The holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching. This year, ongoing supply chain issues, rising inflation, and the lingering pandemic are likely to continue to influence consumer shopping behavior in ways that can make predicting holiday sales feel a bit like a game of chance.
With an estimated $235.86 billion in online sales at stake this holiday season, relying on legacy technology that is not adapted to the demands of the modern buyer can leave potential revenue on the table.
What should your next-generation eCommerce product discovery tech look like heading into the year’s second half? With more consumers shopping online and on mobile devices, meeting them where and how they want to shop is critical. From there, product discovery needs to be intuitive, reliable, and personalized, making the overall shopping journey frictionless.
Meet Shoppers at every touchpoint and provide a consistent shopping experience
The pandemic significantly sped up eCommerce adoption. The industry saw five years of innovation in about three months and forced brands to embrace omnichannel. As a result, consumer shopping expectations permanently shifted.
During the pandemic, consumers relied heavily on an omnichannel shopping approach, which focused on purchasing via websites, mobile, or even social channels. To further enhance the customer experience retailers implemented flexible choices such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), and curbside pick-up.
As the new shopping choices become table stakes, product discovery technology needs to embrace omnichannel and be able to scale with new business strategies and growth to create a frictionless, relevant, and consistent experience – no matter the channel.
Reliable Product Discovery & Search Recommendations
In the eCommerce world, product discovery solutions, such as search and recommendations, are almost always the first line of defense. In fact, 9 in 10 consumers say that a good search function is essential for a retail site.
Unfortunately, U.S. retailers lose $300 billion each year due to bad online search experiences. The right search and recommendation technology can help retailers change that. Implementing headless product discovery technology that incorporates true AI enables brands to offer personalized search and product recommendations unique to an individual customer’s preferences and behavior. This technology can analyze and compare data at a rapid speed to help brands understand customer intent and adequately predict what a customer wants to see – providing options based on both the data as well as product availability and priority.
Retailers who want to be ready for early holiday shoppers have no time to waste. Upgrading to a next-gen product discovery platform that Google-trained AI models power will significantly boost the relevance of results and can increase revenue by more than 10%, on average.
Frictionless is the Word
In a day and age of instant gratification, losing a customer at any phase of the shopping journey is possible. Friction is not limited to a poor product and search experience. If a site takes too long to load, is hard to navigate, or has too many pop-up notifications, consumers will lose patience and move on to other options. According to Google, it only takes three seconds to lose a web user on a mobile device.
From start to finish, brands need to have competitive and modern SEO and content marketing strategies, interactive and engaging content, personalized search and recommendations experiences, and an intuitive and user-friendly checkout interface to convert on every channel of the eCommerce journey. If the process is counter-intuitive or feels restrictive, a customer is likely to abandon their cart, even if they almost made it to the finish line.
The holiday shopping season is approaching quickly, and now is the time to evaluate your strategy and analyze your eCommerce search technology which can be the deciding factor in bringing in much-needed revenue growth. From acquisition to purchase confirmation, every step of the consumer experience should be analyzed for ease of use, functionality, and personalization across every digital touchpoint.
The author, Roland Gossage, is the CEO of GroupBy.
