Having more products to sell is not enough to make big sales revenue. If your product doesn't hold much visibility in the eyes of customers, then you’re unlikely to make the intended sales and generate your expected revenue. What is contradictory is that while having more products increases the chances of generating more sales, it brings the challenges of making each product visible and discoverable enough to reach the consideration of your store visitors. In the world of shopping, many ways aim to provide convenience to customers in finding the desirable product as they navigate through the pool of items; in physical stores, for example, it’s departments each stocking items belonging to specific categories which are then subdivided into sections and aisles.
However, the world has advanced beyond traditional shopping with the advent of internet technology and eCommerce stores calling us to understand them in more detail. Like in many aspects, the eCommerce domain has pros and cons over traditional shopping. Today we’ll see in what ways it can help us make our products more visible to customers.
Why product visibility is important?
Our world is growing more complex with time. In look to outweigh the competition and meet the growing demand of our modern life, companies are introducing new products and their variants in large numbers. While from one perspective having many options is desirable, it has left many confounded with their choices and search for the right product that matches their requirements. When a customer visits a store they mostly either have a specific product in mind or some criteria of what they require, if, however, they can’t locate and navigate efficiently through these products to what they want they can enter into a state of confusion and leave. Thus the importance of product discoverability and visibility hold great importance in ensuring a great customer experience – since a good customer journey must begin with finding a product easily. The value of product visibility is even more important in eCommerce settings where your customers don’t have any direct interaction with you directly affecting your webstore bouncing rate – a measure that is highly important to eCommerce site owners.
Realizing the importance of this many eCommerce platforms offer great features and capabilities to enhance the product discoverability and visibility that not only improve the customer experience but also improve your sales by bringing the right product in front of the right audience. Let’s see some of these in more detail.
Easy product visibility & discoverability on webstores
What makes eCommerce sites an amazing platform for buying is that the products one is looking for can be discovered easily thanks to the various tools and methods employed. For example, the search bar, easily found on most of the sites, can be utilized to type in your search query and the site’s search engine would look for matching products for you. This makes the search process much smoother and faster for the customer. And if a customer is uncertain about what specifically they want to buy then the site’s product navigation panels features a hierarchy of the whole product catalog with proper category and sub-categories to intuitively guide user through the products preventing them from losing their track and getting lost.
Another great feature that is inherent to most of the eCommerce stores is the filtering option that allows the customers to narrow down their search to align with certain criteria. Filtering works efficiently by making all the irrelevant products invisible to customers and giving them a greater sense of control over their product browsing.
Product suggestion & recommendation
Ecommerce enhances the sales process from the perspective of both the customer and business by bringing the right products to the right audience. When browsing through different products ecommerce websites present customers with product recommendations based on the product, they’re interested in. For example, if a customer is looking at a mobile phone, then the webstore might feature cellphone covers and cases the customers might be interested in. Furthermore, the product pages allow the business to display the same type of product from different vendors and companies which allows the customer to discover different options and make a better decision based on their requirement and budget. Product suggestions and recommendation, therefore, allows the customer to easily discover the right product to their requirement by linking and bringing similar products together and allowing the customer to evaluate them while making a purchase decision increasing both the likelihood of them buying it and improving their customer experience by presenting them with multiple options.
Other ways
While the above-mentioned features are among the most distinguishing things that make the journey of discovering products and making them more visible to customers easier, there are other ways eCommerce can help you feature more products to customers. Some of them include:
Home page: The home page being the first page of the webstore often gets most of the attention that makes it a great spot for featuring your great products. You can utilize them to feature your most trending products, and sales campaign and draw attention to any product you feel holds the potential.
Easy variants visibility: The eCommerce makes it easier to display all the variant options of a main product in a single space easily making it convenient and seamless for the customer to see if the option they’re looking for is offered and available or not.
Sorting options: Similar to filtering functionality the sorting option allows the customer to sort the products they’re viewing in a specific order according to criteria of their importance which makes the product searching process easier and more aligned with their requirements.
Conclusion
Ecommerce has presented us with great tools to enhance the selling and buying experience for both businesses and customers, respectively. The role that digitalization has played in bringing order to the information, its discoverability and reach is apparent for shopping in eCommerce; products are not only easier to find but also easier to evaluate by comparing them against similar products and criteria. Considering this and the complexity imbued by the presence of a multitude of products today, business owners need to realize the importance of owning an eCommerce store.
If you own an eCommerce store or looking to start one, then x2xecommerce can help you set up an ecommerce store and integrate it with your existing business solution. An example of a ,solution by x2xecommerce includes the x2xecommerce RMH-Shopify solution. Reach out to the x2x team for any query or a free demo.