🖼️ Guided selling: just as standard as a checkout

When I worked at an internet agency fifteen years ago, we sat down with every webshop to design their check-out: functional design, graphic design and then building.

Fast forward to now.

Check-outs are coming out of the box as part of e-commerce platforms or payment providers. They, as experts, are investing heavily to make this experience as smooth as possible. In doing so, they optimize the payment process and standardize user expectations.

A decision aid is just as essential for a webshop as a check-out. After all: with a good decision aid, you ensure that a customer ends up at the check-out at all. And just like the check-out, a decision aid must meet a certain standard.

At Aiden, right from the start, our starting point was to create accessible software that sets the gold standard for guided selling. This was also the input for our most drastic, and contradictory, decision when developing our software: we only offer standard frontends.

The standard for the webshop

What makes software users happy? If 'it' works, it will continue to work and, ideally, get even better in the long run (based on the feedback and wishes of the users). In other words, a high speed of development. And - last but not least - that also makes developers happy.

One for every customer custom frontend building (or supporting) is disastrous for these needs. Indeed, something that differs from the standard has a tendency to break for (un) explained reasons when the 'backside' changes. This means that you have to check all custom applications with each release to make sure everything is still working properly. This is undesirable, old-school and inefficient (yes, with an 'o').

For reference: about three times a week, Aiden releases a product with improvements and new features. And we now support more than 1000 decision aids.

If we are going to support custom interfaces, that means less often release (so less likely to add cool features), accept that things break, or hire a battery of testers (who also have to be paid, so: a much higher license price). And of course, we don't want that.

But there's an even more important reason that Aiden doesn't support custom frontends.

The standard for the end customer

Decision aids are a functional tool that should focus on helping customers as easily and painlessly as possible. It is not marketing gimmick. Very cool as the loader one of your plant selection aids is a watering can, but it is probably better to make sure you do not need a loader for your selection aid.

In recent years, we have gained a lot of experience and collected a lot of data and feedback. We have conducted numerous A/B tests to improve the interaction of our decision aids. We know what works and what doesn't.

It is a huge destruction of value if we do this, isn't it? not would work to increase the impact of the decision aids for our customers? This is, isn't it? proper why you want to work with experts as a webshop? Developing custom front ends costs a lot of extra time and money. And when the application finally goes live, the impact is a shadow of its potential because the learning process has yet to begin. What every customer should invest in.

In other words: Why should we let our customers reinvent the (same) wheel over and over again?

The gold standard for your decision aid

Web shops choose to work with Aiden because we know more about decision aids than they do. And that makes sense, because decision aids have our full focus. This is carried by:

• Our vision → E-commerce is broken. Successful sales start with the customer, not with your products.
• Our software → The #1 solution to help customers better online.
• Our expertise → You know your business like no one else. We know decision aids like no one else.

We also go for impact. We think the current approach to e-commerce is fundamentally wrong and want to make it a lot better. This is only possible if you serve many web shops and thus help many customers. And that requires a standard approach.

But a gold standard.