The 2020 holiday season saw record breaking numbers for online shopping, which comes as no surprise to us amidst the pandemic that pushed many different aspects of life online. In a survey by Coveo Qubit of 1,500 participants from the US and the UK, 54.5% said they will shop online just as much this holiday season, and 28% said they will shop online more.
What does this mean for ecommerce businesses? Well, for one thing, it certainly means the influx of online shopping sparked by the pandemic isn’t going anywhere. In fact, over 85% of surveyed consumers plan to continue shopping online despite physical stores reopening.
This increase in online shopping provides a great opportunity for ecommerce businesses, especially around the holidays, but it also poses a unique problem: competition. With access to infinite brands and unending price options, businesses are faced with the daunting task of trying to stand out in the chaos. In order to do this, they need to understand what consumers in the online realm really want.
What Consumers Are Really Looking For
The Coveo Qubit survey found that 87.6% of shoppers say they are faced with an overwhelming amount of product choices to some degree. Additionally, participants indicated that the number one reason they leave an ecommerce site without purchasing is because they are unable to find the products they are interested in.
The point is: the main factor in getting visitors to make a purchase on your site is how easily shoppers can find products that are relevant to them once they’ve landed there.
In other words, what they really want is easy product discovery.
How To Make Products More Discoverable
To help you win this holiday season, here are a few key ways you can optimize your product discoverability:
Personalized Recommendations
Shoppers now expect product recommendations to be tailored to them, yet one in three shoppers in our survey indicated that they don’t find this to be true. The key to making product recommendations that get shoppers attention is customer data. The more you know, the more relevant you can make the recommendations.
When you track customer data, you can offer personalized recommendations for each shopper. Product-to-product recommendations are pretty baseline (i.e., recommending socks when someone adds shoes to their cart). Product-to-customer recommendations, however, are what really move the needle. They result in up to 5% more revenue over standard recommendations, +100% CTR, and in shoppers finding products 300x faster. Instead of simply recommending socks with shoes, you can recommend a clothing option the customer would be most interested in based on their data. This kind of recommendation is much more likely to result in a click through AND in a purchase.
There are times when retailers may lack the customer or product data they think they need to create a personalized experience. They may have a cold start product that’s a new item they carry or new customers that are signing out as a guest. With AI technology, personalization and recommendations can still be achieved even with minimal traditional data sources.
Optimized Mobile Search
It’s no surprise that shoppers’ top way of finding a product is through the search bar, and that many of them use the search function on mobile (according to our research, one in three to be exact). Since so many people shop on a device in the palm of their hand, the mobile search function of your ecommerce site needs to be easy to use, yield relevant results, and must include personalized recommendations.
Your customer’s mobile experience may just be the only one they ever have on your site, so optimizing it can result in less search abandonments, easier product discovery, and ultimately more purchases. Try making easy-to-use filters a part of mobile search, utilize predictive autofill, and regularly test the relevance of search results.
Product Badging & Social Proof
In today’s online world, a whopping 54.9% of customers need more convincing to make a purchase online. So, how do we instill more confidence around our products and help visitors trust enough to buy? Product badging and social proof can go hand in hand to increase consumer confidence and can even act as that final push to get them to say “yes.”
Using badges like “best seller,” “just in,” or “running low” can communicate that a product is a hot commodity, exciting and new, or scarce. All of these tactics work well in boosting conversions. Badging can also work as a form of social proof. While reviews and “as seen in” sections are typical tactics when it comes to social proof, using it with badges can go a long way. A “trending” badge or “most highly rated” can show that other customers are saying “yes” to a certain product and loving it.
