Consolidating varied account platform interfaces into a single cohesive UI without sacrificing functionality

Dr. Axe, a clinical nutritionist and world-renowned advocate for natural health, leverages the Shopify Plus and Recharge platform to sell supplements, vitamins and essentials oils to their ever-growing followers. With subscriptions making up a substantial amount of all online orders, Dr. Axe knows that retaining these customers is key to their long-term growth strategy — which is why they tasked eHouse Studio with overhauling the customer account experience in an effort to reduce churn and maximize customer lifetime value.

Customer retention is critical to the success of any eCommerce business; keeping a larger percentage of customers for a longer life cycle helps to support a revenue model that’s both more profitable and more predictable. To do this, Dr. Axe needed a customer portal experience that serves their customers’ post-purchase needs. Increasing visibility of frequently-sought information and simplifying order and subscription management features both mitigate potential frustrations and allow customers the convenience of self-service. Supporting customers this way helps to strengthen rapport — which, in turn, builds brand advocacy and encourages repeat purchasing.

We began by addressing the account’s most adverse issue: the drastic inconsistencies between multiple platforms’ interfaces. While order management and saved addresses were functionality inherent to Shopify, subscription management was integrated through ReCharge and rewards management through Loyalty Lion. All three platforms used out-of-the-box interface styles that were vastly different in design which created a disjointed and convoluted experience as users navigated between pages.

With the release of ReCharge’s Theme Editor, we were able to gain full access to front-end styles, allowing us to consolidate the platform interfaces into a single, cohesive UI for the Shopify Plus, Loyalty Lion and Recharge customer portal without sacrificing functionality. We created a unified navigation menu that was global across all account pages so that the customer-facing experience felt seamless despite the fragmentation of platforms behind the scenes. We also enhanced the overall visual design of the interface so that the account section adopted brand elements consistent with those used across the site.

While consolidating platform interfaces was crucial, we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to ensure that the user experience reflected the latest best practices. We considered the various objectives that customers might have when coming to their account, as well as the context for user behaviors on desktop vs. mobile. This helped us develop tailored solutions so that customers can more easily and intuitively complete their intended tasks, regardless of the device they’re on. These solutions included:

• Providing an initial overview page so that customers have immediate visibility of frequently-sought information, like recent orders and active subscriptions.
• Displaying thumbnails images of order contents within order history listings so that customers can quickly recognize orders by what they purchased.
• Increasing the visibility of pertinent information regarding fulfillment and tracking to help keep customers updated on the current status of their order.
• Streamlining and simplifying subscription management capabilities so that customers have full control to edit, add, swap or skip subscriptions, eliminating the hassle of involving customer service.
• Integrating and customizing Loyalty Lion’s Rewards dashboard into customer accounts so that users have a centralized, one-stop-shop for all account-related features and functionality.