Less Can Be More In E-Commerce
- by Michael Hylton
Today’s
consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your
favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel
televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of
this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the
products and services that interest them.
In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much
of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants
actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections
and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been
limited.
The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able
to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is
what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each
individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher
conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but
predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult.
In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help
personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they
browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your
products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs.
The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push
visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting
point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address
their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters
and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the
retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search
behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile
have purchased.
Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the
primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on
your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is
clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer
falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions
completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring
rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective.
Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.
