User Experience

2020 was a year like no other. The pandemic upended traditional in-store shopping habits and redirected consumers online like never before. This surge brought unprecedented growth to the e-commerce forecast, with U.S. consumers predicted to increase their spend by 18 percent. While this shows staggering growth in a space with steady momentum already, it also demonstrates…

The pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital channels — and heightened the stakes. While in-store retail sales are projected to stay stagnant, e-commerce experienced a 129 percent year-over-year growth in U.S. and Canadian orders as of April 21, 2020. As a result, online customer experiences have become the battleground for businesses seeking to secure…

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published by Total Retail titled, “5 CX Trends to Help You Win Customers’ Hearts and Wallets in 2021,” authored by Jean Shin, director of strategy and content at tyntec. The article discusses how in 2020, we learned…

While COVID-19 has brought lots of uncertainty to our world, nothing has been “certain” in the retail world for a very long time, and the current pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted anything resembling “business as usual.” However, whether you run a tiny, web-only startup, are the owner of a single small town brick-and-mortar shop, or the…

Lots of design literature has been written to document e-commerce shopping best practices. User experience (UX) and user interface strategies, like checkout flows or microcopy, matter for increasing purchases. The role operations can play with improving conversion and revenue is often ignored because of its multiple levels of difficulty. Unlike a button, whose color can…

U.S. Department of Commerce figures show that even with many retail outlets closed for several weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, total retail sales rose 4 percent between January and June 2020. Much of this was driven by a 30 percent increase in e-commerce spending. Now, a new Pollfish survey shows nearly 77 percent of…

The pandemic has changed everything in retail — and it’s not ending anytime soon. Just as stores started to adjust to the “new normal” of frequent disinfection and face masks, the spread of the virus is picking back up in regions across the country, forcing many retailers to close their doors to the public again.…

Walking into a brick-and-mortar store today feels a bit apocalyptic. Employees now don gloves, facemasks and even the occasional face shield for added protection. There are stickers meticulously placed at six-foot intervals in front of checkout counters to help consumers abide by social distancing rules. Plexiglass shields now act as a protective barrier between cashiers…

Almost nine months after COVID-19 started making its mark on the United States, lockdown restrictions and widespread working-from-home offices have caused many American consumers to rethink their shopping habits. While we still don’t know exactly when the pandemic will be declared over, what is clear is that the post-pandemic retail world will be different to…

It was early 2020. Retail was confident it had the right marketing strategies, technology and understanding to reach and guide customers, no matter where they were and under any circumstance. Then suddenly everything changed and one of the very few unanticipated scenarios came into being. A pandemic required everyone to hunker down, undermined confidence, raised…