Building your digital presence is a challenging task even for veteran players of the e-Commerce arena. In times of abundant content and limited attention spans from the users, it’s very hard to rise above the sea of spam on your clients’ newsfeed.

Holistic Architecture proposes a shift in the paradigm of digital design, empowering both the website’s UI & especially UX.

The key to digital sales is a very easy to follow pipeline of desired actions. You want to guide the user along their cognitive buying process which I will explain thoroughly later on. If the user lands on your website and has a hard time deciding what to press in order to fulfil the wanted action, they will leave. e-Commerce giants call this the rule of 4 seconds. If the user can’t find the button, they want to press in 4 seconds, they feel stupid and leave your website. So basically, your UX, supported by your UI, must help your user feel tech-savvy.

What is the map of decisions the user has to compare and contrast when prompted with your product? The first is if they want to click on your ad on not. That’s the whole purpose of marketing, getting people to land on your website. From there, it’s all about UI&UX.

As I promised I will explain the cognitive process of the typical buyer. The average customer will most likely land on your website from a social media advertisement. The cognitive process must be analyzed in order to better understand what happened in your user’s mind and through an exercise of empathy, put yourself in their shoes so you can learn what shortcomings your project has. When people reach on a website, they are usually assaulted with pop-up ads trying to catch their attention. Maybe pop-ups used to work, but nowadays people developed the ability to mentally block and filter content. Just think about the speed it takes you to decide if a post on your newsfeed is worthy of your attention. Now add in the factor that people might want to fool you into buying stuff you don’t need. That’s right, you scroll right past posts that aren’t insightfully designed to capture your interest. So why would a website browsing experience be any different?

To harness the power of holistic architecture, your e-Commerce website must have excellent UX design. This implies the aforementioned step of empathizing with the client and going through the customer journey. Make notes of every action needed to go from landing page to confirmed order. Count them, analyze them and if possible, reduce their number to the minimum. Pro tip: every step is a decision the user must make, at every mental decision crossroads, the user can decide to abandon their journey on your website. This creates the all-feared issue of high abandoned cart rate which ridden the e-Commerce sites.

If you get the hang of holistic architecture, all the other steps of the e-Commerce Ascension™ become way easier. The template is not just a powerful tool to increase your e-Commerce performance, it’s a mindset that allows people like you and me to gaze through the lens of consumer behavior and successfully apply the insight gathered.