Tag: online merchandising

Looking for a Certona Alternative?

Posted on January 13, 2020 by

Just like offline stores, eCommerce stores also require merchandising to attract visitors. It is the art & science of determining what products to display at a retail store. 

Rated 4.8/5.0 in G2, Tagalys is a high performing online merchandising engine for Magento & Shopify stores. 

Tagalys’s solutions include Intelligent Site Search, Product Listing Page merchandising & Product Recommendations to increase the conversion of your online store. We offer custom pricing to suit merchants of all sizes based on their exact business requirements.

Sign up and kick start your 28-day free trial now!

A quick comparison between Certona & Tagalys*

Monthly pricing starts @

Certona Tagalys
Site Search ** $89 (per 10K visitors who search)
Product Listing Pages 

(Category|Collection)

 $199 (per 20K Product Listing Page visitors)
Product Recommendations $129 (per 25K visitors who load Recommendations)

Ideal for

Certona Tagalys
** Retailers with annual online revenue between $500K to $20M

Site Search

Certona Tagalys
Conversion Optimised Search results  ✓  ✓
Popular/Trending Searches  **  ✓
Typo/Spell Check  ✓  ✓
Search Suggestions   ✓  ✓
Visual Autocomplete   ✓ ✓
Synonyms   ✓ ✓
Search Redirects   ** ✓
Query Stemming    ** ✓
Partial Search Matches   ** ✓
Boosting Rules (Universal)   ** ✓
Product Pinning (Hero Products)   ** ✓
Search Results Personalisation ✓
 ✓

Product Listing Page Merchandising

Certona Tagalys
Conversion Optimised Sorting  ✓  ✓
Product Sequencing (Basic)  **  ✓
Product Sequencing (Advanced)
  **  ✓
Listing Page Generator   x  ✓ (Patent Pending) 
Universal Boosting  **  ✓
Product Pinning (Hero Products)  ** ✓
Product Pinning (Scheduling)  ** ✓
Personalized Store  ** ✓
Listing Pages Personalisation ✓ x

Product Recommendations

Certona Tagalys
Personalized Recommendations ✓ ✓
Best Sellers / Most Viewed / Most Popular ** ✓
Similar Products ✓ ✓
Cart Page Recommendations ✓ ✓
Customizable Recommendations ** ✓
Embeddable Recommendations ** ✓
Recommendations to emails ✓
 x

Why should you switch to Tagalys?

Schedule a demo now!

Certona and Tagalys comparison

Certona and Tagalys Comparision

Customer Satisfaction Score (Net Promoter Score)
Certona Tagalys
 **  93

Rating Source: g2.com

Why merchants love Tagalys?

Tagalys wins comfortably over other products in terms of onboarding, customer support, ease of use and most importantly, value for money that increases your marketing ROI. So what are you waiting for? Make the switch to Tagalys today.

Sign up for a free 28-day trial of Tagalys and we take care of the rest! You can also schedule a demo here to know more about Tagalys.

*Comparison as on January 10, 2020
**Data publicly not available as on January 10, 2020
Posted in e-Commerce Personalization e-Commerce Product Listing pages e-Commerce Product Recommendations eCommerce Site Search Uncategorized
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Looking for an SLI Systems Alternative?

Posted on January 6, 2020 by

The eCommerce industry is highly competitive today and online retailers must use merchandising solutions to thrive, succeed & improve profitability. Tagalys is a high performing online merchandising engine for Magento & Shopify stores, rated 4.8/5.0 at G2 Crowd.

Tagalys provides products like Intelligent Site Search, Product Listing page Merchandising & Product Recommendations to increase the conversion of your online store. We offer custom pricing for merchants with more than 25000 monthly engaged visitors, based on their exact business requirements. Sign up and kick start your 28-day free trial now!

A quick comparison between SLI Systems & Tagalys*

Monthly pricing starts @
SLI Systems Tagalys
Site Search ** $89 (per 10K visitors who search)
Product Listing Pages 

(Category|Collection)

 $199 (per 20K Product Listing Page visitors)
Product Recommendations $129 (per 25K visitors who load Recommendations)
Ideal for
SLI Systems Tagalys
Large Enterprise Retailers with annual online revenue between $500K to $20M
Site Search
SLI Systems Tagalys
Conversion Optimised Search results  ✓  ✓
Popular/Trending Searches **  ✓
Typo/Spell Check  ✓  ✓
Search Suggestions   ✓  ✓
Visual Autocomplete   ✓ ✓
Synonyms   ✓ ✓
Search Redirects   ✓ ✓
Query Stemming   ✓ ✓
Partial Search Matches   ** ✓
Boosting Rules (Universal)   ✓ ✓
Product Pinning (Hero Products) ** ✓
Product Listing Pages Merchandising
SLI Systems Tagalys
Conversion Optimised Sorting  ✓  ✓
Product Sequencing (Basic)  **  ✓
Product Sequencing (Advanced)
  **  ✓
Listing Page Generator   x  ✓ (Patent Pending) 
Universal Boosting  ✓  ✓
Product Pinning (Hero Products)  ** ✓
Product Pinning (Scheduling)  ** ✓
Personalized Store  ** ✓
Listing Pages Personalisation ✓ x
Product Recommendations
SLI Systems Tagalys
Personalized Recommendations ✓ ✓
Best Sellers / Most Viewed / Most Popular ** ✓
Similar Products ✓ ✓
Cart Page Recommendations ** ✓
Customizable Recommendations ** ✓
Embeddable Recommendations ✓ ✓
Recommendations to emails ✓
 x

Why should you switch to Tagalys?

Schedule a demo now!

Customer Satisfaction Score (Net Promoter Score)
SLI Systems Tagalys
27  93

Rating Source: g2.com

Why merchants love Tagalys?

Tagalys wins comfortably over other products in terms of onboarding, customer support, ease of use and most importantly, value for money that increases your marketing ROI. So what are you waiting for? Make the switch to Tagalys today.

Sign up for a free 28-day trial of Tagalys and we take care of the rest! You can also schedule a demo here to know more about Tagalys.

*Comparison as on January 02, 2020
**Data publicly not available as on January 02, 2020
Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Product Listing pages e-Commerce Product Recommendations eCommerce Site Search
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Which is the best merchandising solution for Magento and Shopify eCommerce?

Posted on December 26, 2019 by

The fast-paced digitalization is accelerating the eCommerce growth rapidly in recent years. Statista says in 2019, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 3.53 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 6.54 trillion US dollars in 2022. A lot of offline brands are turning omnipresent and launching their online stores every day. 

The availability of global dropshipping options has expanded the retailer’s services all across the world. Thus an online shopper has plenty of retailer options to purchase a product. All he/she has to do is to type in a query in a search engine and tens of thousands of results pop up.

Hence a lot of retailers focus on their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to drive traffic to their stores. While most retailers succeed in bringing traffic to their store, they fail in effectively converting them into buyers. This increases customer acquisition costs and reduces the store’s profitability.

Why Merchandising is important in eCommerce?

Merchandising helps retailers to increase visitor engagement and thereby improving sales. It is the art & science of determining what products to display at a retail store and the same is required at the online store. 

Over 80% of your visitors drop off after 3 scrolls at any product listing page. Hence the top 100 products at any listing page influence your sales. Merchandising comes handy to display the products in the desired order that is more likely to sell. 

Challenges/Limitations in eCommerce platforms

The eCommerce platforms like Magento and Shopify by default do not offer or offers only limited merchandising options to the retailers. Creating and managing listing pages in these platforms are completely manual, time-consuming, tiring and not data-driven.  As a result, the pages remain static and reduces the CTR (Click-Through-Rate). Merchandising extensions and apps makes the activity easier, productive and helps in conversion improvement.

What to look out from a merchandising solution provider?

Choosing the best merchandising solution for your eCommerce store is crucial since it directly influences your revenue numbers. We recommend you to consider the below points while selecting a merchandising solution

  • Features
  • Pricing
  • Integration/Onboarding support
  • Customer support

Comparison of various merchandising solution providers and their features*

Tagalys SearchSpring Nextopia Klevu Attraqt UNBXD
Monthly Pricing starts @ $199 (Magento) $499.951 $3951 $9981 ** **
Pricing based per 20K Listing page visitors ** ** Up to 600K API calls ** **
Conversion Optimised Sorting ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓  ✓  
Product Sequencing (Basic)  ✓ ✓ ** ** ** **
Product Sequencing (Advanced)  ✓^ ** ** ** ** **
Listing Page Generator  ✓ (Patent Pending) x x x x  x
Universal Boosting  ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓  ✓   ✓
Segmented Merchandising ✓^ **  **  **  **  **
Product Pinning (Hero Products) ✓ ✓ ✓   ✓ **   ✓
Product Pinning (Scheduling)  ✓ ✓ ✓ ** **  **
Personalized Store  ✓ x ** x **  x
Listing Pages Personalisation  x **   ✓ x  ✓   ✓
G2 Rating (out of 5.0) 4.8 4.8 4.2 4.0 4.0 4.0
1 Inclusive pricing along with other solutions ^Launching in 2020 

Tagalys

Tagalys is a predictive online merchandising engine that optimizes the store for the highest conversion. Tagalys also saves retailers over 60% of their time, giving them the opportunity to invest their time in other activities.

Rated 4.8/5.0 at G2, Tagalys provides value-based pricing to its customers. It is based on visitors & not hits. Also, Tagalys provides excellent service in terms of onboarding & customer support that has been rated almost 10/10 across all reviews. Value-based pricing, with excellent conversion, increases customer ROI.

So what are you waiting for? 

Schedule a demo and start your 28-day free trial today!

 

Other eCommerce solutions from Tagalys include ‘Site Search’ and ‘Product Recommendations’. The data-driven features have helped online retailers increase conversion, automate merchandising, increasing their productivity by over 60% and quashing human errors. 

Check out our G2 reviews to know why eCommerce retailers around the world love Tagalys

Sign up for a free 28-day trial of Tagalys and we take care of the rest! You can also schedule a demo here to know more about Tagalys.

*Comparison as on December 23, 2019  **Data publicly not available as on December 23, 2019
Posted in e-Commerce Product Listing pages
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Creating Product Listing Pages for Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores using smart category conditions

Posted on August 22, 2019 by

In brick and mortar stores, you can see products arranged in separate aisles in categories such as ‘Dresses’, ‘Tees on sale’, ‘New Arrivals’, ‘Under $50’, etc. This helps the visitors to quickly navigate to their desired aisles and start purchasing. Arranging the products in aisles also helps the retailers to manage and organize their inventory.

Similarly, in eCommerce stores, Product Listing Pages are nothing but the online aisles. They help visitors to discover and purchase products quickly based on their interests. Listing pages account for approximately 56% of product discovery within an online store. The remainder is shared by other channels namely Site Search and Product Recommendations. Considering this high potential of listing pages, It is essential for retailers to have unique and smart product listing pages.

Limitations in Magento and Shopify

In Magento creating pages like ‘New Arrivals’, ‘Sale’, or in the case of a Shopify store a minimum discount page requires a lot of human effort. The merchandising team has to spend hours of time to analyze the entire catalog and pick and position the products on each page. If the inventory size is large and if the retailer has too many product categories, the retailers are forced to spend more resources and time in creating & managing these pages. They should also keep track of the inventory and update these pages if new products are added in the future. When compared to Magento, it is easier to create listing pages in Shopify but both the platform offers very limitedly merchandising capabilities and control to the retailers.

Creating product listing pages using smart category conditions in Tagalys

(Smart conditions in Tagalys to create listing pages within a few clicks)

 

In Tagalys, pages like ‘Sale’ or ‘New Arrivals’ can be created and merchandised in less than a minute. For example, the Tagalys conditions such as ‘Discount Amount’, ‘Discount Percentage’, ‘Introduced At’, ‘Sale Price’ etc can be used and desired pages can be created within a few clicks.

 

(Creating a custom ‘Sale’ page in 30 seconds using Tagalys)

Similarly, pages can also be created from attributes inherited from the Magento catalog. 

Apart from eliminating the manual effort in creating and managing pages, Tagalys pages also increase the store conversion upwards of 35%. The products in all Tagalys powered pages are by default sorted by ‘Trending’ to optimize conversion. In simple words, the products are automatically sorted in an order that is more likely to sell. Also, the Tagalys powered pages are dynamic and hence are likely to rank higher in organic search results in web search engines, thereby reducing the customer acquisition cost. 

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 Product Listing pages
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Conversion Optimised Sorting for Magento and Shopify Product Listing Pages

Posted on August 2, 2019 by

The eCommerce industry is advancing rapidly and is turning out to be the next battlefield for conventional retailers. These days consumers are getting busy and they expect brands to be available online to make shopping convenient. Retailers have acknowledged this need and have started to make their presence online using eCommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, etc.,

As we all know, with the fast-growing online market, retailers are strongly competing against each other. The audience are common and each retailer wants to attract visitors to their online store & convert them. Having a diverse product catalog by itself is not going to help win customers unless you are able to effectively merchandise your online store. What consumers see online, influences what they buy. The lack of data-driven product sorting at these online stores is increasing the cost of customer acquisition, as more visitors leave the stores without buying.  Tagalys is one of the leading products in the market for predictive online merchandising, which helps retailers automatically detect products that are trending to increase CTR & conversion rate. 

Product Listing Pages in eCommerce stores

Product Listing Pages are the online aisles through which visitors discover and purchase a product. They are called category pages in Magento or Collections in Shopify. This channel accounts for approximately 56% of product discovery within an online store. The remainder is shared by other channels namely Site Search and Product Recommendations. Hence Category pages have a great potential in driving up the conversion of eCommerce stores. But over 80% of visitors will drop off after 3-page scrolls of any category page at an online store.

Challenges with Magento Category pages and Shopify Collections

Most retailers use simple sorting mechanisms like “Sort by date”, “Sort by Position”, “Sales” etc., which is less effective to grab the visitor’s attention. It is essential to entice visitor’s interest within the first three page scrolls to achieve conversion. In Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores, merchandising these category pages is a time consuming and laborious task. For stores with many products, it is humanly impossible to pick the best performing products or predict if a new product is likely to sell well in the future. Also, small-sized eCommerce retailers will find it difficult to use their productive resources to manually merchandise the pages. The inability to predict which products are most likely going to perform, based on past engagement data, impacts the conversion rate of the store.

How can data-driven Product Sorting make a difference in conversion?

Online visitors are always quick and they expect to view their desired products among the top results. Also, mobile visitors do not prefer to keep scrolling, due to lack of online real estate. The top 100 products displayed on any page influences the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and conversion rate. Hence dynamically displaying the products (old or new) that are more likely to sell has the maximum impact on conversion. 

Tagalys Product Sorting – Advantages and Applications

Products in Tagalys merchandised pages are by default sorted by the trending score. This is a dynamic score and is based on the overall performance of the product and its tags across the last 30 days. This conversion-optimized dynamic sore is called the ‘T-Score’ in Tagalys. In simple words, the products are automatically sorted in an order that is more likely to sell. As over 80% of visitors click on products on the first 3 pages, T-Score sorting increases the CTR of the page as trending products are displayed on the first page. This increase in CTR & reduction in page bounce rate improves the page ranking in web search engines.

(Conversion Optimised Dynamic Sorting in Tagalys)

Tagalys Performance in Magento eCommerce stores

Leading Magento retailers across all verticals on an average have recorded a conversion improvement of 25% upwards by using Tagalys. The Tagalys merchandised pages also attract more traffic to the store as they are dynamic in nature. 

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 Product Listing pages
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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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Personalization and its application in online shopping

Posted on June 24, 2019 by

People around us are diverse in their thoughts and interests. Everybody has a unique preference and this applies to online shoppers as well. Serving each person according to their preferences and interests is called personalization.

Personalization in eCommerce is the ability of the system to display unique products to each visitor based on their interest at the store. The system records the actions of each visitor and delivers tailor-made results to each visitor. Although Personalization is widely used in fashion retail, it also works well in other eCommerce verticals with large catalogs & purchases are made within a few visits. Personalization reduces time to discovery & improves visitor engagement.

The most popular personalization channels at an online store are across ‘Recommendations’, ‘Site Search’ and ‘My Store’.

1.Recommendations

These product recommendation carousels are 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.

(Single carousel recommendation widget that displays personalized results)

(Multiple carousel recommendation widgets that display personalized results)

2.Site Search

The conversion percentage of visitors who search is 2X greater than the visitors who browse through the store. Visitors on mobile, have a higher inclination to search, as it reduces the time to discover products. Hence personalizing the search results have provided great improvements in conversion rates for leading retailers.

 Search results personalized for visitor A                                               Search results personalized for visitor B

Tagalys personalizes the search results by collecting & analyzing click-stream data by visitor and sorts results by products of interest that are specific to visitors.

3.My Store

Almost every human that has shopped online, might have come across Amazon’s personal Store for its users.

(Amazon’s My Store)

‘My Store’ is an end to end completely personalized space that displays personalized product listing pages by the interest of the visitors. The products in ‘My Store’ are based on the visitor’s shopping interest. Online visitors who enter “My Store” convert at a 3X higher rate than Search. My store, eases the product discovery process, ensuring only products relevant to the visitor’s interest are visible.

‘My Store’ is also available to merchants using Shopify or Magento from Tagalys.

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

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Personalization e-Commerce Product Recommendations eCommerce Site Search
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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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Visual Merchandising for Site Search in Magento and Shopify e-Commerce stores

Posted on July 23, 2018 by

Why is visual merchandising for site search important? Site Search in your online store is the most important conversion funnel. Visitors with intent use the search funnel. A data-driven site search engine that predicts what products will sell is a minimum requirement to get the best conversion rate. This is what Tagalys Search was back in 2017 when we used data to predict the best products for any search query. Then why did we add a visual merchandising panel if the engine is supposed to optimize conversion?

Historical Data Limitations

All site search engines rely on data collected from the e-commerce store to make sense of it. Think of data as fuel to the engine. The main differences across various engines like Klevu, Nextopia, Sli and the others is the duration or the amount of fuel used. The limitations of search engines based on historical data are it does not tell you anything about this moment. They make predictions only based on past behavior.

Today matters because sometimes marketing campaigns are based on immediate trends and not something that happened 2 weeks back. For example and this happened at a fashion retailer we currently work with. A certain celebrity was found wearing a palazzo & top from this designer’s collection and it because of rage online. Almost everyone at the online store was trying to find that product as it was trending across Twitter, Instagram & Facebook. But none of these trends are passed to the online store programmatically. That SKU was not the first product visitors saw when they search for “Palazzo” or “tops”. This is when our customers & product team realized the shortfalls of only using historical data.

Visual Merchandising Options in Magento and Shopify

The limitations of historical data required Tagalys to provide the ability for retailers to control the products displayed for any search query. Visual Merchandising is a channel through which retailers can visually identify the products they want to promote instantly. Here is an example of the Visual Merchandising panel from TagalysVisual Merchandising panel

Merchandised search

Tagalys provides retailers with a visual panel to instantly choose products for a search query and ensure they positioned such that the visitors find them.

Product Insights

As soon as we launched the visual merchandising panel, retailers & their stylists started using it changing the sort order of products in multiple searches. The freedom to control products displayed empowered retailers to a point where sometimes it started to negatively impact the conversion rates. We realized that merchandisers started promoting products based on gut and not only data. The purpose of the panel was to promote products that matched external data trends that were not part of Tagalys, but it was being used differently. Hence we then added real-time product insights for every product. Retail teams could consider historical product performance before making a merchandising decision.

Product insights for merchandising

Conclusion

A merchandising panel for site search by itself is not going to boost conversion rates. We recommend our clients to only merchandise the searches that have external trends not part of the store. This should be less than 5% of the overall unique search queries. Hence the final impact on the conversion rate is less than 20%, depending on the total number of searches for the merchandised search terms.

For the client shared in the above example, the merchandised search itself generated over $77,000 in revenue as the external trend lasted over 4 days.

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 eCommerce Site Search
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