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. 50% of the total online sales in the coming years will be grabbed by the global eCommerce giants like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc. 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 also 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.

Sendinblue 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 you to send up to 300 emails per day (9,000 emails per month) 100% free.

Another great tool to check out is SendX. It is an extremely intuitive and affordable Email Marketing Software and a great Mailchimp Alternative. SendX allows you to send unlimited emails with every plan and pricing tiers. On top of that, you can also use their powerful rules-based automation and create bigger email marketing campaigns. And they’ll make sure you never get stuck thanks to their 24×7 Live Support. Paid plans start at $9.99/mo.”

Personalized Recommendations 

Recommendation carousels are product suggestions that are unique to 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.

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 General
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Online Merchandising – What does it mean to your eCommerce 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 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

It 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 at 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?

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

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

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 science of driving sales by enticing visitors, engaging them and making them your customers. This has been conventionally in practice in physical retail where select products are placed in the select locations. This is done in such a way to visually appeal the visitors of the region intrigue their interest and make them customers. Adding decorations, banners, display signs, and layout of space, etc are included in this. The ultimate purpose of visual merchandising is to get visitors to view the products and make the purchase. Visual Merchandising is turning more important in eCommerce than ever, especially with the rise of mobile-first commerce.

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

Running a successful online store is very challenging and tough these days. It is like having a brick and mortar store, but with your hands almost tied. Mobile devices contribute to over 70% of the total online store visitors. They are quick and do not have time to scroll pages after pages. Your competition is not just limited to other eCommerce stores but also with Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and many other mobile applications. They all want a piece of the audience time to increase their engagement metrics. So how to keep your visitors interested in your online store and not leave at the ping of a notification?

Visual Merchandising has helped all leading online retailers, to ensure the right products are displayed across their home, category & search results pages to trigger visitor interest as soon as possible. In order to improve 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 visitor traffic, you are likely to make more revenue, by virtue of more visitors converting to the customer.

Common activities between online & offline Merchandising

Decorations & Display

Offline:

You might have noticed standees, pamphlets, etc., displayed at prominent spots. This is to communicate to visitors and attract walk-ins at the store.

Online:

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

Product Positioning

Offline:

A merchandiser uses data to source the right products to the right stores. He also ensures it appeals to the audience of that location.

Online:

Your visitors can be from multiple locations and there are three ways you would get product positioning right

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

StoreWide Trending: This is the common Trending algorithm of all the 3 types. 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. This is likely to increase engagement with visitors at your store. 

Visitor Specific (Personalization): Analyze data across the entire store particulr to each visitor and 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) are applied for the visitor.

Layout

Offline:

Physical location has to be designed to ensure the seamless movement of traffic within the store, while also ensuring communication and enticing visitor interest to view products.

Online:

Your store can be accessed via desktop or mobile phone.  Various visitors across locations, demographics & interest levels access your store. Hence using 3rd party tools to analyze the heatmaps, movement and click-throughs need to be constantly used to ensure any in-store communication and sparking visitor interest to view products.

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

Visual Merchandising objectives

The ultimate goal of visual merchandising is to get visitors 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 eCommerce 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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