Product Discovery – The Foundation To Ecommerce Success

In this ever-evolving eCommerce landscape, where millions of sellers vie for customer attention, offering an effective product discovery experience has become both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses. Understanding the significance of product discovery is paramount to thriving in this competitive landscape. In this blog, we’ll discover how to enhance the shopping experience for your customers through an effective product discovery strategy and maximize your business’s outcomes.

What you never knew about Ecommerce Product Discovery

While we have extensive research and discussions on Conversion Rate Optimization, ‘product discovery,’ an integral aspect of the eCommerce customer journey, doesn’t garner the true attention it deserves. Here are some of the less-discussed, must-know aspects of eCommerce product discovery:

1.Being the first and foremost touchpoint in the eCommerce customer journey, product discovery can make or break the entire shopping experience.

2. Facilitating speedy and easy product discovery gives an instant positive reputation to your brand and motivates shoppers to proceed further with confidence.

3. When utilized effectively, product discovery can increase average order value and boost up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

4. Implementing advanced personalization technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence into product discovery can give you a great competitive edge.

5. Nuanced techniques like including filter attributes to search results can boost conversions instantly. For example, if a shopper types ‘red umbrella’ on the search bar, the engine should auto-apply the ‘red’ attribute in the ‘color’ filter while displaying the search results.

4 Aspects of A Positive Product Discovery Experience:

Listed below are four foundational elements that make eCommerce product discovery a game-changing experience.

1. Speedy product discovery

In today’s fast-paced world, shoppers expect lightning-fast results. The way Google displays search results within microseconds has set the standards high, and buyers expect similar speed on eCommerce websites too. Apart from optimizing the speed of the in-built search bar, you can also implement real-time suggestions as users start to type their search queries. This speeds up their typing, saves time, and makes product discovery a convenient experience.

2. Accurate product discovery

Ensure that your search results align perfectly with user queries. Increase the precision of your product listings with the help of advanced search algorithms. The search system should consider factors like relevance, user preferences, and popularity to present the most fitting results first.

In order to finetune the accuracy of your search results, incorporate natural language queries, contextual keywords, and synonymous alternatives along with verbatim search queries. By including these elements, the search system gets a more comprehensive understanding of user intent and better interprets customer preferences. This makes the search algorithm context-aware and leads to more accurate and relevant product matches and a super-personalized discovery experience.

3. Engaging product discovery

The following ways help to make product discovery as engaging as possible.

a. As the user starts typing the product names, the search bar should list product suggestions with high-quality images.

b. Enrich your mega menus and transform them into interactive and expansive product catalogs by incorporating high-quality images and visual representations of your products.

c. Implement personalized product recommendations based on user interest and previous purchase history. Personalized recommendations make customers feel valued and included by fostering a sense of connection.

4. Easy product discovery

Making your product discovery engaging and interactive shouldn’t make it a complex process. Ease of use is the core of any digital experience, and product discovery needs to be as simple and easy as possible. Here’s more on how to achieve easy product discovery:

a. Place your search bar in a prominent and easy-to-access way. The search bar should also be easy to type, and the search results need to be easy to click on.

b. Don’t reinvent the wheel. In the name of innovation, many brands deviate from familiar practices and make the shoppers feel alienated. Sticking to already familiar experiences and fundamentals will give ease. For instance, Google’s search bar doesn’t have a separate clickable button and uses the ‘Enter Key’ as the submit command. If you deviate from this universally familiar practice and add a ‘submit’ button, that’s not going to help.

c. The entire layout should be clean and clutter-free and guide the users effortlessly throughout the process.

d. A self-explanatory, no-nonsense, and logical product category structure will help buyers browse your website effortlessly and intuitively. Such intuitive navigation reduces frustration and encourages them to stay on the website longer and explore more options.

e. Providing a seamless experience across all devices will make a huge difference. Ecommerce traffic from mobile devices is increasing dramatically, and boosting mobile responsiveness will largely contribute to ease of use. Search bars, mega menus, navigation structures, and filters—all these need to be thoroughly optimized for mobile devices to make it convenient for users to explore products on their smartphones and tablets.

In conclusion, by focusing on speed, accuracy, engagement, and ease of use, you can deliver a winning shopping experience that keeps buyers coming back to you. Offering customers what they want is the key to a positive experience. That’s exactly what product discovery is all about. Implementing advanced personalization techniques will help make the product discovery process seamless and action-oriented. You need to customize your product discovery experience based on your industry, customer expectations, and competitor websites. Need a helping hand to get started? Our CRO specialists are here to help. Get in touch with us for a free website audit.