6 Ways to Improve SAP Hybris B2B/B2C Accelerator Applications

Pete Lagana

SVP & CTO

If you want to take your SAP hybris B2B/B2C Accelerator application from good to great, you need look no further than improving your site's UX. To accomplish this, you don't need to reinvent the wheel or invest in an expensive upgrade. You just need to know where to begin.

1. Improve Website Speed

According to the HTTP archive, 60 percent of website page weight is due to images. To make an SAP hybris application load faster, reduce the size of images by using PNGs or SVG files. By switching from the standard GIF, TIFF and BMP formats, you reduce image weight by up 50 percent without sacrificing quality.

Minimizing the Javascript and CSS can also reduce the website weight. Remove unnecessary line breaks, extra spaces, and code to speed up parsing, downloading and executing.

These simple tasks will cut bytes of data that will lessen your website weight and, therefore, vastly increase your website's speed and responsiveness.

2. Simplify Navigation Without Sacrificing Visual Appeal

Is your navigation conducive to how your customers shop? It needs to be straightforward to your users - simple, but not so much so that it lacks appeal. Use colors and fonts that convey your company’s personality and brand. Utilize product attributes to further hone your navigation and make it even easier for your customers to shop. By creating a user-friendly shopping experience with easy-to-understand navigation, customers will interact with your website longer and with greater frequency, which is guaranteed to increase your number of orders and total sales.

3. Increase Search Engine Friendliness

SAP hybris B2B/B2C applications are not Search Engine Friendly (SEF) out of the box. But you have a multitude of options to make sure customers find your site.

Incorporate keyword-rich URLs for better SEO and brand identification.

Add Meta Tags to the <head> element of your HTML and include ALT tags within the IMG tags to add relevancy.

Finally - and most importantly - include engaging content. It is no longer enough to sprinkle specific keywords throughout your site. Your content needs to be easily readable, pertinent, and add value for your customers.

4. Maintain Browser Compatibility

SAP NetWeaver Enterprise supports Inter Explorers 6 thru 8, IE9 (recommended), IE10 desktop, Firefox 10-17, Safari 5.1 & 6 (for Mac OS 10.7 and 10.8) and Google Chrome (Support of NW 7.02, 7.30, 7.31). Instead of adding extra snippets of code to the existing CSS and Javascript, it is best to replace it with common CSS & Javascript in the application to support all browsers & versions.

5. Improve Customer Communications

The current state of online technology is characterized by greater user interactivity and collaboration, more pervasive network connectivity and enhanced communication channels. The web is more social than ever before. Increasingly, websites enable community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Today's technologies provide for heightened levels of interaction on websites, and consumers expect that same level of interaction when shopping online. These new and better experiences encompass online collaboration, social networking and a closer simulation of an in-store shopping experience.

Today is the era of responsive web design which means e-commerce sites should respond to a visitor’s environment without affecting the user experience. A responsive website is easy to identify - size adjusts to the visitor’s device, whether it be a wide screen monitor, tablet or smartphone. By making your SAP hybris B2B/B2C application responsive, you're providing your users with a seamless shopping experience, regardless of what devices they are using.

6. Enhance Accessibility and Usability

SAP hybris B2B/B2C applications need to emphasize usability more, not less, because they help customers accomplish more advanced tasks. There are a number of ways this can be improved.

Make your system status highly visible. That is to say, show customers where they are when navigating your site. This is achieved with breadcrumbs, page headers, highlighted menu options, progress bars and thank you pages.
Speak the language of your customers, including jargon and phrases tailored to your target audience.
Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
Simply eliminate anything that takes control out of the hands of your users. Allow customers to easily discover and control what they want to do or where they want to go. Customers should not have to wonder whether different words or actions mean the same thing. The last thing you should subject your customers to is a sense of confusion on website. Websites should not be puzzles. Instead, you should create a fluid experience that eliminates any guesswork.
Support undo and redo.
Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present customers with a confirmation option before they commit to the action. When you design carefully and mindfully for the user experience, errors don’t pop up much at all. This may require several iterations of usability testing and improvements on your website.
Minimize the customer’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The customers should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Incorporate UX features like accordion, sticky menus and change colors of visited links to further your site's usability.
Allow customers to tailor frequent actions. To encourage efficiency and flexibility of use for your website, accelerators — unseen by the novice customer — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced customers.
Keep dialogue at a minimum. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Allow customers to recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors by using messaging that is expressed in plain language (no codes). They should precisely indicate the problem and constructively suggest solutions.
Offer help. This can be accomplished utilizing live chat, FAQs, & microcopy. Any such information should be easy to search, focus on the customer’s task and include step-by-step directions.
Optimize your web accessibility by making your website and applications available to everyone. This increases your potential customer base by including all users, regardless of their vehicle or bandwidth.

These are just some improvements you can make that are guaranteed to enhance your SAP hybris B2B/B2C accelerator experience without breaking the bank. But perhaps you'd still prefer user experience professionals to provide you with personalized insight. The experts at Excellis Interactive can help you optimize your existing technologies today that will continue to prove their value tomorrow - saving you time and money. Fill out the contact form below to get the conversation started - what can we simplify for you?

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