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I’ve been informed that a busy sales period might be upcoming, one for which landing pages would be most appropriate. If you want your own high-converting landing page to send to customers over the holidays, you might wish to get one from us.

I sometimes poke around a discord for support people, which I guess got renamed to “customer experience” while nobody was looking, which fine.

I do this for a few reasons:

• We analyze customer support inquiries as part of our design practice.
• It’s nice looking at professions that have a direct impact on the outcome of online stores, but are a little outside of what we do when we practice store design.
• Our professions are received in spiritually similar ways: valued when they’re there, dumped when the economy tanks. Support is largely devalued at the same time as design winters, and for the same reasons.

I mostly lurk. It’s nice being in lurk mode, especially when you have a big personality all over the place elsewhere. And last week, somebody posted this meme, which is both factually accurate and a decent reflection of what store design is like right now.

I wrote this in response:

at some point i’ll write that blog post about how my working on yogic consciousness has made me into a better design researcher, and it will be by far the most woo AND unactionable thing i ever do in my career

Of course, a bunch of people asked for it. Emoji reacts. Text replies. Fine. Fine.

The fourth line of that meme is not a joke, in both spiritual and practical senses. Practically, every ecommerce professional has at some point been a customer of some other store. Participating in the same system as everyone else should result in a closer examination of how your own business operates, but for too many people it just doesn’t.

More spiritually, though, I think store owners in particular suffer from the belief that by owning a store, and by selling their products to others, they somehow exist in some position of superiority. That business ownership somehow involves existing in a position of power. That they’re cool & brilliant to make the things they make, and they deserve to be rewarded in kind.

I believe this is both factually inaccurate and terrible business.

It is terrible business because, well, you don’t have the power. Your customers do. They can go anywhere else, and they chose you. Competition exists in order to keep businesses in check for this specific reason.

It is also factually inaccurate because doing so lightly denigrates the humanity of those who are working with you to succeed with their products. No one person is “better” than anyone. Late capitalism makes us believe this. It is on all of us to remember that our getting to the position of running a business is itself a form of tremendous privilege.

Nobody has a clear sense of what it is like to experience their own store. In another life, you could be on the receiving end of your store’s hostile design – or you could just buy the thing, go about your day, and have a great experience using the product.

The more you recognize that you & your customers are one and the same, the better you’ll do at business and the better you will treat other people. I firmly believe your legacy is defined not in what you do, but in how you make people feel. What are you doing to nourish the latter? How are you moving with kindness?

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for baby formula brand Bobbie.
• Our weekly lesson is about discount strategies. When are discount codes appropriate, and how do you audit them to pare back what you already have?
• And our design of the week is about a… curious brand decision.

Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

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Links

• This post is correct, and it speaks to some of the more serious issues that technology will be facing as machine learning takes over some of its key precepts.
• More on how to build case studies. If you’ve read our book, you know that case studies are the only reliable way to show that your work has a meaningful economic impact. I’ve never seen a situation where case studies were overdone.
• What is the relationship between value-based design work & optimization for search engines? One focuses on real humans, and the other focuses on a robot that is focused on humans in a different way. Conversion works out the ramifications.
• Filling out a multipartite form that has accordion steps? Once each one is completed, collapse them into a summary to make it clear what the next step is.

Thanks for the sponsorship, Buttondown!

Did you know this very email you're reading was sent with Buttondown?

Folks like you send millions of emails every day through Buttondown because of its super-high deliverability, ease of use, and fair price.

Read why Nick likes using it → https://buttondown.email/stories/nick-disabato