Barilliance eCommerce Personalization Blog » personalization

Personalized store locator

Ido Ariel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:18:23 +0000

There are so many opportunities to enhance the shopping experience by personalizing it. A few days ago I came across rockport.com and found their use of my Geolocation information to be very compelling.

Rockport shows you the nearest stores to you at the bottom of the page

This experience is much better than the standard one and definitely sets rockport apart. I wish they would have take it even further and show me product availability in stores near me automatically when I’m browsing products on the site.

Product recommendations on out of stock pages

Ido Ariel — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 10:19:05 +0000

Do you measure how many out of stock page views (i.e. out of stock products which are being viewed by your visitors) you receive per day?

Consider shoppers who search for a specific product on Google, find you on on the search results page or an ad, click on it, arrive to your site only to discover that the product is out of stock. This is a disappointing experience for the shopper and a missed opportunity for your business.

So what can you do about it?

1. Probably the best thing you can do is show alternative product recommendations at very prominent position in the product page (above the fold is highly recommended). So when people arrive to an out of stock product page they immediately see the alternatives and chances are your bounce rate will come down.

2. Another action you can take is to allow shoppers to get notifications when the product is back in stock. By doing this you engage customers and build up your permission based marketing database at the same time

3. Consider offering a coupon for first time visitors who landed on an out of stock page but purchased a similar product during the same session

Product Recommendations titles

Ido Ariel — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:38:44 +0000

What should be the text of product recommendations titles? should it be a generic “You might also like” or should you provide Amazon style titles such as “Inspired by your shopping cart” or “People who viewed this product also viewed?”

The benefits of the Amazon approach are mainly:

Trustworthiness as recommendations are not provided by the merchant. They are based on the “wisdom of the crowd”
Transparency, shoppers are informed why products are being recommended to them

Those who prefer the “You may also like” approach think the Amazon approach might raise privacy concerns. We don’t think so and recommend our customers to go with transparent titles that clearly explain customers why a set of products are being recommended to them.