Ecommerce Search: Giving Control to the Consumer
If you take a step back and remove your retail or trading or marketing or technology hat for a moment, doesn’t it seem ludicrous that we spend so much time trying to control what consumers see in ecommerce search?
Sure, we want to provide the consumer with guidance and support, but that is very different from the relatively prescriptive way that most ecommerce providers currently drive the customer journey. We extensively merchandise and personalize the search results, at significant effort, building on the notion that “the platform knows best.”
But is all of that effort actually paying off? Are consumers actually being engaged ?
Has anyone stopped to consider whether the desire to control the customer journey is actually impeding the ability to deliver a better customer experience and achieve higher conversions? It’s time to evolve and start exploring what gains can be made if merchants dared to relinquish some of this control back to the consumer.
The idea of giving up control is not one that is often considered by ecommerce providers, yet this could in fact be the key to better performance. It’s the Consumer’s Journey, After All
When consumers land on a site, merchants want to deliver a positive experience by tailoring the products shown. For example, in summer you display bathing suits more prominently; in winter it’s ski outfits. Modern ecommerce providers include so-called merchandising capability to allow such boosting or burying of products based on a set of (generally manually-entered) rules.
This is useful for the start of the consumer’s ecommerce search journey, when you want to steer the results in a direction that shows proven uplift, compared to simply using a random ordering.
On top of merchandising, modern ecommerce providers also use search engines with sophisticated personalization algorithms that tailor the results for a specific consumer. This uses third/second/first-party […]
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