3 ideas that (could) make lensonline.be a better webshop

How starting with user needs can end up in commercial success

9 min readFeb 4, 2019

First, a little background… LensOnline was founded in 2004 in Belgium. It is a company that sells lenses online and through a network of over 100 partner-opticians across the country. In the past several years, the company has grown to be the most important player in the contact-lens business in Belgium. With its recent acquisitions, it’s becoming more and more active also in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France and Germany.

So, how was the online platform changed along the way to handle such a rapid expansion rate of orders and users alike?

From 2012 to the first half of 2018, on behalf of Xcommerce, I led some of the most significant redesigns of LensOnline‘s online platform to facilitate a better user experience.

A new eCommerce platform

Back in 2010 lensonline.be was already a successful webshop in Belgium. Since orders were starting to stack up, the company has partnered up with Vigor to integrate SAP B1 into their business framework.

In the spirit of streamlining the sales process, management started discussing also about a new eCommerce solution. They wanted an interface so-to-speak between SAP and the webshop. Through this interface, new, marketing-specific functionalities would be implemented and controlled. That was when Xcommerce got involved.

The plan was to create a dedicated eCommerce platform that would handle the webshop-specific functionalities while also taking care of the known usability issues, thus providing a better shopping experience for customers.

We started the design process by discussing with the LensOnline marketing team to understand their customers and their needs. The goal of our discussions was to identify solutions that connect the needs of customers to the business needs of LensOnline.

Customer needs

Users need to find their contacts as soon as possible. Whether or not they are buying contacts for the first time, the primary reason of their visit is to find a particular lens type from a particular brand.
Users need to find the offers that suits their needs. There are several offers to choose from when purchasing contacts on LensOnline. Users need to see (only) the offer(s) that are relevant for them.
Users need to place orders before they run out of lenses. This seems obvious, but often times contact-lens wearers forget to place their orders in time and this can lead to a couple of very unpleasant days.

Business needs

LensOnline needs to grow their customer base.
Average order value needs to grow.
The number of recurrent orders needs to increase.

As we looked for connections between the needs of the customer and the needs of LensOnline, ideas and functionalities started to appear.

1. Relevant content is key

If the goal is to reduce the time needed for users to find their products, the question that we need to ask ourselves is: Where do users (first) look for their products?

From the nature of the products, we assumed that users know what types of lens they want to purchase BEFORE they visit the website. Research showed us that most users also know what brands they prefer. Consequently, most users were accessing the website by accessing one of the product pages. In other words, they used an external search engine (such as Google) to find their lens before even accessing LensOnline.

So, it made sense to work on the content of the details page.

From the user’s perspective: They find their lenses sooner. Users who look for their contacts on Google click on the links that seem most relevant for them. Here, relevance can be associated with a sense of trust and security, besides the obvious indication that the product is in stock.
From LensOnline’s perspective: LensOnline has the opportunity to grow it’s customer-base. In other words, new visitors find their way more easily to LensOnline. It is more likely that they enter a webshop if they are certain that it has the products they want to buy.

As a result of relevant content placement and SEO on the product page, LensOnline shows up as the second link in Google, when the user (with a Belgian IP) searches for a particular product, such as Dailies AquaComfort Plus.

Note: AdWords links have been removed from the screenshot as they are not relevant in this review.

Of course, searching on Google is not the only way users arrive to the website. There’s a case to be made that on-site navigation is just as important in finding the right products. However, because it is a complex issue, I decided to cover it in a separate article.

2. Less is more when it comes to offers

Upselling

Buying more lenses results in a lower price per lens. In the frontend, up-selling methods were used to display the many offers through which the user can buy the desired product.

Initially, our assumption was that for a given product, showing as many offers as possible would help users decide which is most advantageous for them. However, tests indicated that users tend to get overwhelmed and confused when too many options are shown on the same page. Consequently, the up-selling offers on the product page got fewer clicks.

Hick’s law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. And as the decision time increases, the user experience suffers.

To solve the issue, we proposed to reduce the number of offers on the product page to one. Up-selling rules needed to be established in order to display the offer that is most likely to be of interest for the user. It’s easier than it sounds… When visiting a product page, users are shown only the next bigger package.

Cross-selling

If you are familiar to buying contact lens, you know that one doesn't usually buy only contacts. Orders are often accompanied with lens solutions such as eye-drops or multi-purpose liquids.

It is reasonable to think that mentioning these additional products to users who are about to purchase contacts is a good idea. However, timing - as it turns out - is rather important.

One could argue that the issue of a suitable lens-solution should be considered a separate step in the conversion flow. I would visualize it - very roughly - as in the picture below.

In this flow, the 3rd step is optional. Making it look as if it was otherwise could compromise the purchase. For example, the user could - for good reason - be frustrated if he would get the impression that buying eye-drops is mandatory in order to get the advertised price on his daily lenses. Placing the eye-drops in the same context (on the same page, in close proximity) as the Rx information is likely to produce that effect.

The solution, in terms of UI design, is an entirely separate section dedicated only for choosing (or not) the lens solution. Something like in the picture below.

This section would appear after the user pressed the Add to cart button. At this point the user is done completing Rx information and is committed to purchasing the product. This is very likely the best occasion you could mention additional products without coming off as being pushy. To comply with Hick’s law, I would even reduce the number of additional products from two to one.

3. User-oriented subscriptions

While gathering customer feedback, LensOnline realized that their customers wanted an easier solution for ordering their lenses on a recurring basis.

The subscription model is not a new concept. The idea of sending out pre-ordered products (such as magazines or newspapers) on a recurring basis has been around long before the internet even existed. Subscription-based e-commerce models however are a relatively new trend in the world of online shopping.

LensOnline first introduced this service in 2016 as a lens-subscription service. There were around 3 brands of contacts that could be ordered as a subscription. Below, you can see the steps the user needs to take so that he’ll “never run out of contacts again”.

Subscriptions work in three steps on LensOnline

The service was the subject of numerous ideation sessions and improvements. One of these improvements was giving users the possibility to choose whether or not they want a subscription after they have added the products to their shopping cart. This had a major impact on subscription-orders, because it added a much needed flexibility to the service. I’ll explain…

Initially, we looked at the service from the developers’ perspective: There are products that can be bought as a subscription? Good. Let’s put them in a category called Subscriptions. There, the user will choose the subscription package he wants and go on to a slightly different checkout flow.

The thing that we didn't consider was that looking for a particular subscription package is not something that a customer would normally do at an optician. At an optician, the customer would first choose a product (for example EyeDefinition Oxygen Plus Toric, monthly lens), give the optician her Rx information, choose a lens-solution and only after the product selection and setup is done she would decide whether or not she wants to set up recurrent orders and not go through the whole process again next month. Instructing users to do the process differently online - we learned - took away from the otherwise good user-experience.

Today, users are no longer needed to go into the list of subscription packages if they want a lens-subscription. If a product they added to their cart can be purchased as a subscription, they have the possibility to order it on a recurring basis. To put it differently, users are no longer need to change their purchasing habits. Unless they want to, of course: the category dedicated only to subscriptions is still accessible for users who are looking exclusively for subscription packages.

Users can now choose to order their products as a subscription also after adding the products to the shopping cart.

Final thoughts

From our first meetings with LensOnline, I knew that in regard to the LensOnline webshop, there are multiple areas that needed to improve. By defining not only business needs but also customer needs at the beginning of the project, gave us the necessary framework based on which we could work more efficiently towards clearly defined goals.

Personally, as a UI designer for Xcommerce, it was an incredible experience for me to be part of LensOnline’s success-story. Among the many hard and soft skills required, effective communication and good management proved to be invaluable.

The ideas (and corresponding functionalities) mentioned contributed a great deal to the commercial success of lensonline.be, but these aren't the only ones that had (or could have) an impact. I am planning to write about such ideas in my following articles. So stay tuned, if you are interested.