Why you need to revisit your eCommerce roadmap

We’re almost halfway through 2023, can you believe it? 6 months ago we delivered a workshop on adapting your eCommerce roadmap to get ahead in 2023. We covered how customer empathy creates a stronger roadmap, why research should become a recurring activity and how to prioritise your roadmap using insights. Now we’re well into the year, we’re giving you the opportunity to revisit your roadmap and consider where you need to adapt it.

Adapt at each stage of planning

A lot of people think the research stage of your roadmap should happen before you set any plans in place. And it should. But you need to be considering research throughout the year when you’re executing your roadmap.

You should consider where your problems and opportunities sit. You can identify these through research and evaluation. Some questions you might ask are:

Which stages of the buying process seem to cause the most issues for our customers?
What are the three most common queries or problems customers have about our products?
How would you describe the different types of customer you regularly come into contact with?

Then, ask yourself how to overcome these obstacles. Ask your customers. Conducting customer surveys will validate your problems and help you formulate a plan of action.

What snagging points almost stopped you from completing your order today?
Which of these Buy Now Pay Later methods do you prefer to use at checkout?

Then you should move on to sharpening your outcome. How do you optimise and create impact with your findings? You can do this through usability testing. This method allows you to evaluate your product by getting customers to complete a list of tasks while observing and noting their interactions.

For example, give them the following brief:

Choose a shopping list that best suits you, then start buying the products on our website.
Navigate the website as you normally would. We won’t intervene unless you’re really stuck.
Please “think aloud” — tell us your thoughts as you go about decisions you’re making.

What else should you be doing when revisiting your roadmap?

In this blog we’ve covered just one thing you need to consider when revisiting your roadmap. For a full rundown on how you should approach your roadmap, you can access our on-demand Adapting your eCommerce roadmap to get ahead workshop here. Registrants to this workshop will also receive a roadmap maturity models guide post-workshop.