After implementing Brazen’s recommendations, Shopify’s retail team saw a 2700% increase in clicks on their primary call-to-action.
The Challenge
Shopify caters to a wide range of small business owners with wildly varying needs. In particular, retail sellers — those who sell in-person at markets, pop-ups, or stores — have hardware, software, and product management requirements that online-only sellers do not.
A planned overhaul of retail-related pages on Shopify.com was in the works, but Shopify still had major questions to answer about retail sellers’ information needs and navigation behaviors before they felt comfortable finalizing and launching the new pages.
The Approach
We worked with Shopify to define key target audiences for the research, including Shopify users who choose to handle the retail aspects of their business through a different provider, and non-Shopify users who sell in retail settings and would consider switching to Shopify.
Participants were recruited to represent a diverse range of business sizes, verticals, and demographics, and sessions were structured in two parts:
- Context-building interviews gathered information about participants' current needs, goals, behaviors, and pain points related to retail selling on their current platform
- Usability testing of relevant retail pages on Shopify.com revealed which aspects of the content and design were doing a good job of addressing participants' needs, and which were falling short
