Showing visitors what is relevant, as soon as they land on your website is a challenge faced by many websites today. Not only are attention spans shrinking, but competition among websites is very high. Capturing your customers’ interest should be of paramount importance to any website business owner. EPiServer Commerce is a solution built exactly for this purpose. It’s based on behavioral analytics – which impacts merchandising activities online. The customer thus sees on the home page what he/she likes. This is termed as behavioral merchandising. Let’s explore it with EPiServer Commerce.
What is Behavioral Merchandising?
EPiServer Commerce is a platform to develop digital commerce solutions. One important feature of this platform is Behavioral Merchandising – which is a technique to increase sales by analyzing customer behavior and understanding what the customer likes. These learnings are then used to distinguish what each customer is likely to buy, and shows them the relevant products on the home page. Hence, your average order value or AOV increases. Three key factors which make Behavioral Merchandising by EPiServer Commerce beneficial are:
- This solution powers your search capability with adaptive search. This means that customers visiting your website are going to see products that they like at a fast speed. This attracts a potential customer and gets him/her to linger longer on your website.
- Auto-suggestions – This is a very powerful feature as this combines three features, namely the customer’s history (behavior, searches etc.), related queries which foster an environment for more accurate searches and finally, behavioral boosts, which highlight the most popular products – driving continuous business by tackling the challenge of customer conversions, not just retentions.
- Advanced self-learning techniques make EPiServer Commerce truly a great solution – meaning that it gives the customer personalized recommendations based on the customer’s history. This in turn eliminates the need to follow other rules and programs to ensure that your customer gets the correct recommendations when required.
How can EPiServer Commerce benefit your website?
All business owners are well aware that they need to not only attract the customer to their website, but also ensure that the conversion rates from simply visiting a website to buying a product should be kept high. EPiServer Commerce breaks this process down into a few steps. Here, the business owner can ensure that the product which is likely to be picked up by the customer is displayed to him/her. This solution drives sales and gives your website a great boost. Following are the various ways in which EPiServer Commerce boosts your websites sales:
- This solution helps you save time by making the entire merchandising process more efficient. You can now use a single catalogue to sell across all kinds of markets and brands, which not only maximizes your earnings but also saves time by not having to make different catalogues for different geographies.
- EPiServer Commerce enables you to create a new product range by just typing in a few key words. You also have the flexibility to choose how these products should appear to the customer.
- The information provided for each product is extremely critical. In a sense, it is the description that a sales person will give you, which can either close the transaction or have you walk away to another shop. Using a single data warehouse, you can give accurate descriptions and pricing information against each product, which will automatically update the product information on the website. In fact, this single repository of product data can be used across different segments and channels. This ensures that your website maintains the consistency required across all geographies.
- Another important feature which aids the website in boosting sales is ‘Guided Search’. Observing and understanding what a customer needs is perhaps the first and foremost step in serving your customers well. The best way to get this data is to begin with what customers ask and search for. EPiServer Commerce uses the past data of customers, and guides your customers to their destination much faster than ever before. Using advanced ranking methods and auto – complete features, you can ensure that your website gets higher conversion rates.
- Upon understanding what your customer is looking out for, ensure that those pages and links that have a higher click through rate – CTR are displayed to them frequently.
- As EPiServer Commerce analyzes the increasing number of customers each day, the search box continually evolves, to the point that the auto complete feature lets the customer see search results much faster and more accurately.
- Content creators have a lot of opportunity here as they have the ability to improve the customer experience by simply adding similar words and synonyms for what is being searched for. You can read more here.
By cutting down on a lot of effort put into merchandising activities and by providing faster and more accurate products displayed to your customers, EPiServer Commerce is sure to refine and enhance the website experience for your customer, based on his/her behavior. Does your website use EPiServer Commerce Solutions? Leave a comment below.
To know more about Suyati’s EPiServer expertise, write to us at services@suyati.com.
PS: On second thoughts… if you are attending Ascend, let’s meet up.