The act of doing most of our shopping online is so far from being new, that it is actually hard to remember what it was like before online shopping became the norm. Do you remember going to travel agents’ shops to book flights and hotels, or not being able to buy a product because you didn’t have a branch of the shop that sold it near to you? Ever since the end of the 20th century, online shopping has given us the opportunity to buy whatever we want from whomever we want, and to scour the web for the best deals. It has changed retail immeasurably. However, what it has not done, is stood still.
The Move Toward Greater Personalisation
While it may feel in many ways that buying a product online today is exactly the same as it was doing it in 2001, improvements and changes to the online shopping experience have been made over time. The latest link in the evolutionary chain of ecommerce is the level of personalisation businesses can now give to individual consumers, and this is something that makes shopping online better for everyone. At the simplest level, they can make sure the site remembers what country and language you want to shop in, and does other convenient things like auto filling delivery addresses. At a more advanced technological level, companies who use consumer portals based like those from Weaveability.com, are able to offer personalisation to a degree that can actually make your individual shopping experience uniquely tailored to you.
Directing You to Relevant Content
One of the most significant ways online retailers can make your shopping experience more personal is by analysing data – both data you have provided and data that they hold on other searches and purchases – to make recommendations. They can analyse which of their current offers might interest you based on your previous interactions with their site, and make sure you know about them when you visit. They can compare your searches to those of other visitors and suggest other products you might be interested in. This enhances your experience because it focuses on relevance. Before this was possible, they would perhaps show you their most current popular offers, but these might be things you have no interest in – for instance offers on baby products when you don’t have a baby, or offers on women’s shoes when you are a man.
Customers Love Relevant Content
As customers, any space on a site that is talking about irrelevant things is wasted, which is annoying, and for businesses, there is no point at all promoting things to someone who has no reason to want them. Google focuses so much of its work on making the results you see when you search the most relevant to what you are looking for, and ecommerce businesses are following suit. With strong enough technology, they are able to give you a customer experience that matches your own buying history, preferences, and things that have been shown to compliment the things you are interested in in thousands of other customer interactions.
The more relevant any page of web content is the more we like it, and this is as true with ecommerce as with anything else.
The post TOP TIPS: WHY CUSTOMERS PREFER A MORE PERSONAL ONLINE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE appeared first on Ideal Magazine.