How I Built 1 Website For 2 Different Audiences At Route

Lots of companies have multiple product offerings, Uber has drivers and riders, Route has merchants and shoppers, Snapchat has B2C and B2B, how do you build a website for it?

Feb 19, 2024

Building A Website For Two Different User Bases

Working as a Growth Product Manager for Route I was responsible for the marketing website and the user experiences across that product. Route had two primary products and two separate markets for each product.

Route’s B2B product was shipping insurance for online merchants. If you sold t-shirts on your website, at checkout your users would have the option to add Route shipping insurance for a couple bucks. Once they add the protection product, if anything happens to the t-shirt in the shipping process, Route would handle the customer service and fund a replacement.

Route also offered a B2C product for tracking packages once ordered. So if a consumer ordered a t-shirt from a store with Route insurance, they would be prompted to download the Route mobile app where they could track their package, file claims and handle any other odds and ends related to the consumer experience.

One of the biggest problems we faced was how to handle these two very different groups of users on the marketing website without making sacrifices to either of their experiences.

The two biggest concerns were:

B2C users (we called them Shoppers at Route) had a problem with their order and tried to contact Route to help resolve it, but instead of getting to the Shopper help center resources, Shoppers found our B2B (we called them Merchants at Route) lead forms and filled them out. The submissions from these forms went to the sales team, so often a submission through a Merchant lead form would never get to the right place or team, resulting in a really terrible user experience for Shoppers.
B2B users (Merchants) searching for Route were most likely to find the home page, but because the large majority of website users were Shoppers, the home page was almost exclusively dedicated to Shopper resources and product offerings, meaning Merchants looking to learn more about Route found a confusing and disjointed experience.

These problems caused lots of discussion and ideation at Route that most often resulted in everyone tossing their hands in their air, unsure of how to tackle this problem.

Studying Industry Leaders

Once we had gone around the block a few times with different stakeholders on possible solutions, I decided to explore other companies who had similar problems to figure out how they solved them.

The two tech companies that I decided to study were Uber and Snapchat. Both had product offerings for B2B and B2C and both had slightly different solutions that seemed to work pretty well.

Uber

Uber was a natural analog for Route because the primary conversion action we both wanted B2C users to take was downloading the mobile app and navigating their experience through it. We also had similar goals for our B2B users because we wanted them to use the B2B portal. Uber’s was a separate mobile app, Route’s was a web app, but it was close enough.

There were a few things Uber was doing really well that Route was missing.

Uber had resources for their B2C users on their website and they’re easily accessible.
Uber had a web app that allows B2C users to manage their riding through desktop, not exclusively through a mobile app.

These were two features that Route did not have at the time, and as I researched Uber, it became clear that these specific features provided a much simpler and clearer user experience for their B2C users.

Offering these features ensured that B2C users didn’t fill out B2B forms, or in Ubers case, didn’t download the Driver app. Why would they? The delineation between Rider and Driver was very clear.

Route didn’t have a clear delineation between resources and it caused problems.

Snapchat

Snapchat provided a slightly worse example than Uber, and was closer to Route’s experience, which provided me a chance to experience how crummy our experience was for our users.

Snapchat’s website was very focused on their B2C users. The problem was that they had offerings and products for B2B users, but they were difficult to find and navigate.

Snapchat did a great job funneling users who get to the website to their mobile app, which is obviously the intent of the majority of their users. But business users ended up having a worse experience. This directly paralleled our experience at Route.

Route

Once I had done some deep dives into those industry leaders and analogs for Route, I needed to develop the strategy for how Route would solve our problems.

A few ideas became clear pretty quickly:

Route needed a B2C (Shopper) web app that users could access from the home page
Route needed better navigation and direction for Merchants on the home page
Route’s Merchant facing pages needed ways to redirect Shoppers to resources for their needs

So I set out to act on these ideas.

Shopper Web App

Building a web app for Shoppers would not be a small task, I was basically asking a significant portion of our engineering staff to spend several months dedicated to this problem.

I went to the PMs and Engineers who would tackle that problem and started working with them to build it out.

Everyone agreed this was the right solution for this particular problem, but developing it would take months. So that team went off to work.

Eventually the team rolled out a web app that mimicked the mobile app for Shoppers and it saw a ton of use. Rolling this out also reduced Shopper submissions to Merchant lead forms.

Merchant Navigation

My ideal situation was to add more Merchant specific resources and content to the home page, but as I pitched this to stakeholders I was met with a lot of resistance. Executives wanted the home page to be dedicated exclusively to Shoppers. They were open to better navigation and support on the rest of the website, but the home page needed to be Shopper focused.

That was not the answer I wanted to hear, but in my experience there are always constraints and I believe operating within them can lead to exceptional and innovative solutions.

So working with my designer and head of growth, we designed a new menu that would only appear on Merchant facing pages. This wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it would provide a much simpler and clearer way for Merchants to navigate the website.

Redirecting Shoppers From Merchant Lead Forms

With the previous two solutions being built, I knew that would help mitigate this problem, but I also figured we’d still have some Shoppers submitting forms.

So I came up with an idea. We asked, what if before displaying the lead form, we asked users what their intent was. We could ask if they identified themselves as Shoppers or Merchants or even ask what problems they were trying to resolve and then direct users to the right resources or allow Merchants to fill out the form.

We constructed and ran a series of tests to identify the most common Shopper concerns. We learned that the most common intents for Shoppers were to track a package, followed by file a claim for a lost or stolen package.

We also ran a test to determine if adding this extra step of self identification before seeing the lead form caused a reduction in Merchant leads.

In a user journey there are points of friction, some good, some bad. We learned that adding this self identification question was good friction. We saw a statistically significant reduction in Shopper lead form submissions and almost no reduction in Merchant leads, meaning this positive friction caused users to pause and then could find the resources they needed to solve their problems.

We decided to roll this change out to the entire experience and it worked great.

Evaluating Route’s Solutions

In the end we were able to mostly solve the problems Route was facing. We had some stakeholder push back on some of the solutions, but I think the ways we solved the problems despite those constraints was actually really clever.

Takeaways

Building a website product for two different audience segments is hard regardless of stakeholder support.

It took almost a year to research, strategize, design, test and launch all of these solutions. We did see great results, but it took a lot of time and expertise to reach solutions that worked. There were a few other attempts along the way that I didn’t describe here too.

If you decide to undertake a project like this, be prepared to allocate a significant amount of resources and energy to solving it.

I’ll add though, solving this problem, despite the cost, lead to a significant increase in user engagement, retention and reduction in churn. So these efforts were definitely tied to revenue and growth.

Test Everything You Can

We had several iterations and ran multiple tests during this experience. We got lucky on my side where most of the tests were designed with smart teammates and taught us a lot, I can’t speak for the web app team, but I know they beta tested frequently while developing the web app and it ended up taking like 8 months.

Our testing of the lead form led to some really interesting insights that informed changes we made during this entire project and resulted in a higher conversion rate and fewer manual customer support inquiries.

Studying Industry Leaders Helped Us Along The Path

Spending a significant amount of time studying industry leaders who had already confronted the problems we were having was a wise use of time. I was able to infer questions they had asked and solutions they had reached. Just because another company does it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it, but it taught me and my team a lot and helped us speed up our ideation.

Conclusion: You Can Develop A Website For Different Audience Segments

It just takes a lot of work to do it right. Even after launching all these changes, there are still many things that needed to be tested, optimized and refined.

At the end of the day we were able to make a significant impact to the user experience by optimizing the website and we have strong data to validate those claims.

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