Supermarkets – well known for their selling techniques. Shelf positioning, label colouring, targeted promotions, loyalty schemes, loss leaders, display cabinets and presentation are just some of the techniques used to entice you into making a purchase. There is however, a way to apply some of these techniques to your online store and for that matter, actually go far beyond anything an offline store is even capable of. Introducing, the smart e-commerce shop.
Make your e-commerce shop smart
By adopting some of these techniques (not necessarily all of them, it entirely depends on your business model) you can create ever-changing product displays, promotional pages, hero images and targeted e-mail/social campaigns based entirely on your customers browsing habits, location and history.
Locational awareness
Did you know that you can detect the approximate location of a user based on their IP address? As HTML5 becomes more available this is even more accurate and reliable, but quite often you won’t need to go to that level of accuracy. By detecting the users location, you are able to link this in with your own database of products and adapt the layout of your site, tailored for users from that region. Here are a few ideas: Event based promotions If you sell festival products – targeting the festivals happening in the user’s area is a good idea:
Weather based promotions
By using a weather API, you can actually find out the user’s weather based on their location and change your products accordingly.
Factual based promotions
An area may have a famous celebrity, monument or culture associated with it. For example, Torbay (Devon, England) is famously associated with Agatha Christie
By utilising what you know about the area, your campaigns can be more focused and personal to the user.
Historical awareness
This is the most widely adopted and commonly practised technique used, especially with some of the big players such as Amazon. The big advantage here is that you can use it for both registered and anonymous users. Simply by tracking the user and logging what products they view, you can put this information into a database and return similar products based on the user’s browsing history. These similar products are formulated based on products other users have viewed and purchased. You may even want to relate certain products yourself through your admin area. As you can see, I have been searching for Agatha Christie books on Amazon. When I visit the home page I see the following:
The registered user
The registered user is certainly the easiest to customise for. You have a whole wealth of information, including their e-mail address that you can use to create targeted e-mail campaigns, exclusive offers and a store suited to their needs. The products you show them can be based on what they have viewed, their profile information (eg. Gender – which you can get from their title), previous purchase history and analysing their contributions to your e-commerce community. I buy most of games on Amazon, so when I’m logged in I see the following:
The possibilities are endless. You can use the data to split test, customise promotional boxes, hero images or even entire layouts suited to the user. Finally what about you - what do you do to target your products to each individual user?