Adapting your eCommerce Roadmap for 2023
Why your eCommerce Roadmap for 2023 may need adapting…
There’s no denying that turbulent times are ahead for the retail sector. Amid economic uncertainty, comes a greater responsibility for retail businesses to understand their customers’ evolving pain points and respond accordingly.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, we saw many large retail brands — from Topshop to the EWM Group — fall into administration. While they struggled, other businesses were able to survive, and some even thrived, emerging stronger than ever!
Why? Because they were able to adapt quickly enough to their customer’s wants and needs.
Such successful brands truly understand their customer’s wants and needs and have the flexibility to adapt to these at a moment’s notice. This sounds simple enough, but when you have a complex eCommerce roadmap with multiple projects and deadlines to meet, customer empathy often gets lost along the way….
How customer empathy will improve your roadmap
Backing your roadmap with customer insight will bring you more confidence in your ideas succeeding; and that confidence means you can walk into that boardroom and sell your plans, knowing they deserve the budget to back them. Plus, when the majority of your decisions do result in wins, you and your team will be closer to hitting your KPIs, along with bringing tangible growth for the business. What could be better?
Customer-centric roadmaps are increasingly crucial as we go forward into 2023. Customers are cautious, many businesses are struggling with funding and some are operating in survival mode. There are so many factors influencing your customers that it’d be foolish to ignore them as you map out your game plan for the year ahead.
Supply chain issues and inflation mean that it might be a rocky road ahead, but merchants can use this time to take control of where they’re heading. To ensure that the actions they’re taking will get them real results, rather than waiting for things to feel ‘right’ again.
Top 3 ways to prepare your e-commerce roadmap for 2023
- Take a people-centred approach
Approach your roadmap by asking: “How do we move forward with an experience that will meet or exceed our customers’ expectations?” When you do this, you’re always returning to what matters – making decisions that will impact the business and the customer in the way that you want them to. - Make informed, research-backed decisions
These decisions require insight, creativity, experimentation and risk-taking. They also need to move fast. But rather than betting on opinions, you’re betting on data itself, so you can make these quick decisions with confidence. - Tap into your support team!
Your support team can tell you if customers are likely to care about the loyalty scheme you’re planning on implementing or the next website feature you’re investing a bunch of money into.
By asking them the big questions first, you’ll save yourself time and money. Because there’s no point in testing the usability of new features if those new features aren’t of interest to your customers.
You can’t afford to get your eCommerce Roadmap wrong next year, so join our complimentary virtual workshop as we discuss how you can adapt your current roadmap and prioritise your customers: Adapting your eCommerce Roadmap for 2023
You’ll discover:
✅ How customer empathy creates a stronger roadmap
✅ Why research should become a recurring activity
✅ How to prioritise your roadmap using insights