Making Data-Driven Decisions to Improve Your Application
Leveraging Behavior Analytics for your International eCommerce Application
In addition to various simulations, we can also capture the actual user experience directly by enabling session recordings. There are some caveats for GDPR and other privacy measures, but the right tools are available to overcome them (for example, instead of personally identifiable information in forms, the recording might show asterisks). Generally speaking, recording sessions and looking at anonymized sets of data, like heat maps, can be extremely valuable for proper execution of a robust usability testing. The usability testing itself should be an ongoing procedure and represent part of the organization’s culture for any international eCommerce platform.
The core concept is that data is king, and the team should ideally be focused on data when making decisions. That being said, we absolutely don't want to be agnostic to logic and street smarts. We instead begin with logic, business experience, and what's working in the industry, and then iterate based on data-driven validation. Hence, there has to be a reasonable combination of learnings, creativity, research & development, decision making and evaluation by trying things out. That's practically the name of the game and everything should be centered around a very solid feedback loop.
Undoubtedly, this information must be also validated with real users, who can swiftly provide feedback based on their conversion rate optimization. Along these lines, usability may be viewed as a kind of mantra: a method of operating internally that is absolutely paramount for a successful international eCommerce platform. Another aspect to consider is how each of the different regions, countries, and possibly even jurisdictions, may need their own catered settings and configuration in order to flawlessly optimize for that particular area.