eCommerce Website Solution

What kind of shopping experience should you provide?

Streamlining your merchandising efforts with a tool like Cleverset is a powerful way to really bring your products to life and create an intuitive and exciting shopping experience. The most interesting thing about this application is that it can offer individually-tailored product recommendations to online shoppers based not on historical data but on what the customer is looking for at that precise moment. It’s customer behavior that drives the product recommendations and allows customers to discover products they wouldn’t encounter otherwise.

For example, an online electronics merchant could capture data on a visitor interested in photography and then market a special on digital cameras. Recommendations can be based on the amount of time spent on a web page or the pictures they viewed.

Here’s a basic rundown of what this technology offers:

·      An increase in online revenues by offering personalized recommendations to your customers as they shop on your site. Attracting consumers to your website is only the first step; converting shoppers/visitors into customers while they are on your site really impacts your business.

·      Delivers individually-tailored product recommendations to online customer as they shop, actually predicting what each visitor wants and boosting online retail revenue. Recommendations allow online shoppers to discover products they would not have encountered otherwise. Behavior is driving product recommendations whereas current solutions of cross sell and hard coded recommendations are trying to force behavior.

·      Personalization of ecommerce websites with product recommendations and cross sell and up sell that is based on the behavior of the individuals visiting your client’s websites.

·      Dynamic product recommendations are made in real time based on the behavior of individuals as they interact with the web site.

Moving beyond technology, there are some merchandising techniques that will consistently showcase your products in a unique and interesting way.

·      Bundling products can be an effective way of increasing average order value. For example, you can give customers the option of purchasing “the whole look” – the jeans, shirt, jacket, scarf and boots instead of just the jeans.

·      Offering Hot Sellers

·      Offering Related Cross-sell Items

·      Having a designated Overstock or Clearance Section - showing products on sale is a tantalizing proposition to online shoppers.

·      Gift Wrapping Services

Do I Know You?

To effectively sell, you have to have a very astute understanding of who your market is and what they want. You have to know your customers so well that you can predict their next action or behavior - be close enough to “feel each other’s heat.” There’s some real psychology involved in the act of making a purchase. It’s your job to understand this, understand what makes your customer tick. To start with, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “Do I want this product? How will it make me feel? Why should I purchase this product from www.yourwebsite.com?”

Remember, though, that asking those questions is just the beginning of understanding who your customer is. You want to know what keeps them awake at night and how you can answer the problem or the need they have. You want to provide answers to their questions in an easy to navigate and easy to understand format. Don’t make them search for answers. Know them so well that you can serve up what they want before they even realize they want it. Create a conversation with them that leads to an ongoing relationship.

There are some technologies we highly recommend that can help create an atmosphere of socialization on your site. These are tools can increase the conversation between you and your customers as well as increase the conversation between your customers. In effect, it allows them to recommend products to one another and participate in the online discussion.

Bazaarvoiceoffers outsourced technology, community management services, analytics and syndication to encourage and harness word of mouth marketing, and bring it closer to a company’s brand and customer experience.

This hosted and fully managed customer ratings and review service allows businesses to enable, encourage, and analyze customer ratings and reviews on their web site. With Bazaarvoice, companies can empower their customers to share honest opinions and influence each other to make more informed and rewarding purchase decisions.

The Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews platform is unique in the industry because they offer what they call a “Managed, Measured, Maximized approach.”

Managed

·      Hosted and Easy-to-Deploy: Bazaarvoice hosts and manages the functionality and deployments can be completed in as little as 20 IT hours.

·      Customized & Integrated Like It's Your Own:  You approve a customized look that seamlessly integrates with your site design and authentication systems.

·      Professional Content Management: Every submission is reviewed by Austin-based professionals to ensure that only accurate, relevant, and appropriate reviews are posted to your site. Dedicated Community Managers provide merchandising alerts, insights, and recommendations to help you make improved customer-centric decisions.

Measured

·      Site Influence Reports: Through the Bazaarvoice Workbench you can view and run reports on categories, brands, products, rejected reviews, and other data.

·      Custom and Ad-hoc Analysis: Your dedicated Community Manager is available for on-demand analysis, and can create quarterly assessments which you can present to colleagues and executives.

·      Web Analytics Integration: Bazaarvoice has partnered with leading web analytics firms to ensure that we can measure the impact of our solution and feed relevant customer voice data into your tool of record.

 Maximized

·      Hassle-Free Partnership Integration: Bazaarvoice has partnerships with leading online providers in analytics, search, navigation, and email systems.

·      SearchVoice™ - Landing Pages for Natural Search Results: SearchVoice landing pages are hosted and branded on your domain, and include a 20-point search optimization feature across layout, design, and code increasing traffic and improving your main site ranking.

·      FeedVoice™ - Hosted RSS: Increases loyalty and repeat visits with the first hosted RSS feed for your Top Rated and “Hot” Products.

·      SyndicateVoice™ - Portal Advertising: The first syndication service to publish your ratings and reviews (and links) on a growing, open network of the largest portals, such as MSN, PriceRunner, Smarter.com, Froogle and others.

PowerReviews is a similar application and it’s actually FREE. It’s a unique service that utilizes the concept of tagging where customers can agree or disagree on a current product review and post their comments or reviews. It allows for intuitive interaction amongst your customers and between you and your customers. It’s a perfect solution for small to mid-sized businesses that are on a limited budget.

Mercado - is a rapidly-deployable search, navigation and merchandising solution similar to the ones used by large retailers like Macy’s, Williams-Sonoma and REI, but packaged and priced for smaller online businesses. Mercado's bFIRST is a software as a service (SaaS) application built for companies looking for a packaged solution and a quick implementation.

With Mercado bFIRST you get:

·      A pre-configured search and product indexing system built on the experience of large retail clients

·      Relevant and merchandised search

·      Intelligent navigation results and ranking

·      Linguistic support

·      A comprehensive merchandising rules engine managed by business users, not by IT

     Commerce Merchandising Console (CMC)

·      A low-maintenance SaaS solution

The business tool within Mercado bFIRST is a tool that anyone can use to sell products online and effectively promote products and merchandising strategies. With the CMC you have complete control to optimize merchandising zones. The common promotional areas to take advantage of are:

·      Best sellers

·      Related items

·      Recommended Products

·      Banner ads