E-commerce space is brimming with companies, but most of them fail to stay ahead of the curve in terms of conversions and driving sales. If 76 out of every 100 visitors end up abandoning their cart, there is something that’s not adding up. Having the basics down might attract shoppers on your e-store but they convert, repeat shop, and become advocates of your brand only when they have an unforgettable shopping experience.
The good news is you can build it with your merchandising strategy.
A good merchandising strategy goes a long way in making your site visitors keep coming back for more. It forms an ecosystem towards which visitors gravitate. This blog post covers 6 practical ways to form a robust strategy via cognitive search.
1. Devise Your Merchandising Strategy with AI-Fueled Insights
Understanding your customers is the first step to craft an effective merchandising plan. To do so, you need to ‘measure-and-interpret’ visitor behavior on your site regularly.
A cognitive engine unearths rich insights such as top searches, popular keywords, filters selected, exit rates, and conversion rates on product pages. These reports provide valuable information about items that spark shoppers’ interests. Based on that, you can experiment with the placement of different products on your website accordingly.
2. Understand the Shopper’s Intent
Hasty shoppers don’t always come up with the perfect keywords to search for what’s in their heads. They have been spoilt by web search and expect to be matched with relevant products even in the absence of exact expressions.
Thanks to advanced NLP-based algorithms, a cognitive search engine acts like a wizard and understands the intent of the searched query. It then indexes hundreds of product descriptions to match users with the right product. For instance, it understands when a visitor types ‘dry skin’ and presents relevant suggestions.
3. Recommend, Personalize, and Repeat
Who doesn’t like attention? Your customers feel special when presented with personalized recommendations. I am not talking about suggesting things simply based on their gender or geography. That’s categorization, not personalization.
Cognitive search enables you to not only hyper-personalize your site but also do it on scale, which means every interaction is unique. How? It analyzes the customer journey and behavior—all viewed, clicked, added-to-the-cart, and purchased products to automatically recommend items to a shopper that build interest. This heightens the chance of connecting customers with the product that’s in their mind and driving sales.
4. Bundle and Re-bundle Complimentary Products
A powerful cognitive engine can connect the dots and enable you to merchandize the same products in different ways. For instance, if a customer searches for a ‘Pleated skirt’ it can present different ‘looks’ by clubbing products that will go with the skirt.
Deep analytics embedded in a cognitive search engine makes constructing these looks a breeze. And with the reports that detail all the metrics, you can easily optimize and make these clubbings better.
5. Provide Filters for Category-Based Merchandising
A staggering 84% of the major e-commerce sites were found to have a mediocre or poor product filtering experience. There goes your chance to convert picky shoppers.
A smart engine not only provides facets but also divides existing facets into relevant sub-categories to help users filter down to the relevant result. Also, if the admin missed out on a particular classification, the search solution is smart enough to add the nested category when results are derived from it.
6. Target Product Promotions
As an e-store owner, you would like to promote specific products. Maybe, you want to promote items of a particular/in-house brand, or you have launched new product lines and want shoppers to notice that, or maybe, you simply want to clear your store of seasonal products.
Cognitive search lets you do that in a seamless manner. You can promote items by routing shoppers towards product landing pages for defined search queries. Manual tuning of search results and query mapping ensure that your marketing strategy is right on track.
Want to master the art of delivering a stellar e‑commerce user experience?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to dive deeper, here’s a comprehensive ebook for you. It’s curated keeping in mind modern customer expectations so that you can provide state-of-the-art experiences. Or you can request a demo to see how we can help transform your e-store.