Online Merchandising - Where "User Attention is taking over "Shelf Space"
With the advent of e-commerce all the benefits of a store needed to be replicated in the online world. This included the experience of having the sales representatives helping each customer, the experience of having the in store displays and the other promotions of products.
Search technologies have played a key role towards this by providing a superior user experience thereby increasing the “stickiness” and traffic to the sites. The primary aim of the e-commerce sites has been to convert these Browsers into Buyers and subsequently to increase the order size of the buyers. Order Size of the buyers can be increased by effective promotions and item associations that would result in additional items getting added into the shopping basket of the user. A few ways through which this superior user experience can be met are -
Guided Access
This would enable the improvement in the visibility or presence of an item by guiding the user towards the same. This is extremely essential, as in the online world every space on the web page is a premium shelf space and the grabbing of the user’s attention holds the key. This would also help in guiding the user through his “attributes of concern” meaning a price conscious user could be guided through a set of price ranges, a brand conscious user can be guided via a set of navigators of different brands. Guided Access can also be achieved in different other ways such as mediated access where the user can define what exactly he wants by answering a set of questions and get only those results which would be most relevant to him/her.
Dynamic Content Association
Search technologies today is being looked at as more of a “Contextual Information Integrator” and this enables the contextual and dynamic content associations. It can be leveraged to build the item associations dynamically that are relevant to the Product life cycle and merchandising strategy
Promotions
The power of “relevancy analysis” can be leveraged to identify the best cross sell and up sell opportunities. The promotions can also be carried out aiming at pushing out the excess inventory.
Seamless User Experience across channels
Search could be leveraged to enable virtual content consolidation of content residing in multiple systems (integrating this information contextually) and empowering the user to access the information in a unified manner thereby providing a seamless user experience across channels.
User experience plays a huge role in ecommerce world and we see that search technology in its new avatar can make the difference between a good user experience to one that is great.
Guided Access
This would enable the improvement in the visibility or presence of an item by guiding the user towards the same. This is extremely essential, as in the online world every space on the web page is a premium shelf space and the grabbing of the user’s attention holds the key. This would also help in guiding the user through his “attributes of concern” meaning a price conscious user could be guided through a set of price ranges, a brand conscious user can be guided via a set of navigators of different brands. Guided Access can also be achieved in different other ways such as mediated access where the user can define what exactly he wants by answering a set of questions and get only those results which would be most relevant to him/her.
Dynamic Content Association
Search technologies today is being looked at as more of a “Contextual Information Integrator” and this enables the contextual and dynamic content associations. It can be leveraged to build the item associations dynamically that are relevant to the Product life cycle and merchandising strategy
Promotions
The power of “relevancy analysis” can be leveraged to identify the best cross sell and up sell opportunities. The promotions can also be carried out aiming at pushing out the excess inventory.
Seamless User Experience across channels
Search could be leveraged to enable virtual content consolidation of content residing in multiple systems (integrating this information contextually) and empowering the user to access the information in a unified manner thereby providing a seamless user experience across channels.
User experience plays a huge role in ecommerce world and we see that search technology in its new avatar can make the difference between a good user experience to one that is great.
