Online shopping is quickly evolving as more compelling Internet tools enhance online purchasing sites. The convergence of maturing Internet technologies in the ecommerce space will lead to a more integrated, intuitive, empowering shopping experience across many mainstream shopping destinations.
Traditionally, online shopping has been a simple mix of search and product filtering, ie browse. Shoppers are used to navigating thousands of SKUs as they look for a good match or a great deal. Amazon and eBay welcome visitors to their homepage with search and / or category browsing. These ecommerce leaders have built their empires by focusing on search, performance, product visualization, and streamlining the check-out process.
The most recent wave of ecommerce optimization has been to integrate recommendation engines, ratings, and the Facebook like button at the product level. Shopping has become more social as shoppers easily access opinions from other influencers.
The next frontier in ecommerce innovation will be empowering customers to have more control of the product itself. Shoppers expect to be able to not only find and select a product, but to able to fine-tune it to their liking. At a basic level this means selecting sizes and colors, but it can also mean designing and styling. Many merchandising leaders like Nike, Apple, and Dell.com lead the way with “build your own” features that allow for a full customization experience on their websites.
To date, customization, ie co-creation, has been mostly an experiment that large companies like Nike, LL Bean, and Trek Bikes have been testing alongside their vast online catalog of standard products. Many customization initiatives have been more successful as promotional tools than as sales tools.
Beyond experimentation from large companies and design-your-own specialty sites that target niche markets, we will see more mass customization and personalization integration into mainstream, high volume shopping sites. Industry leaders will drive strategic initiatives to enhance the overall shopping experience, and some levels of product configuration and personalization will be natural extensions to a standard browse experience.
The “killer app” in online shopping is the graceful combination of shopping paradigms like search, browse, filter, select, review recommendations, customize, personalize and share. The real potential of the expanding co-creation market is the opportunity for ecommerce companies to appropriately mix shopping tools that allow search, select, configure, and socialize.
Ecommerce shops will aspire to refresh and enhance their online shopping experience because shoppers have a decreasing tolerance for awkward and slow websites. Users will expect to land on a product page, quickly filter down to items that interest them, easily make selections, customize options, personalize (if applicable), and socially share their creations all in one simple flow. The flow ends with a purchase from a customer who has been guided through an empowering, self-educational process that is highly visual and intuitive (and fun!).
This vision of the future of shopping is not that far off. The key to success in ecommerce innovation is a thoughtful user experience design that lets the shopper quickly and elegantly navigate through a fluid but guided shopping experience so they can feel comfortable finding and tweaking their selection before deciding it is exactly what they have been looking for.
Filed under: Market Trends Tagged: | build-your-own, co-creation, configurator, customizer, ecommerce, mass customization, product configurator, product finder, visualization
Many customization initiatives have been more successful as promotional tools than as sales tools
The most recent wave of ecommerce optimization has been to integrate recommendation engines, ratings, and the Facebook like button at the product level.