Criticizing the critic:
The presenters were extremely clear about what they set out to do, and the agenda of their presentation was clear:
The UI of ShopBack is crap.
I can't agree more. The whole dual language thing makes it not just look like a translation failure, but a cheap ripoff site where they sell you a whole bunch of fake goods (oops, sounds familiar).
They made great points about how the ads are a complete pain in the ass (sorry am I allowed to use language like that?) and how badly the T&Cs are listed. What's best is that they did also suggest improvements to it - and excellent ones at that, which should totally be given to the development team for implementation.
What really caught my attention about their presentation was how they raised the problem of having to advertise their other partners while at the same time trying to minimize the UI/UX problems by using the chrome extension. This is a great example of a real-world problem and other factors which hamper development, and that's a really great lesson to learn from them.
My gripe with this presentation is how they spent a too much time on the start showing off statistics that are totally unimpressive. Really, 7000 order, 10000 users? That's really on the lame side - why bother putting it in bold and giving it all that time? Negative example lah... I think they should have played to the strong points of ShopBack instead (though there really aren't that many). Lesson: Choose the numbers you present properly. This was 2 slides (10% of the entire presentation) of useless stuff that doesn't convince anyone to care about ShopBack at all
My thoughts on ShopBack:
Interesting idea, that cannot stand alone. It needs to be better integrated with its' partners. Currently the flow is
ShopBack -> Partner -> ShopBack (The last page you visit must be ShopBack)
Instead, to make this successful, it needs to be
Partner -> ShopBack -> Partner
Let's face it, ShopBack is tiny compared to its' partners. Their current model only works if they are larger than their partners, thus making them a good landing page. (Which, as seen from the stats in the presentation, isn't true).
Hi Emmanuel, thanks for critiquing on our presentation!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the slides stated 7000 daily orders (about 210,000 orders per month), not 7000 orders from the start. :)
Personally, I feel that ShopBack is worth studying not only because of their product, but their whole business model as a whole. From what we gathered, they received $1.1 mil in seed funding (that's quite a healthy and chunky amount!) which means that their investors really did see value in their business model or financial projection.
10000 users can be a lot or very little depending on the industry the startup is in. Imagine 10000 people buying cars from a car dealer every month versus 10000 people buying ballpoint pens every month. Doing some quick arithmetic, if 10000 active users (ignoring the non-active users) can give around 210,000 orders per month, that's an average of 21 orders per active user per month. These wouldn't only be just 10000 active users, it would be 10000 VALUABLE active users.
The real issue comes in when given all the hype it received at the beginning (300 participating merchants, with over 120,000 people visiting ShopBack website every month, reference at the end) 2 years ago then does the 10k active users sound like a small number. ShopBack's real value to partnering merchants are the constant supply of customers it can provide and the number of active users it has now does not sound the most promising. Hence, we did the presentation in a way to propose the possibility that their webpage's UI/UX is the main issue affecting the number of users from turning active.
I will have to take a different stand from you in terms of "their current model only works if they are larger than their partners". In my opinion, they don't necessarily have to be bigger than their partners, they just have to be able to provide a large, constant source of active users (say 25k to 50k) to be on the right track.
-Nicholette
Ref: https://vulcanpost.com/174511/steady-silent-and-deadly-inside-singapores-hidden-gem-startup-shopback/
Hey Emman, I like your candour and I am going to reward you with a dose of mine too.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think the UI of ShopBack is crap. It is just that we are unable to accept it because we don’t really like the idea of so much ads and promotions flooding our screen space. Many companies in the same space have the same style in their design and perhaps the rationale is that this might encourage spending. Think about this: if I am offering truckloads of value-for-money products and I want to sell it at a physical shop, will I use the Sheng Siong model or the Apple Store model?
I’m not very optimistic about the company because I don’t see the value in what they are doing. But perhaps I’m not in the position to comment because all the clothes that I have were bought by my Mum. So maybe I should ask her to give feedback instead.
I fully agree with you about the presentation part. While the statistics might be meaningful at a meeting to understand the financial situation of the company, I think most of us couldn’t really relate to the figures given.
Cheers,
Derek
"The UI of Shopback is crap."
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be one of the most rapped point where it comes to the deficiencies of Shopback, but it is entirely possible that it was intentionally built that way.
Having used Shopback **a lot** (at present, I have $85 pending cashback in my account), I would point out that the Shopback interface is actually rather clean as long as you are not looking at the pages that advertise stores and products. Take the Shopback Referral pages or the help pages. They were designed quite decently and quite uncluttered as compared to the mess on their landing page.
The problem with having a nice Shopback UI is that most users (like me) who use Shopback do not use it because we Shopback's store recommendations or "curated" store lists. We use it because we already know what we want to buy, and going through Shopback gives us 3% cashback. Plain and simple. A naive improvement of the Shopback UI to improve customer happiness would mean allowing end-users to get to the page they want quickly.
This is all well and good except for the fact that the end-users are not Shopback's customers. The merchants are, and no merchant would want to give Shopback a 5% referral fee for free (after all, those who go through Shopback are those who already would have made a purchase on the merchant's site anyway). Why not just give the 5% directly to the customer?
Especially given that the target audience are customers who already know what they want and are simply going through Shopback to get to what they want, it is quite plausible that the UI is intentionally cluttered and in-your-face simply to resort to traditional advertising methods - making your ads as intrusive as possible so that more eyeballs will look at it.
Hi Emman, as I read through your critique a few things came to my mind.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, the UI. ShopBack’s site actually gave me a pretty bad impression the first time I visited. I felt that the page was too cluttered and overall, too many things were going on. I certainly didn’t like it, but it did remind me of something I read a while back, about shopping sites in China. Turns out in China a minimalistic site doesn’t really work out too well (we can compare Taobao’s mainland site as compared to their international site to see this difference). Now I still don’t ShopBack’s site will be appealing to customers in Singapore, just that the site had reminded me that design sometimes requires contextual context.
That being said, I agree fully that mixing languages is really unprofessional, and can be really confusing to the user. What I suspect is that ShopBack had allowed its partners the flexibility to define what they want on their page. For example, the prime example for a page with multiple languages would be TaoBao’s page. Yet, other vendors, like AliExpress, sticks faithfully to English on their pages.
I feel it’s related to your second point about how ShopBack must be integrated with it’s partners. It is entirely possible that ShopBack had consciously decided to give up some autonomy on its website’s design so as to attract for partners into its enterprise. While that can be a reasonable tactic to get started, ShopBack more or less also lost control of their own image. If my suspicions above are true, then we have just seen how a partner had sabotaged ShopBack’s image. Moving forward, ShopBack might do better to put in place a more stringent review system, once it has a stable pool of partners to depend on. The model can be somewhat like what Facebook does for third party apps, where a review must be completed in order for the third party to make use of certain integrations.
Yichen
Thanks for the critique Emman!
ReplyDeleteLooks like you are quite displeased with the Shopback experience overall. I mostly agree with your thoughts in that Shopback's UI and UX is not only unimpressive but actually quite sub-par.
1. The dual language: Although I think in principle this is a really nice feature (many websites have done multi-lingual support well), Shopback's execution of it is underwhelming. It looks like a half-done job with a mix of two languages still appearing on the page.
2. The Chrome extension mitigates some of the poor UI of Shopback. It's also much more convenient for the users instead of them going to separate website every time they want to shop. But to do this right, Shopback should allow all functionality from their chrome extension and devote their website to advertise and teach on how to use the extension. I think learning two workflows (the website and the extension) is too much to ask of a user.
3. "Their current model only works if they are larger than their partner". I disagree. Shopback is an aggregator and an advertising platform. Their job is to list products and services from other stores in the region. Agreed that Shopback's size is important for their user's experience and Shopback's own growth but not being larger than the company it leverages upon is not determining factor. Shopback is an aggregator and this means, they can still list products from all the stores (large or small).