By Andrew Scarbrough, PriceWaiter
In an earlier Executive Viewpoints column, I talked about how virtual showrooming is becoming a standard practice when shopping for products online. Comparison shoppers who engage in virtual showrooming represent one of the most lucrative and simultaneously frustrating customer segments for online retailers.
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Tough Traffic
According to Statista, 36% of consumers spend more than 30 minutes comparison shopping before making a decision on purchasing a commodity product. The majority of shoppers — more than 65% — spend more than 16 minutes surfing different sites before making a purchase.
Most of this time is spent checking reviews, looking for coupon codes, using comparison shopping engines, and even using browser extensions such as PriceBlink or Buy Happy to compare prices in real time. You can pretty much bank on the fact that your hard earned (or paid) traffic will spend some amount of time looking elsewhere.
Frustratingly, even after spending significant time reading reviews, honing in on the best price and finally adding a product to the shopping cart, purchases are abandoned 88% of the time.
Though retailers accept that online commerce is an ever-more-difficult arena in which to compete, there are new ways that you can make improvements to your all-important conversion rate.
It’s Now Personal
In a landscape filled with thousands of small to mid-sized retailers and a handful of e-Commerce titans, an effective way to both improve your conversion rate and provide a world-class experience to your customers is to make it personal.
Personalizing a shopping experience is quickly becoming one of the only ways to separate yourself from the crowded field. Here are three areas of the e-Commerce experience that are ripe for personalization.
Product
Many stores’ primary focus is their product. In looking for conversion boosting opportunities, retailers will frequently look at their own pricing and design first. Though this is standard practice, your primary focus should be on giving a shopper the most unique and personalized shopping experience possible.
New data technologies, some affordable for even small retailers, allow you to provide a curated product set that the shopper wants to see and therefore is more likely to purchase. Many stores, like Smart Furniture, have built systems that take user input to help curate product offerings as that user navigates the site. These wizard-type experiences make the customer feel special by delivering relevant products at prices they are comfortable with while also improving checkout rates.
Smaller retailers can take advantage of an increasing roster of third party technologies such as Sailthru and Reflektion to outsource product personalization.
Whether you build a solution in-house or use a third-party technology, product personalization is a powerful tool that is becoming a must-have for product catalogs that offer a wide range of products that are often overwhelming to the average virtual showroomer.
Pricing
In my previous post, I highlighted several technologies that provide personalized pricing for your e-commerce product pages. Personalized pricing is a new trend that is taking e-commerce by storm, but remember, there is a not a one-size-fits-all solution. Two of the most effective types of pricing platforms are price negotiation and dynamic pricing.
Price negotiation widgets like PriceWaiter are bringing the functionality made famous by sites like Priceline and eBay to retailers across the web. By allowing shoppers to have a say in the pricing that they are receiving, retailers can play into shopper psychology and make them feel like they are “winning”. In the end, retailers retain a final measure of control, but the psychological play is powerful.
Dynamic pricing platforms such as 360pi use data to help deliver a price unique to different shoppers. Variables such as geography, demographics, computer type, browser type, time of day, weather, and seasonality all play into the final price that is delivered on the product page.
Both systems are powerful and should be considered by retailers looking for new ways to provide a personalized experience on their e-Commerce product pages.
Marketing
Personalization shouldn’t be isolated to just the onsite browsing experience. A truly effective approach will include off-site touch points such as email and banner remarketing. The days of sending a singular blast to massive email lists are over. One banner ad set is also becoming a thing of the past for good reason. Dynamically personalized email follow-ups and dynamic banner ads offering personalized deals for products relevant to the specific shopper are rapidly growing. Thorough segmentation is now a must.
The key is to use off-site touch points to minimize the time a shopper has to spend looking for the product they want. Effort on the front end to build thorough and segmented email and re-marketing lists will be more efficient in the long run when shoppers see the exact products that interest them the most.
A general rule is that you should apply the same principles that you do for remarketing lists to your email lists. Often the smaller and more segmented, the better.
All too often, retailers’ primary focus is their store, product lines, and sales promotions. Consider focusing on the customer first and providing them the most unique and personalized shopping experience possible. Once e-Commerce managers have the personalized experience a-ha moment, it is amazing to see them think creatively on how to provide it. The conversion rate boosts that follow make all the effort worthwhile.
As the Co-Founder and COO at PriceWaiter, Andrew Scarbrough has introduced the “Name Your Price” platform that engages more customers, converts more sales and makes MAP moot. In addition to founding PriceWaiter, Scarbrough is the Co-Founder and COO at Delegator.com. With a background in web analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and cloud computing, he has played a significant role in the development and execution of successful SEO, e-Commerce and web marketing strategies for companies both large and small.
