Pentair Primer and E-Commerce Pages
What does it take to build a great e-commerce and education experience into an existing site? Getting users into the sales funnel with Pentair Water Services.
Url: https://www.pentair.com/en-us/water-softening-filtration.html
Research: Competitive Analysis, Site Audit, SEO Analysis, Accessibility Audit, SME Interviews
Tools: Adobe XD, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams
Executive Summary
Problem Space
Pentair has been a leader in both consumer and enterprise water filtration services since 2004. However, consumers have always been required to work with local vendors to purchase Pentair’s products. Pentair Water Services (PWS) was devised as a direct-to-consumer filtration marketplace that would deliver a modern e-commerce experience as well as consumer education and resources. We were brought in to help PWS fine-tune their e-commerce, primer and education experiences for their users.
Our Approach
As the e-commerce space is well-defined with many great solutions already existing, we looked outward to both direct competitors and best-in-class retailers to find tools and features that would provide the best possible user experience.
Research
Site Audit
Pentair already has a wealth of customer data, personas and brand guidelines at their disposal, and they graciously provided them to us for our research. Having studied their user base, we performed a site audit of PWS to learn their strengths as well as their pain points. We found that, while the site has a strong foundation, the e-commerce experience was quite clunky and the educational/primer pages lacked strong visuals and interactivity, making for a slightly bland experience.
Competitive Audit
From there we began an extensive competitive audit. We first looked at direct competitors in the consumer water filtration space to see what they did well. We found that Culligan had an excellent e-commerce experience with all of the features users expect to see, and Aquasana featured beautiful interactive infographics that surprised and delighted their users, for example. We also looked at best-in-class online retailers: Warby Parker does a great job of updating their product pages as the user customizes their selection, while Amazon Home Services has mastered the content hierarchy of their pages to ensure a smooth user flow.
Pentair’s existing e-commerce page asked users to select their product based on its SKU, a confusing and unintuitive process
Aquasana uses beautiful interactive infographics to both educate and delight the user
Design
E-Commerce
For the e-commerce pages, we were given the task of redesigning the below-the-fold experience. Some of the enhancements we made include:
An interactive product description widget (pictured, right)
A redesigned specifications table that no longer requires left-to-right scrolling
A “related products” section
A robust product support section with an installation guide, manuals and downloads, and FAQs/troubleshooting
Education
Education pages are designed to answer user questions on a broad range of water-related subjects and gently guide them into shopping phase of the customer funnel. We wanted these pages to utilize interactive carousels and infographics to support the copy and engage the user.
Primer
Primer pages are designed to introduce users to categories of products, educate them on their uses and benefits, and begin the shopping phase of the customer funnel.
Results
Pentair has implemented a wide swath of our design solutions across the PWS portion of their site while continuing their long-term goals of becoming a best-in-class e-commerce experience in the consumer water filtration space. We continue to provide content for their primer and education pages on a regular basis.