Product Discovery vs Product Search. What is the best eCommerce strategy?
The dilemma is here. Product Search or Product Discovery? Where should efforts be concentrated to improve the customer experience in your eCommerce?
Search is great if you know what you are looking for. It’s brilliant for quick, specific answers, but search is really terrible for discovering and exploring new ideas. Besides, the Covid-19 pandemic forced everyone to change the way they shop. So, the consumer preferences have changed. But…have retailers’ preferences changed, too?
Improve Online Product Discovery: URGENT PRIORITY!
Customers don’t always enter a site in order to buy specific products – they may just feel like browsing your store. Some of them spend hours choosing, others are more impulsive and they decide on the spot. No matter how your customers go about online shopping, though, there’s a way to make it easier for them.
Discovery experience, powered by Visual AI, becomes today the most effective way to FIND the perfect item, driving better conversion. So, no matter if your customers prefer search or discovery. The key to success is your customers must find the items they desire in a seamless way.
61 percent of shoppers say making products easy to find is the most important attribute of the online shopping experience. And this makes sense. After all, who wants to struggle to find what they’re looking for?
What can be done to improve eCommerce Product Discovery and Search?
Product discovery isn’t a new concept. However, it’s becoming a priority for fashion retailers. In fashion e-commerce platforms, product discovery is now one of the key components of a good user experience.
Initially, e-commerce sites focused their discovery experience on categorisation browsing. Luckily, this has changed. In this post, we focused on the most popular visual-AI-powered solutions to assist in product discovery.
1# Search By Image (Visual Search or Camera Search)
Mobile shopping is far and away the most popular online shopping mode. Actually, more than 60% of consumers shop daily or weekly via mobile or smartphone. So, search by image is an essential tool to connect inspiration with product catalog. Visual Search is the most intuitive omnichannel shopping experience. After all, visual search solutions – like Wide Eyes’ Search By Image engine-, are a common feature of leading retailers. Zara, Asos, H&M or Neiman Marcus are an example.
The Wide Eyes’ Search by Image solution enables shoppers to find and discover fashion items in the same way they think about it – visually with no words. This visual AI-powered solution allows the possibility to connect inspirational images – from Instagram, from a gallery or taken from devices – directly to product catalog in just one click.
All of this is done in real time, fully automatically and without the need to define the search area or to specify the category of garments. The system sends results of the most similar in-stock matches of the outfit within the retailer’s inventory.
2# Product Recommendation Engines
There are numerous ways in which people find the products they desire. There are two types of AI-powered product recommendation engines for eCommerce to assist in product discovery: Similar Product Recommendations and Complete the Look Recommendations.
Similar product recommendations is one of the popular modes being used where users find products that resonate with their intent. At Wide Eyes Technologies take similar recommendations to another level adding different personalization possibilities. Our similar recommendation system integrates a real-time filter functionality allowing retailers to customize the results for every shopper (size, style, brands, etc.) and also to adapt results to business rules (price range, campaigns, stock by country, area, store, etc.).
Also, by suggesting similar (and available) products to shoppers, you are solving out-of-stock problems automatically and helping shoppers find alternative products that really match their needs seamlessly in real-time.
In order to facilitate product discovery while inspiring customers with a first-in-class online experience, fashion retailers suggest complete recommended outfits in their product pages. With Wide Eyes’ Style Advisor Solution, retailers can deliver complete the look options, aligned with a product style and contextual and situational behavior. A new revolutionary way to personalize every outfit suggestion.
With AI-powered Style Advisor API, retailers are augmenting their styling capabilities and improve operational efficiency and increase sell-through rate.
3# Smart Searchandising
For shoppers who prefer to search, your searchandising strategy is the path to product discovery. Smart searchandising (or search merchandising) can help you prioritize personalized results on product listing pages, as well as create and promote items based on product attributes popular with your shoppers.
By curating on-site search results, help your customers to discover important products on your website as they’re shopping. In fact, since 70% of shoppers view only the first 30 site search results, and 86% click only on the first five items suggested in recommendation carousels, controlling which products appear first is critical.
In other words, searchandising is the eCommerce strategy to improve fashion product discovery and search experience.
4# Personalize Product Discovery Experiences to deliver value
With so many options to shop from, consumers will not tolerate poor product discovery experiences. They now expect not only to find what they’re looking for easily and quickly, but for retailers to also personalize their product discovery experiences.
You are one step away from discovering how AI-powered Wide Eyes’ Solutions can help stand out and personalize the product discovery experience while increasing conversion, basket size and retention. Wanna talk?
