# Asian Master: Shopify Reasearch and Planning
### "Ask Asian 101"
###### tags: `Research`
>This Document is to help us organize our goals for the Asian-Master Website.
>Understanding what to focus on will be key to creating a decent user interface.
## Landing Page
The landing page is arguably the most important page. It should:
1. Cleanly display products and information
- Stay free of clutter and distractions. An overly cluttered page will detract from the experience and make shopping more difficult
3. Lead customers to their desired item
- With potentially endless products, shoppers should be able to quickly navigate to the right item and should be presented with good options and deals along the way
5. Create Engagement
- The landing page will serve as a home for the website it should be welcoming and encouraging shopping
- Engagement should be made through wishlist, email reminders, carts, and active community accounts.
7. Signal Trust
- Encouraging people to shop may be aided if the costumer feels we are a trustworthy brand. We should utilize the website to remind customers of our credibillity.

9. Offer a Mobile Solution
- Most traffic will potentially be from mobile devices.
- Mobile devices may require special design consideration
11. Branding
- The landing page is essentially the start of our brand.
- Strong Headline
- Appropriate Colors
- Professional Media
- Social Media

### Website Inspiration

>Websites to emulate or gather information

#### Shenzhen Audio
[ShenzhenAudio](https://shenzhenaudio.com)
##### The Right
- Presents a lot of information clearly
- Categories come first
- Isn't overwhelming with products/information
- Center Promotional banner
- Obvious Search bar
- Wishlist/accounts/cart

##### The Wrong
- Chat with us
- Colors Do not match food theme
- Custom shopify template so might be hard to emulate

#### Double Green Produce
[Double Green Produce Inc.](https://doublegreenproduce.com/)
##### The Right
- Informative notices. Might hurt trust however
##### The Wrong
- Search Functionality is very unclear
- Categories are just thrown around
- Annoying Banner at the top
- Media looks like basic stock images
- Essentially shopify's basic template
- Price is unclear and deals aren't shown
- Images aren't Cohesive
- The quotes sections is just fun facts
- Basically everything is wrong

#### KBD Fans
[KBD Fans](https://kbdfans.com/)
##### The Right
- Solid Category search with specific and important categories included
- Large Image Buttons that are used for catergories
- Very Good social media integration
##### The Wrong
- Animations
- Would be difficult to navigate more products
### Key Points

#### * Category Based
#### * Clean and easy to understand
#### * Deals and important Products
#### * Search Functionality

## Product Page
Product pages are the space where a customer makes decisions. Good Descriptions, well made product photos, and easy checkout make up the bulk of the user experience.

### Website Inspiration

#### **Amazon**

##### The Good
- Clear, clean image layout.
- Notably, the thumbnails for multiple images is laid out vertically to the side instead of underneath.
- Products with more than a few images have a window that opens to view all the images in a dedicated gallery.
- Detailed product discription without being too dense.
- Important points with some broad specifications.
- "File Explorer" type navigation, usually somewhere in the top left.
- Similar Item comparisons, based on viewing history and item type.
- Extended product description with additional imagery and details for select items.
- Crowdsourced Q&A section for each product listing (maybe we could tie this into a forum like Massdrop).
##### The Bad
- Listing content is left to indpendant sellers, often leading to messy and unclear discriptions and imagery.
- Between the buybox and listing verious buying options and the reviews, listing pages often become messy.
- "Hoover-to-Zoom" can be annoying.
- Too many product recomendations
- Recommendations lose impact and credibility; turn into more of advertisements rather than recommendations

### Our Product Pages
- Traits absorbed from Amazon:
- Vertical image layout
- "File Explorer"
- Bullet-style consise product descriptions
- Similar item recommendations
- Link to product section within forum (more info farther down)
- Section that includes popular recipies that use the product.
- Link to the product's dedicated forum page.
- Reviews and Q&A will be offloaded to the forum to keep the product page clean.
- Media/additional promotional material to promote the item.

## DataBase and Inventory
- Broad catagories, with smaller subcatagories within.
- Lots of catagories are good, but too many can quickly become overwhelming.
- Avoid more than 2 layers of subcatagories
- Target 6 or 7 subcatagories per catagory/subcatagory, max 10.
- Products have specific traits we can sort by including:
- Country of Origin
- Spice Level
- Quantity/Weight
- Availability
- Price
- Refridgeration requirements
- Shipping time (mostly to do with the potential group buy function, but maybe some large items will need more time as well.)
- Brand/Manufacturer
- Products also will have information that will be shown farther down on the product pages.
- Dimensions
- Weight
- Cost
- UPC
- SKU
- Technical Specifications (for non-food items)

## Mobile Strategy
- Catagories on a pull-down window, not shown actively like on the desktop site.
- More icons/images to make site easier to tap around on.
- Website will generally need to have very clear and consise text (in order to keep mobile users from having to struggle to read large paragraphs on a small display).
- Giving the website a more vertically-oriented look rather than a horizonal look will feel less claustrophobic on mobile.
- Carts designed for mobile checkout.

## Profiling
- We will gather information through:
- Customer Wishlist contents
- Unfulfilled carts
- Past purchases
- Browsing behavior
- We should considers customer preferences like:
- Spice level
- Price point
- Country they prefer
- Specific tastes (Sweet, salty, hot, etc.)
- Give the customer the ability to manage their own profile on the site
- Checklist of recipes they've completed
- Favourite recipes
- Favourite ingredients
- Posts they've made on the forum
- Wishlist
- Profile page (visual) customization

## Wishlist
- Simple one click button on homepage
- Possibly track item price
- Show and alert discounts to saved items
- Viewed product section
- Quick links to get to buying
- One click buy
- Navigation links
- Add to cart buttons
- Emails and outreach
- Stock notifications
- Promotions
- Product updates

## Group Buy / Preorders
- Set order time period
- Predetermined deadline for orders.
- Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ)
- Must be met in order for group buy to happen, otherwise customers are refunded.
- Determined future delivery date
- Date will be determined ahead of time so that customers know when to expect delivery.
- Email updates for those participating in GB.
- MOQ reached/not reached notification
- Manufacturing + delivery notifications
- Delays
- Limited-time products for events & holidays.
- Mooncake Festival
- Christmas
- Chinese New Year
- July 4th
- etc.

## Community Forums
- Crowdsourced
- Customers will reach out to each other with questions and/or tips.
- Builds a more loyal customerbase
- Makes Asian 101 a community on top of being a store.
- Gives us more insight as to how customers are using products and more products we might want to carry.
- Allows customers to show off things they've cooked
- Free additional advertising.
- We will start a section for every product. The initial post (made by us, will be pinned) can include:
- Link to the product listing
- Recipies that use/can use the product
- More detailed discription
- Brief history of the item
- Special ways to use the product (if applicable)
- Any other notable traits that wouldn't belong on the product page.
- We don't want this to be a copy of the product listing.
- It should include additional information that we don't want to put on the product page.
- Posts made by customers within the product section include
- Reviews
- Questions
- Customer photos
- Customer tips
- Recipies should all also have their own individual forum section with a similar introduction post that products do.
- Forum organization would be the same as how we catagorize products, with additional search parameters for recipies like:
- Difficulty/Complexity
- Time to prep
- Cookware requirements
- Should avoid the look of a traditional forum and adopt a theme that would be more similar to Facebook/Reddit.
- Will be more familiar to the customers
- Forum Ranks based on activity and internet points

## Recipes
Recipes are likely to have their own section which will replace what is usually called the "blog". Integration of product and blog will likely have to happen mainly on the blog page.
- Cross site, easy to access cart
- Ingredients for recipes to be chosen during recipe creation
- Allows for easy integration
- Only once will ingredients need to be inputed
- Hotlinks for products in the ingredient section
- Essential items
- Ingredients that are needed for the recipe amd that cannot be substituted
- Only things that are listed in the ingredient list
- Suggested Items
- Items that are not essential that can be upsold to customers
- Drinks
- Snacks
- Sauces
- Include the ability to, within one click, add an entire recipie to the customer's cart.
#### Recipe Personalization
We want to give customers the ability to change up one of our recipies, and even make their own. This feature will rely largely on the implementation of the forum.

**PCPartPicker.com**
- Forum sections can be dedicated to customer's own recipes
- Recipes can be closely related to what we provide, or customers can provide their own original recipe
- Customers can upload their own images of their finished product of their personalized recipes.
- Recipe forum page will link to all the products included in the recipe, and also give other customers the ability to "Add All To Cart" like with other recipes.
- Customers will be able to give feedback and comment on each others' recipes.
- They could even be able to modify another customer's already modified recipe.
- Customers can save custom recipes, whether it be their own or someone elses, to their profiles (bookmarking) to save for easy access later.

## Rewards System
It is very common place for companies to include some sort of rewards system;
Chick fil-a, Ralphs, 99 ranch. Pretty much every company has one.

### The Drop.com System
Drop gives a tonne of options to earn rewards. And in everyway they benifit drop. Reviews, product photos, and friend invites all build trust and encourage other shoppers. Shopping from their site in general also builds points that can be later redeemed on drop.com
- Reviews
- Customer Reviews Help us know how customers are enjoying our products
- They also help other customers make decisions
- They build trust and give shoppers a sense of security
- Reviews also generate positive content that search engines love
- >According to Fan & Fuel (2016), 94% of online customers read reviews before making any purchasing decisions. For product-specific information, Spiegel Research Centre (2017) shows that 95% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase.
- Product Photos
- Customer photos legitamize products and our brand.
- >Highlighting customer photos on your website generates more content and conversation around your products and brand. In fact, displaying real customer visual reviews on product pages can increase overall site conversion up to 6%.
- Add a friend
- >Referral programs let customers share their experience with family and friends. The purpose of a referral program is to attract new leads to your business. By asking customers to think about people who would benefit from your product or service, they'll refer those that are a good fit for your brand. Since they've been referred by someone they know, they have a reliable resource telling them that your company is trustworthy and produces a positive customer experience.
- Shop Drop Studio
- We don't have Drop Studio - because we aren't Drop - but we should implement a similar system that rewards customers for purchasing items that we produce in-house or items branded in our name.
### Other Systems
#### Shenzhen Audio
ShenZhen audio earns Rewards in largely the same manner. Comments and reviews give the oppurtunity for earning rewards but they incentivise account creation. I think this might be an important feature in our reward programs infancy
#### Hollister
- Money per dollar spent. This is pretty standard in every system
- Survey rewards

### Spending Rewards
It is pretty common with friend systems to give a reward on signup to a new friend, as well as recruitment from a current customer.
Drop uses points to fill up a meter for a reedemable amount of cash.
Each 100 points is a dollar and a review or photo typically earns 100 points.

## Order Configuration / Checkout Process
Shopify manages most of the details during the checkout process, but there are things we can do before customers start entering their information.

#### "Added to Cart"
Between the product page and the customer's cart, Amazon has a page that recommends similar items/items you might be interested in to also add to you cart.
- Instead of just related/recommended items, we can show:
- Related recipies or recipies that the customer might be interested in based on the profile we've built up.
- Featured customer posts on the product's forum section
- Recipes that use the same ingredients.

## Cart Page(s)
We should include a cart preview, which includes some items and the cart's total price, as well as a dedicated page for the cart, which includes places for promo codes and a box for any special requests or notes they want us to know.

#### Cart Preview
- Item, Quantity & Price clearly displayed
- Running total for the cart
- Also displayed outside of the preview in this example.
- Option to either start checkout process or manage the cart on the dedicated cart page.
##### Additional features to consider
- Some basic form of cart management
- Quantity adjustment
- Item removal

#### Dedicated Cart
- Multiple payment options
- Easy cart management
- Quantity changes
- Item removal
- Per-Item price and cart total
##### Additional features to consider
- Shipping estimates based on zip code
- Promotions that include the product currently in the cart, but that the customer still hasn't met the requirements of yet
- i.e. Buy 2 Get 1 Free, but the customer only has 1 in their cart.
- Forums posts containing the products in their cart
- Can be based on what is the most popular product, what has the largest price, just a random products, or a recipie they are clearly working toward.