It’s not enough for brands to just have quality products and great customer service these days.
While both are important, online shoppers are looking for more. They want to be wowed with an ecommerce experience.
You’ve got incentives to raise the bar for your ecommerce channel. In fact:
To impact revenue—and combat the rising cost of ads—you need to invest in an elevated ecommerce experience.
Today we’re defining what this looks like, highlighting some of our favorite modern storefront examples in the wild. You’re going to want to bookmark these ones.
Let’s jump to it.
Experience, in this case, refers to the touchpoints or interactions a visitor has when engaging with a brand on your owned ecommerce website. These touchpoints are designed to boost your store’s conversion rate while encompassing (and conveying) your brand.
This could vary from subtle yet helpful shopping functions on a product page or dynamic scroll effects that make a site feel luxurious.
“I think all brands—or anyone not selling through Amazon…have to have some kind of reason why they are superior. And that is often the origin story leading to the point of differentiation of quality,” says Alex O’Byrne, the co-founder and director of Shogun Certified Agency, We Make Websites.
On making a site convey more than just convenience, Alex elaborates:
“It’s about how a brand can take something that might be perceived as a commodity and turn it into shopping for a luxury item.”
Experience has become a critical differentiating factor for brands. Especially as retail giants like Amazon make it so easy (and generic) to purchase products.
When your experience feels elevated, you can command higher price points, differentiate in your vertical, and become a lasting brand (vs. just another store).
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Ecommerce experiences come in all shapes and sizes. Some pack a punch and captivate customer attention. And some are helpful or educational yet are equally important as the razzle-dazzle experiences.
Here are 13 great examples of brands with what we’d deem as elevated or outstanding ecommerce experiences (and what makes them so exceptional):
Food and beverage brand, OffLimits, offers a unique shopping experience for nostalgia-loving and savvy shoppers alike.
Not only is this modern storefront a great combination of visual and audio elements, but shoppers are encouraged to explore via visual cues. There’s a lot of playfulness in the branded product photography and props—allowing the eye to wander and discover:
The incentive to collect ‘stars’ also offers an interesting opportunity for shoppers: Customers who collect 10 stars can collaborate on a cereal box design with NFTs.
This ecommerce experience keeps a specific set of folks—those interested in NFTs—on the site and clicking around. However, the gamification pays homage to collecting cereal box tops as many of us did as kids back in the day.
There’s also a ton of content on the homepage, including a collection of the brand’s TikTok content. This investment in original content helps this modern storefront build relationships with their brand fans even if a sale might not happen on the first visit:
Moooi.com, a luxury furniture brand, is an ecommerce experience unlike any other.
This site considers digital atmospherics in that it offers a sensory experience. It’s equal parts audio and visual. Shoppers discover Moooi’s product catalog through various animations and sounds in a choose-your-own-adventure-style shopping path.
Moooi’s modern storefront is taken as an art form, just like many of the brand’s furniture pieces.
The unique design of this site conveys quality, sophistication, and luxury. It’s anything but a standard theme.
But Moooi wants customers to know this isn’t just an extraordinary shopping experience. Trust signals are included on each product page to verify Moooi isn’t too good to be true.
This site caters to a super niche customer. Not everyone will drop thousands of dollars on a statement chair or pig table! But for those that will, this ecommerce experience says, “our products are worth the price.”
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Podbike is an e-bike brand on a mission to bridge the gap between cars and bikes. This future-thinking brand has a future-thinking ecommerce site to match built by Certified Shogun Agency, Calashock.
In particular, we love this interaction where Podbike offers a carbon footprint calculator that tells shoppers how much they’d reduce their carbon footprint by swapping a car for a Podbike.
What’s more, this calculator also estimates how many days Podbike users will add to their life expectancy. Quite the selling point and dials into the buyer’s mindset as an additive site interaction!
Soda-alternative OLIPOP recently revamped their product page layout to create a more dynamic shopping experience for customers.
Now, when shoppers toggle between flavors, the entire page remerchandises in a background color that matches the selected flavor.
This may seem like a small change, but it boosted OLIPOP’s conversion rate by a whopping 25%!
It’s these types of careful rich merchandising details that show shoppers you go the extra mile with your experience at every touchpoint. That is—if your website’s this detailed, just imagine what the experience of opening a subscription box of OLIPOP sodas might be like?!
This detail is what customers are quickly learning to expect of an online brand experience, and you need to keep up!
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Black Rifle Coffee Co. knows shopping for coffee online can be difficult. With so many roasts and flavor profiles to choose from, finding the perfect coffee can be a challenge.
That’s why the brand created this helpful and engaging coffee quiz embedded on their site experience:
Quizzes aren’t a new tactic, but they help shoppers find what they’re looking for and help boost average order value and product discovery.
In addition, Black Rifle Coffee Co. includes interesting filter features on their site—like this adjustable roast scale.
Customers can easily parse through the blends that appeal to their flavor preferences, all from the homepage.
Lastly, Black Rifle Coffee Co. offers customers the chance to join their coffee club subscription, which is a great way to keep them engaged.
“The ability for customers to ‘join the club’ and subscribe to Black Rife’s coffee delivery either at home or at the office is very well executed,” says Aziz Memon, Partner, Brand & Customer Service at Tidal Commerce, a Shogun Certified Agency. “The product selection process enables the shopper to customize the subscription order quickly.”
Similar to their coffee quiz, customers complete a quick quiz-like form that builds the perfect subscription for their needs. Easy and effective!
Blok makes shopping for kids’ watches—dare we say—really fun?!
At the very least, Blok’s modern storefront offers an engaging ecommerce experience full of almost 3D-looking product close-ups, fun animations, and responsive movement tied to your cursor.
For example, this high-res product close-up demonstrates how kids would use the watch as you scroll:
Also, the scroll feature in the “Strap in” section is not only unique but it shows how to use the strap:
These high-quality visuals convey durability and quality—two things that could be important considerations when shopping for kids. And two things that aren’t as easy to convey online (vs. in physical retail).
The close-up photography really gives a sense of textures and helps bridge the unavoidable gap of ecommerce (where you can’t pick up an item in hand). Consider how your modern storefront might use macro close-ups in this fashion to boost customer confidence ahead of checkout.
Providing customers with flexible shopping options is another great way to create a better ecommerce experience.
MastermindToys.com—an ecommerce site built by Tidal Commerce—accommodates busy shoppers with limited time by offering buy online, pay in-store (BOPIS) at checkout.
“Offering BOPIS has opened the door to more online business for the brand as customers can access a more convenient way of shopping by avoiding shipping fees and wait times,” says Aziz Memon of Tidal. “In addition, Mastermind Toys has curbside pickup within one hour to compete with the likes of Amazon.”
Bike brand Veloretti knows what’s important to bike lovers—details.
Using captivating background video and clickable product imagery with pop-ups that highlight product features, Veloretti communicates value, quality, and performance with their ecommerce experience. Customers get a real feel for what makes these bikes special—like an anti-theft alarm, removable smart battery, and more—with these UX features.
Plus, the brand includes additional product specs—like frame and component sizing—which is important when shopping for a bike.
Take a cruise through this site to get a feel for how their expansive photography makes the product feel immense. The subtle animations throughout the homepage immediately signal this is different to buying a bike in a big box store.
These aren’t your childhood Gushers or Motts Fruit Snacks (though we love those brands). TALA offers a grown-up fruit snack alternative, and that’s clearly conveyed throughout this ecommerce experience.
Plus, in addition to high-res imagery, TALA has cool cursor-hovering features; the products change color to match the word of the flavor your mouse is over.
Subtle design elements like this play a big part in relaying the quality of TALA’s products.
With 92% of customers saying visuals are a top influencing factor when making purchases online, creating an ecommerce experience with unique imagery is important. And because these fruit snacks are at a much higher price point than others, communicating value with design elements is key to conversions.
Yolélé, an African food brand, has an ecommerce site that is not only engaging but educational.
Using unique scroll features and a horizontal cursor drag on product pages makes for a fun way for shoppers to discover Yolélé’s products. Plus, the recipe pages use a unique layout that keeps customers engaged and inspired.
Sometimes “experience” means providing enough/the right information for customers to make an educated purchase.
Kinship’s sunscreen page is a great example. Some people don’t like to wear sunscreen because of how it feels—it’s a thing. It’s safe to say Kinship is trying to reduce friction around that point for customers by providing “all the feels” details on the page.
Providing customers with all the details they need—or better yet, answers to their questions as they browse—makes for a superb shopping experience.
As you craft your own elevated ecommerce experience, consider what questions your support team answers on repeat. Are there ways you can incorporate these details into the product pages? Into subtle merchandising moments?
Shopping for eyewear online can be tricky. How will you really know if the frames will work for your face without trying them on IRL?
Eyewear brand, Cubitts, tries to make this experience easier—not only with a virtual try-on feature—but by including images of models with different face types (wide head, narrow face, etc.) to help customers figure out sizing.
This kind of added context and investment in quality product photography shows shoppers how much Cubitts values their experience and caters to their needs. This is a brand anticipating friction along the buyer journey and cleverly eliminating it!
Cadence is a customizable capsule brand that helps customers maintain their routines no matter where they are—at home or on a trip.
Customers can build a six-pack of capsules using Cadence’s customization tool and can see a preview of what their set will look like IRL.
You can completely personalize your Cadence set with colors, icons, or labels, making no two sets alike.
How might a live cart preview help your customers build confidence and excitement for their order? Consider whether customers may want to “see” their order come together and whether it could be an additive experience for building excitement.
There are tons of paths to building the best ecommerce experience. One way scaling brands exceed customer expectations and design limits are with powerful page builder tools—like Shogun Page Builder.
More brands are choosing drag-and-drop page builders that allow them to show off their unique style with customizable blocks, layouts, and metadata. With Shogun Page Builder, brands can access 70+ readymade, fully customizable templates and reusable snippets—making it easier to create and publish pages for whatever your business needs.
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