How Ecommerce Can Take Buyers' Experience Further This Holiday Season

With the ever-changing economy and the advent of digital transformation, ecommerce has been witnessing a fundamental shift and cutthroat competition. In fact, ecommerce is expected to grow by 1,200% to $200 billion USD by 2026. Heading into the holiday season in India and all over the world, retailers are constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition — including a larger focus on improving the buyers' experience along with multi-channel promotions.

While buyers are using multiple devices, brands, or merchandise, organizations always like to stay connected to their buyers in order to deliver products at their own convenience. By improving buyers' search experience and recommending personalized products, a retailer stays relevant in the market. 

During the holiday season, visitors will create information in every site visit that can be used to drive personalized recommendations, helping a shopper to make an effective and realtime decision. We also recommend that you review your organization's previous year's data of the same month to optimize your ecommerce site and empower your buyers with a hyper-personalized, meaningful, and data-driven experience.

Here are three tips of how ecommerce can take the buyers' experience one step further this holiday season:

Personalized Search Results. With the use of data from past behavior and real-time intent, retailers can make the search results unique for every customer in every visit. You need to create a custom search result page based on relevancy, not popularity. However, the user should get the flexibility to navigate different filter options. The true intent of a visitor can be discovered by:

• browsing behavior 
• past purchases
• location
• attribute and preferences of a similar visitor 

A.I.-based Autosuggestions on Complementary Items. With a visitor who is about to add a product to the cart, or click on the "buy" option, showing related products is a huge conversion booster. You can also provide the recommendations once the purchase is complete. Upsell and cross-sell become easier for retailers for the first time visitors. Of course, you can't include personalization for a first-time visitor if the buyer doesn't leave enough behavioral data during the visit. For example, you can create a landing page with a heading "other customers also considered", "you may also like to buy", "frequently bought together with a smartphone" etc. 

Optimize the Site Search. Improving site search can lead to better buyer experience and higher conversion rate. To stay connected and understand the mind of your online buyers, you need to think beyond conventional search. Semantic search can generate a more relevant and accurate result than a lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches. For example, someone searching for “GYM T-Shirt for Men with Size M” is much more likely to convert than someone just browsing “Gym T-shirt”. Also, when a user starts typing in the search box, autocomplete adjusts for relevant keywords which can lead to more personalized results. This ecommerce search suggestion solution (Autocomplete) should recommend both keywords and products.

For online retailers, it is imperative to leverage A.I.-based technologies to take a more predictive, intelligent, focused action. You can make use of abundant data and give your customer the best retail experience in this holiday season which was unfathomable even five years ago. Try to engage your customers with periodic nuggets and convert customers into loyal, long-term shoppers.

Biplab Dikshit is a digital marketer, strategic business developer, creative content maker and marketing technologist at CRMIT Solutions with in-depth knowledge and experience in strategic marketing and demand generation. Check out CRMIT Solutions on AppExchange today.