Taking applied behavioural economics online for retail shopping

Genesis Analytics’ Applied Behavioural Economics (ABE) team held two internal capacity-building workshops with one of the top clothing retailers in South Africa where we explored applying behavioural insights to various business segments ranging from credit, rewards, marketing and analytics to customer insights.

Off the back of ABE’s successful delivery of these behavioural economics training workshops, we were retained to apply behavioural economics to the retailer’s online rewards platform as it shifted from the traditional bricks-and-mortar business to its redesigned e-commerce platform. The main challenge was to consolidate its various brands in the conglomerate onto a single platform. We explored the use of web psychology to design reward and credit webpages to optimise decision making and nudges to influence customer behaviour.

After understanding the possible online customer journeys, we redesigned the wireframes and simplified the user journey, leveraging insights from web psychology, which includes designing with visual and social biases in mind that affect how users engage with their screens and the offerings on them. The final webpages are being designed and once launched will reach over seven million clients across both website and mobile channels.

ABE’s deep dive into the world of e-commerce continues: our next project with the same retailer involves helping to design a rewards programme. The project involves thinking through micro-design elements on webpages, usability testing and user journey design.