Commerce of the future

Category: E-commerce

  • My multi channel commerce site is now live

    pålyset frontpage

    After months of work, my own multi channel store is now live on the best pieces of software available for running an e-commerce store. If you have ever been involved in upgrading an existing e-commerce solution from one software into another then you know that once the new site is launched, then this is actually the starting point for the real work to benefit from the new software. 

    First of all, a brief presentation of the software components used in running my e-commerce store. The software components are selected for growth and for how to be able to make the most of the store based on some of the basic requirements:

    • SEO is and will be the cheapest possible traffic. The platform must fully support us to be really good at doing SEO.
    • Content has been and will be one of the things that will attract the most visitors. We have not been able to convert those before, and by using a CXM as a front end, we will be able to do a lot in this area.
    • Additional sales channels have been successful where our products are sold on marketplaces or affiliate sites. The solution must fully support the segmentation of feeds for the different additional sales channels and optimize the feeds per sales channel.
    • Product Information Managment is the way to work with product information in a multi channel business. This business has an e-commerce store, physical store and B2B customers with a logistics organization to deliver products to local customers.
    • The solution must support both the responsible approach for mobile devices as well as the adaptive way to make parts of the pages specific for the smaller devices.

    The ERP system

    We selected a totally web based ERP-system with an integrated POS-system. This system is also integrated with the PSPs and the logistics systems for TA so that all order management of what has been sold can be managed in one system. This system is also responsible for the process of what to purchase from the suppliers with a partially automated solution with a combination of local stock and suppliers stock.

    The E-commerce engine and PIM system

    Product Information Management is something that I’ve been working with for more than 15 years now and I know how important it is to have great support for how to take the product information to the next level. Having a multi channel business, the PIM system is the information hub for product information and the products sold are created in the PIM before the ERP system. Working with updating products in bulk and enriching from external content providers has been a very important requirement.

    We were very happy to find out that there was one system that was both a really good e-commerce engine with a built in PIM system, the STORM solution used by some of the most successful e-commerce companies in Sweden.

    It provides us with a flexible e-commerce backend solution as a true SAAS solution with integrated CDN for assets and a high performance API for customer specific prices, stock status etc. The solution has been proven to be really compatible with the Sitecore Commerce Connect API, which is what I’ve been implementing on top of the STORM e-commerce engine.

    The Customer Experience platform Sitecore

    Since I first discovered Sitecore for more than 10 years ago, I have always found it to be a great dynamic platform with unique features for how to bring any data model to the web. Since the release of the Commerce Connect API, it has been my preferred solution for building e-commerce solutions. Sitecore comes with an e-commerce engine of it’s own, the Sitecore Commerce Server, but for my case, I was more interested in seeing how a totally different e-commerce engine that is already integrated to the ERP-system could be used in my case, so I selected to go for the generic API instead.

    Sitecore brings a lot to the e-commerce stores of the future. SEO will be even more important, and regardless of any personalization support, you still need to have lots and lots of great landing pages that converts the visitors into customers.

    What we get with Sitecore is the unique platform to integrate the e-commerce solution of our choice in a standardized way where we can re-use a lot of our front end logic in other future projects even if that customer wish to have another e-commerce solution.

    Product recommendations

    We have selected Nosto as our partner for providing product recommendations. We have selected to go only for Nosto on the product level, based on the way that our category structure works, and I will dive more into the details of this solution in future posts.

    What we did here was to create a module on top of the Commerce Connect API to allow Nosto to provide us with product recommendations to extend the personalization features of Sitecore and the logic in STORM.

    Customer support and chat

    We have already been using Zendesk for our customer support since the previous e-commerce solution. We created an integration to Zendesk API from Sitecore.

    Additional Sales Channels

    The additional sales channels consume product information through feeds provided by our implementation on top of Sitecore Commerce Connect with a set of different technical solutions for feeds including CSV, JSON and XML.

  • Recommendations for related products may be misleading

    Recommendations two ways

    Did you ever think about that when you visit a product in a store, that product may very well be related to other articles in the store. It is often the case that one product may be also be related to others depending on the context where it is used. If you provide the wrong recommendations, you may risk loosing a visitor instead of gaining a customer.

    In my store, we sell LED-lighting products and often have products that are both applicable for kitchen and bathroom. This means that for those of our visitors that come visit us when browsing for LED-lighting for a bathroom are highly interested in getting primarily bathroom related recommendations on what is similar to what they are looking for.

    Many solutions today, including the one we are currently using with recommendations won’t be able to tell the difference and will proudly present relations to the visitor based on the products that they visit and whenever they take a step into a product page that relates both to kitchen and bathrooms, we may lead the visitor on the wrong track.

    This is not just something that happens in theory, we can see that from our customer service tickets, that it’s common to have questions based on the automatic recommendations where there a mix of products between several areas that they would like to use in their future redecoration project.

    So there is still facetted navigation when the customer can set a filter on what to look for. This filter often applies for what is ON the product and not what is RELATED to the product. This means that the recommendations will become even more misleading.

    The solution we are looking into is personalization and how to start using also this information that we know about the customer to make sure that the information that we present to them are more relevant based on the navigation history. We need to hit the spot right away, since we don’t have that many clicks to figure out what kind of person they are. In order to do this, we are in the middle of tagging our products in the backend PIM system for a set of areas of interest and connecting the same tags to the information pages so that we will get a quicker way of figuring out what our visitor is looking for. It must also be possible to re-evaluate the visitor really quickly if we are on the wrong track.

     

  • Today’s online stores are like runestones

    Is your store static

    E-commerce stores often tend to be static. They tend to present exactly the same content to every visitor each visit. This is done day after day, week after week. Sometimes we change the store for newly arrived products and season changes, but this it not enough.

    Today we are able to know a lot about our visitors. The links they click, the way they enter the e-commerce site, which type of content that triggers them to add an item to cart, what kind of call to action buttons that works for each visitor and much more. Even with the signals there, we don’t use it, sometimes not even for analysis. This has to change.

    E-commerce still has a focus on technology to present products and how to make a fancy design. Most designs are functional and you will be able to make a purchase in a smooth way with several payment methods and shipping methods.

    What I expect to see in the future

    My version of the store

    The store will adjust it’s offerings to be suitable for me. By knowing what I’m interested in, the store will provide me with suggestions of things that I might be interested in. There are several solutions for this out there already and I’m currently using Nosto for recommendations based on what products and categories that I visit and what I place in my cart. However, we could do much better here.

    A store that addresses me

    The store will know which type of person I am and wether I’m interested in finding the perfect bargin based on price, to buy based on knowledge and the recommendations of the store or perhaps if I’m afraid to miss an opportunity based on that there are only two items left in stock of something that I really think that I need. This will be of help of showing me relevant related offerings such as:

    • Other products on sale similar to the one I’m looking at right now.
    • Other “Best in Test” products in other categories
    • Last chance to purchase other products just like this one.

    If the wrong kind of list is presented to an audience, the conversion rate may actually risk on getting lower than better since we are not addressing them and instead someone else that they can’t identify themselves with.

    The helping store

    When I visit a physical store, I almost always have the chance of getting some help in selecting the right products for me based on what needs that I have or what problems that I need to solve. Every physical store that deals with customers has a lot of knowledge in this area on what purposes that each and every product can be used and what kind of product combinations that are suitable together for a customer. This experience from the physical store or the customer service/sales department of an online store need to be captured and used for helping customers out in the online store as well.

    I have a couple of ideas for how to get this right, and if you follow my blog you will see how to get this knowledge from the physical store to the online store.