collecting or integrating reviews into their website? 

Stuart: Reviews are a pretty simple idea - gather feedback from your customers & display it during the purchasing journey, but there are still way too many people trying to use reviews to trick customers instead of using them to help customers. 

There’s a big difference. If you find yourself uploading fake reviews, moderating out anything below 2 stars, etc… it’s just not worth it.

Reviews are a great tool to educate customers on the reality of your product - done well reviews should both increase your conversion rate and decrease your return rate as customers better understand what they’re buying. Over the long haul customer loyalty, brand trust & more gained from this approach pays dividends many times over.

Oddit: Were there any big mistakes you made early on at Junip that you can share? 

Stuart:  So many. I think most came from us either trying to be too smart for our own good or from focusing on something other than talking to customers & building products. The worst was when we combined both of those two. 

One that sticks out in particular for me is just how terrible our original pricing model was. It’s not that we were expensive (it was quite fair), it just was so unnecessarily complex it makes my head hurt looking back, a brand literally would have to get a calculator out to figure out what on earth they would be paying. 

Finbarr Taylor (CEO at Shogun) gave us some great advice during that period that was something to the effect of… “the only thing I’ve ever learned about pricing is that I know nothing about pricing - so make it simple & easy to test” & since then we’ve done just that. Offer a fair, simple price & get the heck out of the way 😅

Oddit: What feature of Junip do you think isn’t utilized enough by merchants? 

Stuart: Our merchants are pretty on top of it! I guess I’d have to use this as a spot to give a shout-out to our Review Links feature, which we’re starting to see some incredibly creative uses of by a couple of early adopters. When a customer lands on your brand's review link, they’ll be prompted to confirm their email & then are able to leave reviews for any of their previous purchases.

Some of my favorite uses so far are QR codes in packaging inserts & one brand that shared their link in a “close friends” Instagram story (only existing customers are on their close friends).

Right now implementing Review Links is a pretty manual effort, but we plan on helping brands better use these alongside a variety of partner apps in areas like subscriptions, order tracking, account pages & more.

Oddit: What’s the funniest review you’ve ever seen? 

Stuart: Can I be a softie & break the rules by sharing the cutest review instead? :)

This pup’s comprehensive overview of Baboon to the Moon has to take the cake.

How to build your first homepage

Classifieds 🔎

🚀 We just released our first homepage header guide - check it out here!

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: Soonish, Jolie, Chubby Snacks, and Palermo House 

📱 QR Codes have been on a hot streak the last couple of years, but a company called Batch is taking things to the next level 

✅ We just launched the Oddit Instagram account, give it a follow! 

Bonus  

We've been putting together killer playlists for various moods. 

This month we’re releasing: music for daytime walks

Give it a listen! (Only available on Spotify for now. Sorry, Apple peeps 😅)

Want your own brand-first breakdown? 🚨

Check out the essential and premium reports!

 If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked. 

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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