Guided selling that takes online shoppers to the products they want
quickly and effectively is the key to e-tail success. Here I want to
talk about why online retailers need to look carefully at their data to
tackle this challenge.
When companies first started selling products over the internet, it
was a novelty. It was enough for people simply to be given the
opportunity to make purchases virtually. How things have changed.
E-commerce has exploded globally. Now, there’s very little you can’t buy
online and a huge choice of outlets for every product in every sector.
Growing competition and an increasingly discerning online shopper
have changed the game. Just like you’d avoid a messy, cluttered shop
providing poor service on the High Street, particularly if there was a
better version just round the corner, so ecommerce sites are being
increasingly judged by the experience they offer the online shopper.
No matter how niche an online retailer thinks its products are, it
can be sure there’s another outlet a click away that’s desperate to
steal its customers. Shoppers know this, so if they have to spend too
much time searching for the product they want and the information they
need, or the journey to the checkout is too slow or convoluted, they
won’t hang around. And knowing the power of social media, they’ll
probably tell their friends.
Furthermore, those who find faster, buy more. Studies show that
people place more orders on shopper-friendly ecommerce sites. Where a
shopper can quickly find the product they are looking for, they will
remember the experience and come back for more – and even be tempted to
buy more items per visit.
Refining this process is all down to having the right filters to
match your products to the search terms shoppers are most likely to use.
Until now this task has been one that has required considerable manual
effort, particularly for retailers selling a wide range of products. But
tools are now coming onto the market that allow online shops to
streamline this process, by automatically drawing suitable filter terms
from existing manufacturers’ descriptions and e-tailers’ own product
text, providing the attributes of each individual item in a range.
This has huge implications for etailers as it allows them to look
beyond “Standard-Categories or Filters” such as price, size, brand,
colour, and extract information that suits their products and optimally
describes their attributes as well as information which is really
relevant to the client. For example the washing instructions for clothes
in a fashion store or the information, the case width or the colour of a
clock face of a watch in a jewellery store, or even how far up the leg a
pair of boots comes for shoe stores.
And this ties into something that was highlighted in recent research
by Stibo Systems; that what people crave most of all from their online
shops is information. The survey found that a massive 56% of respondents
identified comprehensive product information as the most important
aspect of a retailer’s website, way ahead of images (13%), consumer
reviews (12%), links to similar products (9%) and rich content (8%).
However, one of the biggest challenges that many etailers face with
this content is that it comes from manufacturers in various formats and
structures, with the key attributes of each item concealed in long
descriptions and other bits and pieces of information. Manually this is
at very best heavily labour-intensive. So, by automating the process
they are not only saving themselves money but also increasing their
revenue opportunities by extracting the relevant details from multiple
sources. Not only does this give existing information a structure, but
it also optimises and standardises the data.
There has never been a more competitive environment in which to set
up and run an ecommerce site. This means that it’s no longer enough to
have a well-branded, clean, clear site that has been optimised for the
key search engines. Millions of people can visit, but if the experience
they have disappoints, fewer products will be sold and repeat visits
will be few and far between. Today, e-tailers need to get online
shoppers to the products they want as quickly and as easily as possible,
or pay the price. And managing data is fast become a crucial in the
battle to win customers.
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