Creating an Effortless Experience for Clients on your Website

There is an increasing acceptance that the key to business success in a digital world is to provide an outstanding customer experience. Customers, often unwilling to put up with painful interactions, can and will abandon a site if the user experience causes even the smallest complication. 

What could be the solution to a website providing a poor user experience? Spend some time on your website or application, and while doing so, ask yourself what could be done better to decrease the frustration experienced by a common user. Put yourself into the shoes of your customer, so that your own familiarity with the site doesn’t get in the way of identifying common issues.

Are you looking to create an effortless website experience? Here are a few tips to a seamless website creation process: 

  1. Don’t just solve the current issue, head off to the next issue.

Great user experience will always put you one step ahead. It is best to know and understand your website so you can predict the next issue that your users may experience and offer solutions to that issue. Does your website have a page that offers classes? After viewing that page, people will likely be interested in signing up. So, you need to give them that opportunity to ensure their user experience is positive. 

The smart washing machine is an example of this issue. Samsung was already aware of the problem with their smart washing machine, therefore, consumers likely expected to receive an email with more information about the process of connecting the washing machine to the corresponding phone application. For ease of use, this information could have been included in the specs of the washing machine, better-allowing consumers to evaluate the pros and cons of the smart washing machine and make an informed purchasing decision.

  1. Do the thinking for them. 

Designers need to spend time when creating the website to decide the target market, what they are looking for, and what they will gain from spending time on the website. When a website has too much information, it detracts from the interactions taking place on the site. The more choices displayed on a page, the easier it becomes for site visitors to refrain from choosing anything and ultimately leaving the page altogether. Make sure you give clear calls to actions so that customers know exactly what action they are supposed to perform and when. 

Providing prospects with great user experience is critical to the success of your business. The goal of each website is to provide a positive user experience. You don’t need a complete website redesign to improve the user experience of your website. All you need to do is make changes that will result in easy and pleasant user experience. You’ll be surprised just how much of a difference these little changes can have on customer satisfaction and revenue.

What is an Omnichannel 

Originating in retail, but applicable to any industry, the term “omnichannel” has been a buzzword for the last several years. Omnichannel is an approach to sales that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they’re shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar store.

With each part operating on its own, customers may not recognize disparate channels as part of the same marketing effort, and this can be either confusing or instill a lack of customer confidence in your company. That being said, it is hard to create a true omnichannel with so many complex tools and systems that are unable to talk to each other. 

The future of shopping 

Whether customers visit a brick-and-mortar store or a website, whether they connect through a mobile app, a printed catalog, social media, or a phone call, marketers have to provide a seamless experience, regardless of channel or device.

Omnichannel is consistent, yet unique. It provides consumers with a means of purchasing through numerous different platforms, while also communicating and showing awareness in a way that is consistent with the platform the consumers are utilizing during their stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Nearly 75% of shoppers say they use multiple channels to compare prices, hunt for discounts, or use in-store tablets to shop online. Linking your online and in-store business is essential to stay competitive. By creating a fully connected eCommerce platform, shoppers can buy whenever they want, through any channel, on any device, and expect a variety of delivery options. 

Room for Growth 

Consumer demand for flexibility and choice is driving the pace of technology innovation in commerce, both online and off. Omnichannel retailing is a fully-integrated approach to commerce, providing shoppers with a unified experience across all channels or touchpoints.

Part of an omnichannel strategy is flexibility. New channels emerge and steal attention from incumbent channels. Brands with robust omnichannel strategies often rely on a headless commerce architecture, which allows brands to flexibly offer commerce anywhere there are customers. 


The Why and How of Product Images

We live in a visual world where image matters. The virtual world is no different. Photos and videos are the first things consumers see on your website. The question is, are your images compelling enough to keep them browsing, and eventually, convert?

Customers come to your site with lots of questions about your products, product features, and overall brand. They’re also wildly impatient. They expect page loads under 3 seconds and effortless, intuitive UX. And once they find what they’re looking for, they’re making faster decisions than ever. Great product photography is critical in those key decision-making moments. It tells the customer who you are, what you have to offer, and more critically, if you can help them, and it all happens almost instantaneously. So, how do we create those high-quality, conversion-worthy product photos?

5 Steps to Your Best-Ever Product Photos


  • Simple Is Best: Let Your Product Shine.


Congratulations. A customer—Ella—has come to your site with questions about your product. Now, will she find the answers she’s looking for in your photography or will she bounce? Step one is basic: make sure Ella can see your product in detail by shooting it against a simple white backdrop. Showcase your products without distraction so that she can find the precise features she’s looking for. Remember, your job is to anticipate Ella’s needs before she’s even aware of them. This could mean shooting multiple angles to ensure every detail shines. Help Ella imagine what it would be like to have your product as her own and she might even convert.


  • Reinforce Your Brand with Lifestyle Photography.


Wonderful, your product photography is aces. But your customers also want to see your product in action. Use lifestyle shots to tell the story of your product, answer customer questions, and let them know what your brand is all about. Remember Ella? You’ve built some brand equity simply by answering all of her product questions—and quickly! Now’s your chance to cultivate brand loyalty by forging an emotional connection.

Are you casting your lifestyle shot? Consider your key customer personas as you select the people and places in your shot. Does your cast reflect the diversity and demography of your customers? And what does the location say about your brand?


  • Make Sure Your Lighting Is Just Right. 


When taking your product photos, don’t forget about lighting. If your product is the star, lighting is your best supporting actor. She sets up your star for success and definitely adds drama.

Natural light can be a terrific, easy, and affordable option. The sun can be a little overbearing when taking your photos outside, so it’s best to use the natural light coming through your windows to give you the perfect lighting. Your window will need to be large enough to fully light your product. If you don’t have access to a window that will provide enough light, you can shoot your product photos outside. If the light on your product is too bright or direct, try to distribute the light to better showcase your product. You may consider using a reflector. This will help you direct the light exactly where it needs to be to showcase your product for your best product photos.

Unfortunately, you can’t always depend on the sun for consistent product photography. If you’re shooting a volume of products, you’re going to need a basic studio setup. This includes a camera, white backdrop, different backgrounds, and a light box with two light bulbs. Pro Tip: If you can’t use natural light, use a fluorescent light bulb. These bulbs produce light that most closely resembles natural light. Fluorescent bulbs will give you that natural light look even when the sun is nowhere in sight.


  • Consistency Is Key.


The product images on your website should be similar in look and feel. For product detail images shot in studio, this means consistent backgrounds, lighting, and angles. You’ll also want to crop images so that the products are sized and scaled consistently across your site. Taken together, this consistency will help our friend Ella quickly sort through your many fantastic products, answer any lingering questions, and with any luck, finally convert.

Lifestyle shots don’t need to be quite so regimented. But remember, you worked hard to create lifestyle images that tell the story of your brand. And you want that story (and overall creative direction) to be clear and consistent as well. Consider creating a simple style guide that documents all of your image requirements for both product and lifestyle images so that you have a lodestar you can return to time and time again.

  1. Optimize Your Images for Quality and Site Speed.

You’ve taken some beautiful product photos. Now it’s time to optimize them so that they look their best without slowing down your site.

JPEGs are the best option for your typical product or lifestyle photos. Optimized properly, they’re the smallest and highest-quality files. Experiment with quality levels as you save your initial images, with the goal of setting a site-wide standard. You’re trying to strike a balance between quality (meaning no noticeable deterioration in the image or obvious pixelation) and file size.

PNGs are a good option for images that have text like a logo or banner. When graphics with text lose quality, they can appear pixelated. PNGs reduce that pixelation so that your text reads as clearly as possible.

The most common mistake when doing product photography is a lack of proper equipment. To make your product shine, you will need to use the right camera, lighting, angles, and composition. Change up your background, create different perspectives, and move things around until you have the right angles. Your photos are the first thing your consumers are going to see, so make them compelling enough to result in conversion.

Great product images tell a story. They tell your customers who you are, how you can help them, and can spark a long-term relationship between you and your customer. We hope our simple steps have given you the tools to produce effective product photography and will help you chart a path towards a faster, more relevant and compelling site.

Kubernetes as the future of infrastructure

Container organization allows developers to package applications to be deployed more easily and quickly. Containers are enveloping the world of software development for companies of all sizes, from small startups to Fortune 100 companies. The momentum behind Kubernetes, as the future of infrastructure, will not be slowing down any time soon.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a platform first developed by a team at Google. The goal of Kubernetes is to provide a container management system. Kubernetes has rapidly become the most popular among the engineers at Google, with many other companies actively contributing to the project. By leveraging Google’s extensive experience of running software on a large scale, Kubernetes can now help run software in a modern cloud environment.

How does Kubernetes work?

Let’s say an application environment is your lunchbox. The contents of the lunchbox are all made and assembled before you put them in, and changing one item in the lunchbox does not impact the other. Each piece is isolated in its own container. The Kubernetes system is like a lunchbox that allows for the expansion of certain contents (scaling), with the isolation of every unique item and the ability to remove any item without affecting any of the other contents (immutability).

Kubernetes eliminates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling applications in containers.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates container operations. With containerization as a trend that’s taking over the world, Kubernetes allows people to run all kinds of different applications in a variety of different environments. If you need to keep track of many different containers, schedule them, and orchestrate them, Kubernetes is your solution. 

Our Veterans – an Honor and Privilege to the PeakActivity family.

Our Veterans – an Honor and Privilege to the PeakActivity family.

Veterans Day, originating as Armistice Day on November 11, 1919, was celebrated for the first time on the first anniversary of the end of World War I. In 1926, Congress passed a resolution for an annual observance. However, Veterans Day was not officially recognized as a national holiday until the beginning of 1938. 

Veterans Day originated and is still observed today as a day to honor and respect the men and women who dedicated their lives and made unbelievable sacrifices to fight for the freedom of America, this beautiful country we call home. 

At PeakActivity, we are very proud of our veterans and the sacrifices they made for our country. We are honored that they chose to become part of the PeakActivity family after dedicating their time to the service of our country. Like all veterans, they have helped mold and shape America into its current glory, and we are privileged to have them as part of our team. 

This Veterans Day PeakActivity is honored to recognize our team members that served our country.

Kim Nalepka, our Social Commerce Specialist, dedicated 12 years of her life to service in the Marine Corps. During her time in the Marines, she was stationed in North Carolina and had 5 active tours to both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The military provided experiences that shaped Kim to be the strong, hard-working, and confident person she is today.

“My military experience instilled courage and self-confidence to overcome fear in the face of adversity and to accomplish goals in stressful environments. It gave me the opportunity to build strong leadership, critical thinking, and decision-making skills during combat situations. The way my military experience affects my life today is understanding the importance of teamwork and understanding people and their personalities, to be able to work through complex situations and resolve conflict. Solid leadership, good judgment, and integrity are necessary to build a strong foundation for any company or business.” 

– Kim Nalepka

Mathew Vermilyer, our A/B Testing and Optimization Lead, is originally from Chicago, Illinois, where he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at the age of 18. He served as an Ordnance Technician from 2009 to 2013, with one tour to Afghanistan in 2011.

“The military provided me with some of the most impactful years of my life. I was molded by my experiences, changing my outlook on hard work and dedication. The military taught me the true meaning of a team and inspired me to lead by taking ownership. I am grateful for my time spent in the military, and while challenging, I would not change a single moment”.

– Mathew Vermilyer

Joey Collins, a full stack engineer, devoted four years of his life to service in the army. During his time in the service, he was stationed in Fort Bragg, NC as a part of the 82nd Airborne division. 

“During my time in the Army, as part of the 82nd Airborne Division, I jumped out of more planes than I landed. My experiences we’re life-changing and I have been forever impacted by the time that I served our country. I went into the Army as an introvert, and during my time of service, quickly became an extrovert. With a job of interrogator, it is almost impossible to be shy. The time that I spent in the Army gave me the confidence to chase after everything I have ever wanted out of this life. I have been forever changed and I am very grateful.”

– Joey Collins 

We, at PeakActivity, are honored to have Kim, Joey, and Mathew on our team. We are very proud of the time they spent serving our country. As we continue to grow our team, we would be honored to add more veterans to the PeakActivity family.  

On this Veterans Day, we want to thank all of the veterans who served our country. We are truly grateful for the sacrifices you made during your time of service. 

Be That Voice in Your Customers’ Heads

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“The Kardashian Effect”

It’s easy to make fun of the often absurd world of social media influencers. While delivering 11 times higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional marketing, influencers have taken over the world, and the companies who are hesitant to jump on the influencer marketing bandwagon are missing out.

The concept of an “influencer” may seem abstract to some marketers, but influencer marketing has become increasingly complex over the last few years. Companies need to know how to simultaneously leverage the right levels of influencers to maximize their brand awareness and drive the greatest results. Here’s how it works.

It’s like getting a recommendation from a close friend who cares.

While some companies have dismissed influencers as superficial or not important, your potential customers have real and authentic relationships with them through social media. Product tutorials and endorsements from trusted sources are influencing people to buy things on social media and influencers carry more weight with customers than anyone could have previously imagined.

Influencers are EXPERTS. They offer deep expertise in a specific area. When a beauty influencer features a makeup brand that she uses every day, her followers are going to trust that she uses “the best products” because they trust her recommendations are authentic. Influencers gain the trust of their followers by bringing them into their inner circle and sharing their lives while using the products.

Influencers are CONNECTED. It’s not always about the number of followers on a platform. Social media influencers, including nano- and micro-influencers, have higher engagement rates of quality followers. This deep level of interactivity builds relationships and is critical to why social influencers are so valuable to any marketing strategy: it’s a platform of trusted fans that facilitates a receptiveness to a brand.

Influencers are AUTHENTIC. The best social influencers are authentic; they have a passion for a brand or product, which shows in what they endorse or recommend to their followers. To their target audience, they are the authority in whatever niche they’re occupying. They’ll tell it like it is with no filter.

Seeing is believing…

Ok, you believe you need influencers, but where do you start? It’s time to find fans of your product or brand. The biggest challenge for most marketers today is finding relevant influencers, people who believe in their brand.

To be successful in influencer marketing, you can’t work with just anyone on social media. You need to find the influencers who would actually believe in your product or service. If they love your product, they will talk about it to their audience in a way that is authentic. If you interact, engage, and help promote them, they will be brand promoters for life.

When looking for influencers, you also want to consider the following: 

  • How do they interact with their fans when not promoting content. What types of comments do they write back to their fans?
  • What is their content style? How do they create content and does it align with where your brand is going?
  • What have you done to engage with them? Influencer marketing is a two-way street, so you can’t expect to get what you aren’t willing to give.

PeakActivity has an incredible social media marketing team that can get in touch with the right influencers for your business. They’ve done it for a bunch of companies with a crazy amount of success. No, for real, they know what they’re doing. Visit our website to learn more.

Alexa, what do you see?

Computer Vision: The next step in artificial intelligence taking over your life

Computers have gotten a little more human-like than anyone is really comfortable with. Robots can open doors, perform surgery, and create literally invincible tic-tac-toe strategies. It’s a crazy world. But one thing computers can’t do? They can’t see you…yet. They actually can’t see anything or understand the context and content of visual things. Artificial intelligence is trying to change that, and it could help to bring in the future of eCommerce.

Turns out, seeing is actually really hard

Can computers see? Most have cameras, but it turns out the answer is a little more complicated than that. Computer vision is the process of giving computers AI algorithms to detect and classify objects more accurately and efficiently. One example of this already in practice is facial recognition. Don’t panic, but computers are probably already identifying your face all the time.

More practical applications of computer vision are the next step for artificial intelligence, and this will allow computers to see AND understand images and videos.  Computer vision has the potential to streamline processes within every department, from manually entering product codes or barcodes in a warehouse to reviewing eCommerce photos.

Computers with vision are probably smarter and faster than you

Computer vision is starting to play a big part in eCommerce. Think of a world where your customer could search for a product with an image of a similar product on your site. Your computer could scour the entire internet for your products and bring back pictures to use on your site.

Even better, computer vision has the potential to take over retail with facial recognition, cashierless stores, inventory visibility, and visual search. This tech has recently made a noticeable impact in these four vital areas. Walmart has already been using computer vision technology in more than 1,000 stores to monitor checkouts and deter potential theft. So maybe don’t steal from Walmart.

Basically, replace all your employees with computers

Computers with vision have the ability to solve tasks that can be time-consuming, from manually entering UPCs or barcodes in a warehouse to reviewing eCommerce environmental photos for specific products. Its expansive use of big data collection allows the software to grow smarter and faster in decision making.

Today, only 3% of retailers have computer vision technology in place, however, 40% plan to start or finish implementing the tech within the next two years. Computer vision is a possibility for any company looking to streamline processes that take a manual user time to visually review and conduct an outcome.

PeakActivity is a leader in creating future-proof eCommerce. If you think your computers need a little bit of vision to drive your company forward, we can help you out with that. Visit our website for more information.

Fire Your Models: Leverage the Average Human Faces Behind Your Products 

User-Generated Content: the marketing goldmine that’s going to make your job easier. 

User-generated content combines your eCommerce website with your customer’s social media pages. By integrating your site to pull images from social media, users can get featured on your website, getting their instafamous glory, while you get totally free authentic marketing content. It’s really a win-win.

Here are three ways that you can incorporate user-generated content into your eCommerce site


Homepage Interactions 

Adding your users to your homepage lets them tell their stories about how great your products are, putting their ratings and reviews right there for everyone to see. Customers get bragging rights about being featured on your website, and new customers are able to see how your products will interact with their day-to-day lives.

One great example is Because everyone is beautiful in their vacation photos, Airbnb actually takes their customers’ photos and testimonies and places them directly on their homepage for all to see. 

Shoppable Galleries 

Shoppable galleries embrace customers who are already tagging brands in their social media photos by making all of those photos feed into a gallery on your website. When potential customers go to the gallery, they can hover over the images to view and purchase the products.

Shoppable galleries will also allow potential customers to see how the product will act in their lives, and encourage brand recognition on social media.

Old Navy’s homepage invites customers to post about them on Instagram. The user-generated content gallery shows real people enjoying Old Navy clothing in their everyday lives, which can make a brand seem more relevant to shoppers.


Everyone loves a good competition, especially if it brings publicity to your brand. Invite your users to participate in your brand by offering prizes, discounts, or features if they post the best pictures of themselves with your product.

Starbucks did this in 2014 with their #whitecup campaign, calling for users to draw art on their white cups and post them on Instagram. The winner would get their art printed on actual cups in actual stores. The contest blew up and tons of artsy Starbucks cups showed up all over Instagram. Starbucks got awesome content to put on their website, and Starbucks customers bought extra coffee just to draw art on the cups.

Our thoughts…

User-generated content is the next big thing. Let your customers write your story for you. After all, they’re the ones out in the world using your products and are probably taking beautiful social media photos anyway. Embrace the world of social media and leverage it into awesome, totally free marketing content.

PeakActivity is a leading expert on eCommerce sites and social commerce, including user-generated content. Leveraging user-generated content to enhance your eCommerce site while connecting to your end user is easy if you have the right people to help you out. Visit our website to find out more and set up a 15-minute call to talk to our team.

Quality Assurance: How It Works and Why It’s Important



What Is Quality?


What Is the Role of the Quality Assurance Team?




Why Are There Bugs?



Our Thoughts…


