As a business, you don’t want to just sell your customers the first product that comes along. With an e-commerce product wizard, you can offer the right product for their specific situation and needs. After all, you offer a wide range of variants and models, each with its own pros and cons depending on the situation. In this article, you’ll learn how to leverage your product knowledge and guide customers on your e-commerce site to the ideal item.
Not only will this prevent you from disappointing your customers, but it will also result in truly happy customers. These happy customers, in turn, will become brand ambassadors who spread the word about your brand! Customer satisfaction = customer loyalty.
So how do you create a personalized commerce experience like that?
There are plenty of ways to provide customers with personalized support on your online store to offer, some of which go a bit further than others. Our advice: start at the beginning—with clear categorization, filtering, and product information in your catalog and online product detail pages.
As consumers or professional buyers, we are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available products, making it difficult to see the forest for the trees. Relevant e-commerce categories and product filters are a useful first step to help you navigate the catalog smoothly and narrow down your search to a more limited set of products that meet your expectations.
To make this data readily available on an e-commerce platform, it must also be well-organized in the back-end systems (ERP, PIM, …) that feed the e-commerce platform. This is certainly no easy task, especially when there are tens of thousands of products or more to manage.
To be honest, however, effective categorization and filtering have become the bare minimum in 2022. The next step companies are now taking to better guide their customers through the purchasing process is guided navigation. This involves using a series of questions to help customers arrive at a product selection that meets their specific needs and preferences, which were identified during the guided navigation process.
The E-commerce Product Wizard is the digital equivalent of a sales associate in your physical store who recommends the right products based on a conversation. Especially for businesses that offer strong offline service, it’s essential to extend that same level of service online. Guided navigation is a huge asset in this regard if your e-commerce platform or e-business framework This supports it!
If it turns out that even the guided navigation process or the e-commerce product wizard isn’t quite enough to guide a customer through your range of complex products, a live chat can provide a solution. You can have this chat pop up at the right moment or when certain answer choices are selected.
Because of your e-commerce platform This takes some of the pressure off the sales and marketing teams and frees up time to, for example, staff this chat and advise customers on complex issues. The combination of offline and online channels is a powerful tool for providing your customers with the best possible service! Ultimately, this will result in happy customers, and as mentioned earlier: A happy customer = a loyal customer.
Real-world example of an e-commerce product wizard: Beka
The Challenge
As a consumer, you’re bombarded with a huge selection of pots and pans in a wide range of price categories, materials, sizes, and shapes. The average consumer isn’t a Michelin-starred chef and doesn’t always have the knowledge to choose the right cookware for their needs. You can probably tell the difference between a grill pan and a pancake pan, but did you know there are actually many more different types out there?
Beka wants to change this by sharing its expertise in cookware with consumers. To do so, they developed a product wizard that guides online shoppers through the purchasing process. By asking a few targeted questions about the type of cook the consumer is, their cooking style, and so on, the product wizard can offer a curated selection of products that match the consumer’s preferences.
For consumers, this is a very simple and enjoyable way to narrow down their product selection. However, there is a great deal of complexity behind this visually appealing interface. Setting up such a robust product wizard requires a significant amount of high-quality data, which is retrieved through a logical flow. To achieve this, they integrated the information from their PIM (product information management system) with the Natch E-commerce software.
Thanks to the product wizard, Beka ensures it retains happy customers by simplifying the purchasing process. But that’s not all. By adding a humorous twist to the wizard, they also succeed in engaging consumers on an emotional level. This makes shopping at Beka not only practical, but also fun and memorable! What are you waiting for? Go ahead and e-business give it a boost?
