What are your e-merchandising tools and their purpose?
Hello,
What are the e-merchandising tools that support your commercial performances?
Here are 3 main clusters of tools that any e-merchant should be aware of to boost sales:
- Design & Ergonomics
- Interactions customer – product
- Pricing & Promotions
Design & Ergonomics
The « Design & Ergonomics » cluster gathers all the basics to create the website atmosphere: logo, colours code, speech, images, information and content, animations… and of course the speed of the website!
It is the first step when creating a website or revising it. These tasks are often internalized as they define the merchant and its identity, although many start-ups are now creating innovating tools to enhance ergonomics.
Pricing & Promotions
At the center of most e-merchants strategy, Pricing and Promotions guidelines can be quite complicated to set: should you follow a penetration or a high margins strategy ? How can you convert the visitor while maintaining a good level of margins?
Competition is only one click one click away from your platform and your catalogue can be rather large. Therefore, pricing strategy is fundamental for your success.
It starts by choosing the assortment depth: what entry prices for each category? Which price tiers to invest in? Which brands?
Some products or brands can be found on many websites, therefore putting a lot of pressure on margins. Others will allow you to differentiate your website and avoid a strong pressure on margins.
Whatever your strategy, customer loyalty, through the right speech, an optimized ergonomics and your price image, will support your margins by avoiding a direct competition on your regular customers.
What to think of:
-Price image
-Competition on brands and products
-Customer expectations in terms of promotion
Your tools:
-Assortment depth: entry price, assortment ranges, price tiers by category, brands choice
-Margins set-up by brand and product
-Promotions
-Products and price display on all pages of the website
This last tools introduces the core of the visual merchandising: the customer – product interaction.
Customer – Product Interactions
Once your pricing is set, it is mandatory to show the right product, to the right customer, at the right time and price. Aim: minimize bounce rate, increase conversion rate and average basket size.
Each visitor will follow its own path on your website, depending on his (her) purchasing behavior. Merchants should focus on building a path that will retain the visitor and, ultimately, end in conversion. 2 solutions:
1) One-to-all or One-to-Few: Build basic paths that will answer your main customer segments needs, on store-based merchandising model
2) One-to-one: Build a personalized path scheme, based on intelligent and real-time technologies that will enable you to use the e-commerce specificities
In the first model, e-merchants suggest a fixed set of products to the visitor, usually: best-sellers, new products, promotions. It is also possible to align the choices of products and the editorial speech.
In the second model, merchants define the catalogues display « recommenders » (rules to prioritize products) depending on each visitor specific path, in real-time for the best solutions (click after click). The visitor path is compared to the whole website traffic path and will figure out which product the current visitor is looking for!
We’ll be back next week with a focus on: Design & Ergonomics!
Ezako team