Online Visions – digital expert moves to Coast

DIGITAL EXPERT MOVES to the Sunshine Coast

Other than the massive rise of eCommerce across the globe, the biggest change Covid-19 introduced for Online Visions was the closure of their Brisbane office.

This closure means that Yvette Moreau, owner of Online Visions, and her team now all work remotely and that means that she has been able to fulfill a life-long dream of moving to the Noosa region on the beautiful Sunshine Coast.

Previously, running a high profile eCommerce agency was always associated with an inner-city presence, but now much of the industry still works from home.

Yvette started out as a photographer but moved into the digital space after studying Web Design and Multimedia. After a back injury in her last year of study made it difficult to take on full-time work in the industry, Yvette got into the NEIS scheme through the government in 2001 to start up her business. The program taught her how to write a business plan and provided ongoing mentoring and financial assistance. This, combined with designing small business websites whilst studying, proved to be a great way to get started.

Being a female founder in the male-dominated eCommerce industry filled Yvette with pride. She built her first eCommerce site in 2003 and instantly became addicted and fascinated with transacting online, how it could be done and ways to do it better.

Yvette and Online Visions have worked on some amazing projects over their 20-year span, but being part of the Mobile Optimisation Initiative (MOI) in 2019, a global study by Paypal, Magento and Hi-Conversion was definitely a highlight.

They were one of 22 agencies globally selected to participate. The MOI was about how to close the “Mobile Revenue Gap”, which is the problem of mobile website traffic being much higher than desktop but on average has a 40% lower conversion rate. The study included over 120 A/B test experiments that they ran on their clients’ sites to improve not only the conversion rate, but also focused on the Cart Rate and the Revenue Per Visitor (RPV). This allowed them to benchmark their clients’ results and performance against other participants, which were invaluable. The results of the MOI are impressive with an average revenue lift of 8.12%. Forrester wrote a report on it and Yvette is happy to share it with anyone interested.

One of the company’s other biggest achievements was becoming a Magento Solution Partner in 2015. Online Visions became the first agency in Queensland to achieve this accolade, which is something that’s normally reached by much larger companies. They are also now a strategic partner with BIgcommerce.

Online Visions specialises in B2C / Online Retail, and also has a large focus on the rapidly evolving Wholesale/B2B and D2C space with their brand B2B Commerce that offers digitisation for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors. Their clients range from small boutiques to large retailers and everything in between. Yvette and the Online Visions team love to work with brands who are serious about improving their eCommerce strategy and infrastructure and understand the value of having a good agency to support them.

Online Visions cover everything from eCommerce Consulting, UX/ Web Design, eCommerce Website Development, Integrated Commerce (integrations with third-party business systems), email automation, and Customer Experience/Conversion Rate Optimisation.

We asked Yvette to share a tip that may assist with improving your digital presence.

1) Customer Experience (CX) wins over pricing strategy every time, so personalise the interactions with your customers as much as you can. There are ways to do this through your website by segmenting your customers into groups and making your messaging, product recommendations, and overall experience more relevant to them.

But nothing beats exceptional customer service. I’ve seen a lot of smaller businesses give up thinking they can’t compete with goliaths, but you can gain a competitive advantage, referrals, and drive repeat purchasing by being more engaged with your customers, seeking qualitative feedback and making them part of your brand where possible.

2) Get advice: I probably sound bias but the value of eCommerce consulting is very underrated. So many people make uninformed decisions on their website tech-stack, engage developers offshore to build their site, end up with terrible outcomes but have no budget to have it corrected and continue to lose by having their advertising spend going to waste through a poor converting site.

Prevention is better than a cure – having a detailed requirements analysis and plan in place can avoid that scenario and also help you get better outcomes from offshore resourcing.

3) Test & Optimise: it’s amazing how many people spend thousands driving traffic to their website without properly analysing the onsite user experience and reasons why customers aren't buying. A/B testing can uncover small changes to your site and significantly improve revenue. But don’t just focus on conversion rate in your optimisation process – look at other metrics such as cart rate, revenue per visitor (RPV) and average order value (AOV).

4) Listen to Industry Podcasts and Webinars: there is so much information out there on eCommerce and other brands sharing their stories of success as well as an abundance of information on the latest technology. If you join our email list we can keep you updated with the latest online events.

5) Be Unique: eCommerce is increasingly more competitive regardless of the space you are in. Focus on what is unique to your brand, create rich content and informative product descriptions that talk about how your products solve your customers’ problems, not just their features or specifications.

If you would like to obtain more insights like this, you can connect with Yvette Moreau on LinkedIn or head on over to www.onlinevisions.com.au/blog/

Also join Yvette’s Sunshine Coast eCommerce MeetUp group via Meetup.com a

www.onlinevisions.com.au