Dušan Vereš from ui42: How to be better than giants in e-commerce? Differentiate your e-shop through top-notch CX and CRO
In the latest episode of the Biznislab podcast, host and co-founder of ui42 Martin Krupa talked with Dušan Vereš, head of the customer research department at ui42. They discussed how to maximize profit from existing traffic and why research is more important than ever before.
In a time when artificial intelligence can design an e-shop in a few seconds and PPC ad prices are constantly rising, a nice design is no longer enough. If you want to survive in the market and beat competitors like Temu, Alza, Allegro, or OBI, you must perfectly understand your customers' decision-making process.
Customer Experience (CX) as Your Greatest Competitive Advantage
The difference between UX and CX is crucial for success.
While UX ensures that your e-shop has a well-tuned and usable interface, CX (customer experience) encompasses every single interaction a customer has with your brand – from the first product search, through email communication, to order delivery or customer service.
This is where the opportunity arises to differentiate from the big players.
Especially with more complex products, such as garden sheds, building materials, or living room sofas, the customer does not decide based solely on price. They have many questions, concerns, and practical problems that need to be resolved.
For example, if you help a customer with the building permit process when purchasing a garden shed, or send them fabric samples for a sofa selection directly to their home for a few cents, you immediately stand out from five other price offers.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): Advertising Brings Traffic, but the Website Decides the Sale
Many e-shops struggle with rising marketing costs and margin pressure. However, if you send expensively paid visitors to a slow or incomprehensible website, you are wasting money.
This is where CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) comes into play, which allows you to gain up to 10 - 20% more paying customers from existing traffic.
A common mistake is that the e-shop speaks its own internal slang, which the average user does not understand. A typical example is the sale of mattresses, where sellers offer incomprehensible filters like "flexi-coconut" or "quality 2, 3, 4". The customer does not understand the offer and goes to shop elsewhere.
Where to Start with Optimization According to Dušan Vereš?
Optimizing an e-shop does not have to start with large projects. It often involves a series of smaller but very effective improvements.
Dušan Vereš recommends focusing mainly on these areas:
Website Speed
Loading the page ideally within 1 second makes shopping faster and naturally increases conversion
Search in the E-shop
A quality search is among the most powerful tools. Users who actively use search often convert up to twice as well.
Clear Categories and Filters
The category page must not only navigate the customer but also educate them. Filters should use the customer's language, not technical terms.
Product Detail
The product page must contain quality photos, variants, reviews, and answers to all customer questions or concerns.
Innovate Safely Thanks to Research
Artificial intelligence today can significantly speed up the creation of e-shops or marketing content. However, without a deeper understanding of the customer, companies often end up with average solutions.
If you want to stand out, you need quality customer research. Its goal is not just to measure customer satisfaction or boast a high NPS (Net Promoter Score). More importantly, it is to understand how the customer thinks when making decisions.
Research helps companies minimize the risk of failure when introducing expensive innovations and so-called "managerial flares." Before you start programming a new robust feature, create a simple prototype and test it on a small sample of people.
Practice shows that even relatively small changes can have a big impact. For example, rewriting incomprehensible text based on testing increased the throughput of an insurance calculator by 20%.
What to Take Away from the Episode?
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If you sell products like garden sheds, sofas, mattresses, insurance, or specialized products, you must differentiate with services and customer experience.
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Customer research is not about measuring satisfaction, but about understanding how the customer thinks when making decisions.
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Rising advertising costs mean that conversion optimization (CRO) is becoming increasingly important.
Listen to the Entire Episode of the Biznislab Podcast
Do you want to know more about why information architecture should not be based on the company's internal language, but on how customers think?
Or what book does Dušan Vereš recommend for improving your services? Listen to the entire interview in our podcast.
