MVP for e-commerce: What is it and how does it benefit electronic commerce?
Electronic commerce requires quick strategies to make its products and services known, but before that it requires testing those solutions to make sure they are satisfying the target audience’s needs. This is where the MVP plays a transcendental role in the online market.
For starters: What is an MVP? There are various answers to this question, its acronym stands for Minimum Viable Product. Basically, it's the initial product that is launched to push towards a final version. This prototype meets “minimum” yet essential requirements to offer what users want.
Once the MVP has launched, a transcendental process begins. As time goes by, you will gather opinions of users who acquire it, with the objective of improving, strengthening, customizing, or specializing with technological features, until you achieve the ideal product for the end consumer, whether it’s B2B or B2C.
Additionally, the Minimum Viable Product is seen as an alternative to guarantee a fast and effective ROI. If the MVP generates a truthful, assertive, and quick analysis, it’s likely the perfect product will be ready in less time, you will have an advantage over the competition, and you will obtain higher revenue. At this point, it’s also important to identify and understand what the client wants to find.
The MVP’s success isn’t only be achieved with quality and innovation deposited on the new product, you can also achieve it with the following key points that will allow consolidating and maintaining preference towards the electronic commerce that offers it:
Implement a smart search tool
Users prefer e-commerce that offer easy searches, many of them already know what they want, or hope for an option that offers the ideal product and/or service, but can also be found with the lowest amount of clicks. This is where the search tool is key, we recommend that it be optimized with technology that can respond to searches in seconds.
Less steps during the shopping process
The average user is more inclined toward electronic commerce due to its immediacy and the time saving aspect of it, which is why it’s important to establish a simple shopping process, with reduced steps, intuitive, and efficient. Implementing this recommendation will help reduce the 87% of users that abandon e-commerce when faced with difficulties during an online purchase (Salesforce data).
Post-purchase experience for loyalty building
According to Salesforce, 86% of users purchase again from an electronic commerce if:
- They receive satisfactory attention after their purchase
- They feel accompanied when using the product
- Their guarantee is previously validated
- They get their order quickly
- Their questions are answered almost in real time
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How to build an ideal and attractive MVP for the digital market?
- Carry out a market study to discover what the client is looking for and what are their immediate needs, or those that require short-term prioritization.
- Make it simple, you don’t need to implement multiple unnecessary features to make it innovative. Analyze and study your target audience and present them with a solution that meets their expectations. Remember this is a prototype that will help you perfect your product to the point you revolutionize the market with a highly efficient product.
- Before you launch your MVP, it’s important to carry out tests to verify that its testing or product explanation are correct and that the client will easily understand how it works. It’s also important to guarantee that the online commerce will respond during high-traffic moments, and provide an effective purchase experience.
- Monitor comments, many times they can express new ideas, failures during the shopping process, details to keep in mind about the product, or other errors that need to be corrected urgently to avoid problems, high drop rates or low revenue.
- Look for relevant features that are compatible with your electronic commerce to strengthen your transaction channel and improve your MVPs visibility.
Similarly, the business that creates or manages the Minimum Viable Product has to choose a robust e-commerce platform that possesses the capacity to function and execute features that belong to external providers, in such a way that it reduces the error rate during purchases.
In order to have a successful MVP it’s important to measure, test, verify and retry until you reach the desired product. Listening closely, analyzing every detail and correcting failures immediately are key actions to achieve the business objective with a final product that exceeds expectations.
