E-commerce: Must-have Web Personalization Features

As online shoppers become increasingly savvy, catalogers must meet rapidly changing customer needs and expectations. The must-haves for accomplishing this are advanced e-commerce features that support personalization of online merchandising and enhance the brand experience. These features will allow catalogers to quickly respond to trends, assist in buying decisions, build customer loyalty, target marketing initiatives and enable product comparisons.

Until recently, personalization features have been more reactive than proactive and have been delivered using approaches that leave much to be desired. Available e-commerce solutions that are fully featured have tended to be inflexible and expensive. In-house e-commerce development has left many catalogers with a confusing maze of quick-fix applications. Hosted ASP platforms offer little control, flexibility or scalability and can have restrictive pricing models. Catalogers who use them can end up adding new technologies they may outgrow, or implementing costly functionality they do not need. Unfortunately, reactive features and inflexible approaches simply won’t cut it in today’s e-commerce market.

To succeed in proactively responding to constantly shifting customer demands, catalogers will have to effectively implement -- and deliver on the benefits of -- the new and advanced personalization features available today. That will require e-commerce approaches that provide catalogers with greater control, flexibility and scalability, as well as pricing aligned with results.

Today’s must-have personalization features include the following:

Dynamic Merchandising and Collaborative Filtering: Driven by the broad deployment and usage of site analytics, this long-awaited functionality has become a reality and emerged as a best practice. By taking actual user activity and combining it in an automated fashion with merchandising activity, catalogers will be able to quickly, accurately and proactively respond to trends in the marketplace, rather than waiting for them to materialize in weekly reports.

Social Commerce: Also known as community-based selling, this functionality will bring some of the social elements of shopping to online retail. It will allow customers to compare and rate products, write reviews, create”best of” lists and search for recommendations by other customers. It will also provide “forward-to-a friend” capabilities, and enable search-centric shopping that allows buyers to mine meaningful data from feedback, reviews, and other online content for use in making buying decisions.

Customizable Promotions: This functionality will enable catalogers to tailor promotions to specific customer profiles. Such customization will be instrumental in building brand loyalty and repeat visits.

Robust Content Management: This functionality will enable merchants to quickly deploy specialty shops and gift finders for specific market segments and then revise marketing initiatives to drive traffic to these entry pages. Segmented offers will help convert site traffic into sales.

Product Comparison: This functionality will enable side-by-side product comparisons, thus assisting customers in making the best selections. Customers who can compare products on a site are less likely to feel the need to visit competitors’ sites.

In addition to these must haves, another set of even more advanced features is also available -- although the need for them is less immediate. But with consumers becoming more and more sophisticated every day, these features are fast becoming must haves as well. They are:

Guided Search and Navigation functionality, which will help shoppers quickly locate the products they seek (as well as related products), and allow catalogers to manage merchandise and quickly change product relationships. Cross-sell/up-sell functionality will help catalogers increase basket size by enabling them to update their sites with low-priced impulse items. A/B testing capabilities will enable two or more versions of a product offering, ad, design or promotion to be randomly presented and measured for response. A/B Testing can be tied into site analytics to determine the pricing thresholds that drive the best conversion and site profitability.

Voice (or “Click-to-Talk”) features also are likely to become a part of the online shopping experience. By enabling customers to get live answers to simple questions, click-to-talk will help prevent shoppers from becoming frustrated and abandoning shopping carts.

With the ever increasing use of -- and comfort with -- ecommerce, one thing is certain. Customers are becoming more discerning, and their online shopping expectations are rapidly evolving. To succeed, catalogers will have to stay ahead of the curve by having flexible systems in place to enable the cutting edge, must-have applications that can quickly and proactively provide the most advanced shopping experience possible.

Stephan Schambach is the founder, president/CEO of Demandware, a Woburn, Mass.-based provider of highly flexible e-commerce solutions that provide complete merchandising control. He can be reached via e-mail at sschamback@demandware.com.