Tag: magento

Magento Category and Product Listing Pages – Top 3 Challenges

Posted on March 3, 2018 by

Product listing pages are the heart of every e-commerce store. Also known as category pages, this is where the list of products is displayed. In Magento, creating these pages is a manual task that needs to be done regularly to keep the pages afresh. While Magento provides a strong platform to conduct commerce, we often hear that one of the main challenges here is that the platform is geared for marketers and merchandisers who are tech-savvy.  Some of the basic challenges faced are

Manual efforts to create product listing or category pages:

Assigning a product to a category or subcategory is done by retailers by manually accessing the ‘Manage Categories’ or ‘Manage Products” menu. This means each time a new product has been added to your store, someone has to manually add them to all the relevant category pages or else they are unlikely to get displayed on the front end.

Adding products to Magento categories from the Manage products section

Static pages that do not update dynamically:

By assigning products to the categories using the manual method we previously talked about, Magento depends on the user to update the catalog and each category with newly added products. This means you need to manually edit the relevant categories so that the new products are displayed at your store. For example, a page for New Arrivals or Sale, requires the team to manually add/delete every product to this page based on the date of arrival or the discount.

Adding products to categories from manage categories section

Lack of visual aids to promote or remove products:

As a marketer or a merchandiser, images speak louder than text. The current Magento UI used to create any of these pages is neither intuitive nor is it flexible. Tagalys gives you a visual user interface designed for marketers or merchandisers to make this task as easy as 1-2-3.

Category & Product Listing pages Curation

Solving all of these issues and much more, Tagalys allows you to create dynamic product listing or category pages in less than 60 seconds, in a marketer-friendly user interface. Tagalys also allows you to promote and remove products instantly to meet your business needs. Tagalys allows you to focus on the art of merchandising and not get bogged down by the manual efforts to create a page. Watch this 2-minute video to see Tagalys in action

Watch our demo site to learn more or schedule a 1:1 demo with us at your convenience. What are you waiting for? Contact us now or start your 28-day free trial immediately.

Posted in e-Commerce General, e-Commerce Product Listing pages
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Magento 1 & 2 Catalog Search vs. Tagalys search for Magento

Posted on October 11, 2017 by

Relevant Search Results vs. Trending Search Results

Site Search is one of the highest converting funnels at any ecommerce store. Platforms like Magento rely on open source search like SOLR, that can be configured with simple functions to help you get started with search. But does it really work in improving conversion?

If your goal of the search conversion is to show products, you should stick with SOLR search from Magento. But if your goal is convert more visitors from search to customers, get detailed reports to understand how they interact in each search segment, you should use Tagalys Search. Here are key functionalities that Magento will NOT offer as part of the SOLR search it has inbuilt.

  1. Personalized search results – Best used if high mobile traffic, to ensure each visitor engages with search results catered to his/her interest
  2. Search results sorted by location based analytics – Best used if buying patterns varied by location
  3. Search results sorted by site level analytics – Best used if buying patterns were the same across the entire site
  4. Search Merchandising – Ability for the retailer to modify search results and promote products based on internal needs
  5. Popular Searches – Grouping high volume search queries (ignoring spam inputs), to show visitors what is trending at the store
  6. Pinned Searched – Ability for retailers to modify the popular searches and pin search queries to direct traffic to a search results page of business interest
  7. Prioritized product and text suggestions with auto complete, to help visitors save time time and quickly land on a search results page

Here is a quick video that gives an over of Tagalys search.

Other basic features that are also available are Synonyms, Stemming, dynamic facets, live catalog updates, spell check, multi currency, multi language and multi store support. Check out Tagalys search and signup for a free 28 day trial.

Posted in e-Commerce General, eCommerce Site Search
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Personalized Homepage Product recommendations : The Amazon way

Posted on October 4, 2017 by

If you do not have billions of dollars to build your own personalized recommendation engine like Amazon, this post is for you. When you think of Personalization in e-commerce, you should think of Amazon. No online retailer has experimented across varies application of personalization with the goal to help visitors find a product of interest.

Personalization should not be measured by improvement in conversion rate, cause factors like marketing, promotions, product content, payment gateway failure rates, discounts influence the purchase decision of a visitor. What personalization should do instead, is to allow an online shopper discover as many products thus improving the unique product views per unique visitor metric, eventually improving the end conversion rate. Here are a few funnels where Amazon experiments with Personalization and Tagalys provides the same for online retailers

Personalized home page Product Recommendations

When you engage with products at Amazon, you start sending signals of intent helping them understand what you might be interested to buy. If you return to the home page, almost instantly you will discover many personalized product recommendations by category to ensure you do not get lost in the store and remain to engage with the products or categories of your interest.

Personalized home page recommendations

Search is usually the best performing funnel at any online retailer. At one of our clients candere.com, personalized homepage recommendations led to 10x higher revenue per visitor vs. the search funnel, with a 4x higher conversion rate

Personalized Site Search

Once you have created a persona for each visitor, it is easy to curate the catalog based on their intent and show them exactly what they want. For example, if I am in the mood for running shoes, then when I ask/search for shoes, the retailer would show me running shoes first besides showing the generic product sorting that is defined sitewide.

Personalized Store or Product feed

Amazon has been experimenting with this feature with a small subset of products in what is called “my mix”. At Tagalys we call this feature my-store. Essentially, what this allows a retailer to do it dynamically prioritize categories and products for each visitor based on exactly what they want.

More on My Store from Tagalys in the next article. Interested, Sign-up for your free trial now.

Posted in e-Commerce Personalization, e-Commerce Product Recommendations
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Intelligent Product Listing pages for Magento 1 & 2: Data driven dynamic product sorting to boost conversions

Posted on July 12, 2017 by

Magento is one of the world leading e-Commerce platforms that help retailers sell online. It is easy to use and has features to help setup complex product & store configurations. But it also has some disadvantages, one of which is the intuitive ability to create product listing pages.

Magento allows you to create categories and product listing pages, but assigning products is a manual time-consuming process. Tagalys Merchandising extensions for Magento brings two benefits to retailers using Magento

  1. Create product listing pages in less than 2 minutes in a visual easy to use interface – Save time
  2. Utilize trending logic from Tagalys that works on visitor engagement analytics to dynamically determine product sort order for each merchandising page – Increase revenue

Visual Merchandising from Tagalys allows teams to create product listing pages, with minimal assistance from your development or tech team. It was designed with creative/ non-tech users in mind, with a visual interface allowing you to easily create, curate & modify product listing pages.

Pin products: Paste SKU’s, drag & drop products, select multiple products and choose a position to pin them. There are so many visual ways you can create a product listing page to suit what is best for you.

Choose conditions: Filter your entire catalog instantly, to curate products that best need the needs of the listing page. Go ahead and again use the PIN products functionality on the filtered list to best suit your style of merchandising

Page heading: Help your visitors engage better, by giving a heading to the product listing page.

SEO benefits: Help with SEO by giving your pages titles, meta key words, meta description in an easy to use interface

Catalog updates: Pages created by Tagalys, are updated between 24 hours to 10 minutes, depending on the plan you are in.

Watch our demo site to learn more or schedule a 1:1 demo with us at your convenience. What are you waiting for? Contact us now or start your 28-day free trial immediately.

 

 

Posted in e-Commerce General, e-Commerce Product Listing pages
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Magento Catalog Search for e-Commerce: Pros and cons

Posted on April 4, 2017 by

Site Search within your ecommerce store is a way for your visitors to tell you what they want. If you show them the right products, it increases the likelihood they will become customers. You can Signup Now or continue reading.

Site Search can be configured in Magento, but there are some serious limitations depending on how serious you are about converting visitors who search into customers.

Product Sorting in Search Results: This is the holy grail of search results. What top products do you show for a search query within that site/segment/visitor. Your visitors will NOT scroll more than 2/3 pages to find a product of interest. In Magento Search, which works purely on relevance does NOT consider the engagement analytics within your site to determine the order of Search results. This means, you as a business owner have no control on what products are displayed to visitors, your best sellers could be in page 6, new products that have a higher probability of sale may never show on top and you have no influence to influence with your visitors. Tagalys Site Search for Magento on the other hand considers visitor engagement analytics that ensures the products  (new or old) shown for any search query have the highest probability of conversion and also gives you as a business the ability to modify those results based on internal business needs like a promotion, event etc., by using Search Merchandising and Pinned Searches.

Easy Configuration: If you visit System > Configuration > Catalog, you can easily choose various Search settings like “Like”, Full text” or “Combined”, Enable Popular searches & Search Suggestions. This is the easy part and can be configured in a few minutes. This is probably the only real advantage with the inbuilt Search from Magento.

The Tagalys extension for Magento search can take about 1/2 hour on average to install and is auto setup. Not bad, but still about 20 minutes more than Magento.

Search Suggestions: While easy to setup, is not configured to how consumers are used to shop on an Amazon/Walmart or leading ecommerce companies. Suggestions run from historical searches, but they are not grouped or prioritized for visitor click through and also lead to pages with no results. Tagalys is geared for predictive suggestions that will never lead to a “No Results” page and have the best engagement. Tagalys example below

Suggestions - dresses

Popular Searches: While easy to setup, is also not prioritized and calculated on a periodic basis to show the top N searches for the site. Searches are not grouped, hence you can find suggestions like “Dress” & “Dresses” one after the other as the queries and not processed internally and cleaned. These suggestions are also not validated to see if the resulting search page has results or not. Tagalys is geared for prioritized Popular Searches, that will never lead to a “No Results” page and have the best engagement, with added capabilities to modify these Popular Searches and promote your own to address business needs.Tagalys example below

tagalys popular searches

Spell Check: Not something to write home about, but this is also not available in Magento Catalog Search. Tagalys offers this be default in FREE and PAID plans. Tagalys example below

auto correct

Allow us to show you a demo or contact us and start your free trial now.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
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Predictive Site Search suggestions for Magento e-Commerce

Posted on December 28, 2016 by

The starting point of any eCommerce Site Search experience, are search suggestions. There are a few shortcomings on the existing suggestions available at Magento, that make this an unwelcome experience for your visitors.

Predictive search suggestions

As most humans have experienced search with google, they invariably would be pleased with Google like suggestions. In other words, suggestions that autocomplete themselves with the user entered search query forming a subset of each suggestion.  Interested – Sign up now.

screenshot-2016-12-28-15-19-11

Popular searches

Before you allow your visitors to start the search experience, load up the most popular or trending searches that occurred in your e-commerce store. There is a high probability these popular searches will appeal to a vast majority of your visitors as they have been generated with the help of an analytics engine, based on search data from your e-commerce store. Typing is friction and by allowing visitors to click on the popular searches, saves them effort and provides the same end user experience – discovering products that they seek.  Interested – Sign up now.

Prioritized Search suggestions

Online visitors have high expectations as many of them might have also engaged with retail sites like Walmart, Amazon, Asos etc.,. Getting search suggestions wrong makes a retailer looks amateurish as visitors expect this as a bare minimum. A well-designed search suggestions product limits the suggestions between 5 and10 suggestions but this could vary by category. Here are a few examples

Ensure search suggestions have results

As simple as it sounds we have encountered many online stores that auto-generate suggestions but do not keep tabs on the potential results it will display or how inventory changes in time.  This is the first epic fail.

Ensure search suggestions have accurate results

Showing 5 to 10 search suggestions and leading visitors to a page where the search results have no connection with the suggestions that were clicked on, is 100% going to lead to bounce or a lost customer. We have encountered this issue at many brands that use the default suggestions on Magento, that generate suggestions but results are not accurate.  Interested – Sign up now.

Spell check

Visitors are humans and bound to make mistakes. Autocorrect what your visitors type into correct suggestions that ease the search experience and guide them into correct results. Interested – Sign up now.

Consider historical searches

In addition to generating search suggestions from available attribute and tag data within the product database, leveraging historical search data and also showcasing them in suggestions is likely to increase conversion rate. This is because historical search data is representative of what your visitors are asking from you and considering them in the right suggestions, is likely to convert visitors into customers.

Configurable or customizable

With all of the above working for you, having the ability to configure what suggestions to show and disable certain suggestions, give the retailer a chance to control consumer experience and promote business interests alongside customer needs.

Support currencies and languages

When your online store supports multiple languages and currencies, make sure suggestions support the same. Showing a visitor from Hong Kong suggestions and pricing based in USD, is bound to decrease visitor engagement. Tagalys ensures suggestions follow the same language and format enabled in your Magento store to support your global business.

At Tagalys we serve all of the above needs to further enhance visitor shopping experience at your Mageno powered eCommerce store. We love Magento and proud to associated with one of the fastest and largest platforms for eCommerce. While Magento focuses on their core competency, it allows products like Tagalys to add to their ecosystem to continue enhancing visitor experiences at Magento powered eCommerce sites.

SIGNUP NOW, join a free plan or a free trial to know whats best for you. 

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
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