Tag: merchandising

The best features and plugins to increase eCommerce conversion at your Magento store

Posted on July 19, 2019 by

The eCommerce industry is growing competitive each day and online users have plenty of options to choose from. The global eCommerce giants like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc are anticipated to grab 50% of the total online sales in the coming years. It is hence inevitable for growing eCommerce retailers to completely make use of the opportunities to engage with their visitors and turn them into their customers. 

We have listed here some of the best features and its plugins to drive conversions at a Magento online store.

Live Chat

Live Chats replace the role of the salesperson in online stores. It acts as a virtual assistant and quickly addresses the questions of the visitors. Most people experience difficulties in fulfilling their orders and abandon their carts. Live chats reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion. Live chats are also meant to build a customer-retailer relationship that can bring in them repeatedly in the future. Freshchat and Zendesk are good live chat plugins for Magento stores. They are quick and provides productive features for the support team.

 

Push Notifications

Push Notifications in online stores are similar to In-store supermarket announcements. They quickly get the visitor’s attention and trigger their interest. With push notifications, retailers can initiate visitor engagement by letting them know about a new product in-store, a limited period special offer, or a seasonal item that could sell out soon. This gives the visitors an understanding of the products in the store and helps them to make an immediate purchase.  Push notifications are also used to remind visitors to complete their purchase of products added in their carts.

 

 

iZooto helps Magento retailers to send targeted and personalized push notifications to drive traffic, engagement, and sales.

WebEngage is also a good option as it provides pre-designed templates to create high impact push notifications. It allows retailers to have different notification settings for mobile and web.

Emailers

Emailers help retailers to establish a regular connection with their visitors/customers. Sending personalized emails tailored to their interests can help in bringing back the visitors to your store. Emailers also help to keep visitors informed on their wishlist, cart list and influence them to purchase them. 

Mailchimp is one of the widely used mailers by Magento retailers. It helps to recapture lost sales through recommendations and abandoned cart emails. It provides AI-powered, user-friendly tools anyone can use to be successful. Mailchimp puts the audience at the center so that retailers can send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online

The other option is definitely Sendinblue. It is a complete all-in-one sales and marketing toolbox. The pricing is based on the number of email messages sent, rather than the number of contacts keet in the account. It also offers free accounts that allow to send up to 300 emails per day (9,000 emails per month) 100% free

Personalized Recommendations 

Recommendation carousels are product suggestions that can be made unique for each visitor based on their browsing history. They can be grouped into a single carousel or segmented by product type based on merchant requirements. Some of the popular companies that offer recommendations are Nosto, Barilliance, Celebros to name a few. They deliver one-to-one personalized product recommendations to every customer across the site.

(Recommendations by Nosto)

Site Search

The conversion percentage of visitors who search is 2X greater than the visitors who browse through the store. Search results have to be intelligent, accurate & fast to achieve this.

Tagalys Site Search – Tagalys sorts products in search results based on what is most likely to increase revenue. It also allows retailers to merchandise the search results to meet their exact business needs. Tagalys Search includes popular/trending searches, search suggestions (both text and visual), auto-complete, spell check, synonyms, query stemming, no results recommendations and much more. 

 

(You can try a demo of the Tagalys eCommerce site search here)

 

Nextopia eCommerce Site Search uses an adaptive search algorithm, dynamic filters, and enhanced auto-complete to provide fast, accurate and intelligent search results.

Search Spring is a good pick when retailers want to personalize the search results exactly the way they desire and remain highly relevant.

Category Pages 

Category Pages are online aisles in your store. Visitors are dropping from the store after every page scroll. In order to drive sales, it is important to grab the visitor’s attention within the top results. 

Tagalys Category Pages – Tagalys automatically sorts category pages, displaying products that increase CTR (Click-through rate), leading to better conversion. Tagalys also gives retailers instant control to merchandise the page, so they are in 100% control of what products to display to their visitors. Some of the features of Tagalys Category Pages include advanced personalized product sorting, product sequencing, listing page generator, product performance insights, smart category conditions, page banners, SEO variables, etc. 

(Creating a custom sale page in less than 30 seconds using Tagalys)

 

(A smart category page created using Tagalys in 30 seconds)

 

Nextopia Navigation helps to create highly specific landing pages for email campaigns, keyword or specialized campaigns.

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Personalization e-Commerce Product Listing pages e-Commerce Product Recommendations eCommerce Site Search
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Merchandising – What does it mean to your online store?

Posted on August 8, 2018 by

store merchandising

According to experts and other blogs, Merchandising is everything you do to promote and sell your products once the potential customer is in your store. A sale starts with the giving the visitor a great first impression, which means retailers always trigger a visual experience for every visitor the moment they walk into the store. This brief post is to help you understand that online merchandising has equivalents and you can use these strategies at your online store to improve the visual experience you offer your visitors. Merchandising is the part of the holy grail of traditional retail and includes

  • Window and in-store displays
  • Grouping related products together
  • Shelf signage
  • In-store ads featuring the merchandise
  • Samples and giveaways
  • In-store demonstrations
  • Well-stocked shelves
  • Spotlighting promotional items
  • Shelf Design

Each of these items can be translated into the online world and must be given importance to grab the attention of your visitors. Remember, it is harder to keep your visitors engaged online and easier to lose them in just the click of a button. Traditional retail is easier as walking out of the store if a physical effort and the farther you have walked into the store, the more time you need to spend to get out of the store.

  • Window and in-store displays = Homepage banners
  • Grouping related products together = Product Recommendations
  • Shelf signage = UIUX of Listing pages
  • In-store ads featuring the merchandise – Sponsored products
  • Samples and giveaways = Coupons & Discounts
  • In-store demonstrations = Multiple product images or videos
  • Well-stocked shelves = Intelligently stocked Listing pages
  • Spotlighting promotional items = Labels on Thumbnails (e.g., New, Next day delivery, Discount etc.,)
  • Shelf Design = Listing page layout, Design, Facets & Sort options

What merchandising strategy do you apply at your online store today? At Tagalys, we only help with a few of these merchandising requirements, especially those Like Search, Listing Pages & Recommendations that analyzes store data to predict what are the best products to be displayed in those channels.

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Product Listing pages e-Commerce Product Recommendations eCommerce Site Search
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Must have UI elements before online merchandising works in e-Commerce

Posted on July 25, 2018 by

First impressions are the best impressions. Before you invest in a merchandising engine for your online store, you must have basic UI elements in place. You will not buy a car with a fabulous engine but looks ugly or has poor design elements. The same applies to visitors are your online store, who need to be guided to find a product of interest. While a merchandising engine can help predict or influence what products are displayed in search or other listing pages, the user interface of the listing pages has to be designed keeping your visitor & online category in mind.

The basic UI elements of any listing page are the filters, sort options, and product thumbnails. Within each of these, a retailer needs to think through many factors to influence how your visitors will react when they are on that page.

Page Filters or Facets:

  • Selection: The products in your online store might be assigned to multiple attributes and it is imperative to note that not all attributes are relevant to your customer. Display only the filters that are relevant to your customer and not to your business.
  • Order: We live in a mobile-first world, hence 70% of your visitors are likely to come to your store via a mobile phone. The mobile real estate is limited and they are likely to see the top 5 filters when they open. What are the top 5 filters that you should display at your store? Not every facet is equal, if you are in the luxury business, maybe a discount does not matter to your audience. What would be the top 5 questions your visitors ask you if this were in a physical store?
  • Position: Having worked with over 50 online retailers it was interesting to note that around 15% of them actually have their facets placed horizontally on top of a listing page. But most have the facets on the left of the product listing. One retailer had a combination where they had standard facets on the left and facets like offers, coupons and discount percentage on top. Something to think about.
  • Visibility: Within each facet, you might have more than 10 tags. Limit tags displayed within each facet to 10 and make sure the top 10 tags are sorted by the tags that are assigned to the most products. If there are more than 10 tags, they should be collapsed, pop-up on demand or have a search bar within the facet.
  • Anchoring: Facets are a quick way to find products within a listing page. It is recommended to anchor your facets to the page, such that they do not scroll on top. Make life easy and obvious.

Sort Options

  • Selection: Display sort options that are most likely to be used by your visitor. It is a poor experience for your visitor when they find so many irrelevant sort options like sort by name, brand, location. The most relevant sort options are the ones that are tied to numeric fields like price, date, discount. We discourage sort options tied to text fields.
  • Display: Make life simple for your visitors and provide the ascending and descending sort options within the drop down. We have noticed sites where the sort option contains the field to be sorted and the visitor is expected to click outside the sort option, to change the order to ascending or descending.
  • Location: The most obvious location to anchor your sort options is right above the product listing on the left. That is the most commonly used location, so do not try to reinvent the wheel.

Product Thumbnails

  • Size: Your visitors do not have time, but how many product thumbnails do you show per screen? This is directly tied to the size of the thumbnail image. Too large, you show better clarity, but that requires the visitor to scroll more to see more products. Larger images can also marginally impact the load times of the pages, as the size of the image is slightly more. Too small an image and your visitors might get lost in the clutter.
  • Information: Assuming you have determined the ideal image size, basic elements like name, price, the sale price must be determined on the product. Additional information like brand, SKU, etc., should only be displayed if you think it can increase your CTR to the product view.
  • Elements: Additional product tags in the form of labels can also be displayed if that can increase CTR to product views. Some examples of labels are New, Ready to Ship, Next Day Delivery, Offers, Sizes & Color Swatches.

The objective of a listing page is to get the visitor to get to a product page as quickly as possible. The metric you should be tracking is Click Thorugh Rate (CTR) from the listing page to the product details page. What is the CTR of your listing page?

Let us know if you would like us to audit your site, you can schedule a call with us using this link. You could also signup to start your 14-day free trial now

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Product Listing pages eCommerce Site Search
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Retail Merchandising Requirements – Product Curation in Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores

Posted on July 2, 2018 by

Merchandising is the practice that contributes to the sale of products to a retail consumer. It refers to having a variety of products available and the display of those products in such a way that it stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase. The keyword here is Stimulates interest and this applies to online shopping. While Merchandising spans a variety of activities, we will talk about a few key activities in a series of posts. This one is about Product Curation.

Product Curation: Why is it required?

As an online merchandiser, you will need to rely on a data engine to decide how to display the hundreds of products in each aisle or category page in your online store. While a data engine will be applicable over 70% of the time, many a time, you have insights into products that your online store might not. Hence be being able to promote, curate or move those products to the top of the page is a way stimulates interest

Product Curation: When should we do it?

Your online store is marketing on many channels; social media, blogs, advertising, etc., and you are observing how visitors are interacting with your brand. Lets say on Instagram, a particular product has garnered more interest that it has at your online store, because a celebrity wore something similar, this is a reason why you will want to promote that product across pages, so when the same visitors come back to your online store, it stimulates interest and that can influence sales. The data in these external channels is forward-looking and needs to be complemented inside your online store.

Product Curation: How do we do it?

The easiest way to curate is to find that individual product that gathered external interest and promote on the home page. Easy, but not effective. Experts do a few activities once they see an external trend and want to push that to their online store. They start by identifying the products that gathered external interest. And find out what are the attributes of that product to know what else can be promoted. To find these products, you could again use the search API or the similar product recommendations API from Tagalys. Identify the best channels to promote these products when the visitors arrive at your online store – Homepage, Category Pages, Search and ensure to promote all products that match these attributes. At Tagalys we provide curation capabilities across all our tools like Search & Category pages that makes this task visual, instant &; data-driven.

Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn; let us know how you carry these tasks today. If you want to try Tagalys for a free trial, you can signup here

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Visual Merchandising in Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores

Posted on July 2, 2018 by

Visual Merchandising is the practice that drives sales by enticing visitors, increasing retention and making them your customers. The practice has long existed in physical retail with products placed in the right locations & stores to visually appeal to the visitors of the region intrigue their interest and make them customers. This includes adding displays, decorations, signs, and layout of space. The overall purpose of visual merchandising is to get customers to come into the store and spend money. Visual Merchandising is becoming more important in online retail, especially with the rose of mobile-first commerce.

Why do you need Visual merchandising in Magento & Shopify eCommerce?

Online retail is hard. It is like having a physical store, but with your hands almost tied. Over 70% of visitors visit online retail stores via mobile devices. They are on the move and do not have time. As a retailer you are not only competing with other retailers, you are competing with Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and every mobile application who wants a piece of your time to increase their engagement metrics. So how do your visitors interested in your online store and not leave at the ping of a notification? Visual Merchandising is practiced by all leading online retailers, to ensure that products displayed across their home, category & search results pages are geared towards acquiring visitor interest as soon as possible. In order to fix your eCommerce conversion rate, you first need to have more visitors view products of interest to them. If that number increases, even if you have the same eCommerce conversion rate, you are likely to make more revenue, by virtue of more visitors converting to the customer.

Common activities between online & offline Merchandising

Product Positioning:

Offline: A merchandiser uses data to send the products to the right stores, to ensure it appeals to the audience of that location.

Online: While you have only one store, you have visitors from multiple locations visiting the same online site. There are three ways you would get positioning right

StoreWide Trending: Analyze data across the entire online store to assign a trending score for each product at the store. This ensures no matter which part of the store you visit, this trending sort order of products is applied and is likely to increase engagement with visitors at your store. 

Location Wide Trending: Analyze data across the entire store by Top locations to assign a trending score for each product at the store by location. This ensures when visitors arrive from various locations, the trending sort order of products of that location is applied and is likely to increase engagement with visitors at your store at that location.

Visitor Specific (Personalization): Analyze data across the entire store by the visitor to assign a trending score for each product type for that visitor at the store. This ensures when that specific visitor arrives at the store and views that product type, products for that type (e.g., tees) is applied for the visitor.

Decorations & Display:

Offline – Offers, events, promotions can change by location. To communicate this to visitors at the store, you might have noticed standees, pamphlets, etc., displayed to visitors to attract walk-ins

Online: Page banners and popups are used to communicate the same information to visitors when they visit the online store.

Layout:

Offline: Physical location has its constraints and stores have to be designed to ensure seamless movement of traffic within the store, while also ensuring communication and sparking visitor interest to view products is carried out.

Online: Your store can be accessed via a mobile device or a desktop. This may sound simple, but it’s difficult, as the same stores are accessed by visitors across locations, demographics & interest levels. Hence using 3rd party tools to analyze the heatmaps, movement and click-throughs need to be constantly used to continuing to ensure any in-store communication and sparking visitor interest to view products is carried out.

There may be a few more common activities, but strategically these are the top 3 challenges or requirements of a merchandiser – online & offline.

Visual Merchandising objectives:

The overall purpose of visual merchandising is to get customers to come into the store and convert them to customers. This journey starts with the visitor viewing products of interest, and that is the number 1 goal for merchandiser. In the online world, this would translate to reducing the bounce rate, increasing the number of product views per visitor & percentage of products viewed for the impressions by the visitor.

What are your goals as a visual merchandiser?

Tagalys maximizes conversion rate & gives merchants visual control of products displayed in Site Search & Category pages at their online store. To know more about our solutions and features, get in touch with us now.

Posted in e-Commerce Personalization e-Commerce Product Listing pages eCommerce Site Search
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