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The Definitive Guide to Intent-Led Commerce
Imagine if you knew your customers’ intent.
Instead of relying on constantly buying traffic, presenting endless product choices, and heavy discounting, imagine a world where you actually knew your customer’s intent. Where you could use this knowledge to deliver contextual site experiences so that they discover, find, and buy the products they want.
This is intent-led commerce. It is the world that FoundIt! is making real for its customers.
Intent-led commerce is all about improving the commercial performance of your website by shaping your site around how your customers want to shop, not how your catalogue is organised. It is centred on harnessing the power of customer intent signals and using these signals to shape each stage of your customer’s journey from discovery through to purchase, so that they achieve their mission.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through what intent-led commerce is, the benefits, its level of adoption, who owns it, and how to get started. This is your ‘cheat sheet’ to get the inside track on intent-led commerce, and to get ahead of your competition.
What Is Intent-Led Commerce?
Let’s get this clear from the get-go. Intent-led commerce is not a tactic that you deploy in SEO. Neither is it “links on a page”.
Intent-led commerce is a commercial, business-wide strategy which centres your organisation on understanding what your customer is trying to achieve – their ‘mission’ – and using this understanding to shape how your customers discover, find, and buy products on your site. It is the new way to play and win in today’s saturated eCommerce marketplace.
“It’s not just about the features themselves; it’s about the thought behind how they work.
Many eComms professionals treat their site functionalities as a checklist: Product recommendations? Check. Site search? Check. Hero links? Check. But they miss the big picture – the purpose driving those choices.
If similar products are the ‘what’ and a carousel on the product detail pages (PDPs) is the ‘how,’ then customer intent is the ‘why.’ Why those products? Why in that spot on the page?
It’s less about individual features and more about how they all come together to respond to the customers’ intent.”
Warren Cowan
CEO, Foundit
It is a commercial strategy with clear business benefits
Central to this definition is that it is a commercial strategy. Intent isn’t soft and fluffy. It’s a cold, hard way of operating which sets out that by understanding and catering for our customers’ intent, we will help more of them find the products that they want. This delivers an immediate lift in conversion and revenue per customer. Further, it builds stronger customer loyalty and lifetime value as customers get experiences that work for, rather than against them. And because we do a better job of surfacing the right products to our customers at the right stage of their journey we are less reliant on pushing offers, and discount far less.
“We added 7.8% to our revenue per visit in less than 12 weeks.”
Andrew Jayes
Digital Director, Fenwick
Every business function plays a part
Intent-led commerce unites the key eCommerce functions from Product, through Trading & Merchandising, to Marketing behind a common North Star that focuses the business on helping customers achieve their mission. Product teams create the contextual shopping journeys, merchandising surface the right products in the customers’ language, and marketing helps searching customers find these products.
Personalisation vs. Intent: What’s the Difference?
While personalisation and intent-led commerce may seem similar, they are not the same. Personalisation is a strategy that focuses on getting to know the customer. In contrast, intent-led commerce focuses on what the customer wants to achieve.
The difference is subtle yet powerful: personalisation asks, “Who is the customer?” while intent-led commerce asks, “What does the customer want to do?”. By prioritising intent, businesses can eliminate distractions and deliver experiences that help customers reach their goals faster.
The Five Pillars of Intent-Led Commerce
Building a successful intent-led commerce strategy requires five key components. They blend accessing and leveraging intent data, together with using this data to deliver contextual customer journeys to match how customers want to shop.
1. Intent-Led Product Enrichment
The foundation of every intent-led strategy is to ensure that every product in your range, across hundreds of thousands, or even millions of products, is enriched with accurate, intent-based data. Traditional product tagging relies on catalogue information and subjective inputs, leading to limited, inaccurate tagging.
Intent-based enrichment, on the other hand, uses natural language, search behaviour, and pattern recognition to create a rich intent picture for each product. Algorithms augment every product in the range with this information, and critically, automatically keep it up to date. So no matter how seasons, trends, search patterns or range changes, your products are always findable.
2. Curated Navigation
Instead of forcing customers to navigate your catalogue categories, an intent-led strategy organises products around how your customers want to shop. By using aggregated intent data, you can create filters and facets that simplify the shopping journey, helping your customers get to the right products with less effort and fewer clicks.
3. Site search that ‘listens and learns’
Intent-led site search doesn’t just match keywords; it understands the intent behind search terms. By bridging the gap between customer language and catalogue speak, this approach ensures that customers are presented with relevant results, reducing their frustration and site abandonment.
4. Product pages that lead discovery
More customers today use search engines like Google to find the products they want instead of browsing sites. So, the product pages must work much harder to engage customers. Intent-based product pages are therefore not only designed to show the right product in the language that the customer uses, but critically, to lead discovery into the related parts of your range rather than to the exit. The goal is to show just enough range to help customers select, but not so much that they get paralysed by endless choice.
5. Intent-Based Architecture
Instead of being reliant on paid acquisition, becoming intent-led allows you to automatically optimise every product for organic SEO. This enables you to build a sustainable, long-term acquisition strategy.
The Current State of Intent-Led Commerce
Intent-led commerce has long been a cornerstone strategy in B2B (business to business) markets, where understanding customer needs is critical to success. But it’s in its infancy in consumer retail. Most retailers today still rely on the tried and tested model of acquisition supremacy and providing ever-more product choice. But this strategy is failing. There are fewer customers with higher expectations, and we are facing competition from every direction for these customers. To hit trading forecasts, we have too often resorted to discounting.
Leading retailers like M&S have broken away from the old playbook. Instead, they are leveraging customer intent signals to create contextual customer journeys that help more of their customers discover, find, and buy the products they want. As a result, M&S now sells over 80% of its range at full price and has achieved four consecutive years of revenue growth and profitability.
Who’s responsible for intent-led commerce?
While intent-led commerce is a company-wide strategy, it needs a champion to drive its adoption. This person is likely to work in Product. They may already have a customer experience or personalisation mandate today and therefore more quickly grasp the opportunity that intent-led commerce offers. But they may work elsewhere. Those leading SEO in their organisation for example have long-understood the importance of customer language vs. catalogue speak to help customers better find the products they are looking for.
One day soon we’ll see a ‘head of customer intent’
As the market takes off and starts to gain wider acceptance, we will see new roles emerge – ‘head of customer intent’ or ‘head of intent-led commerce’. This role will report directly into the c-suite and have the mandate to deliver step change in the organisation centred on implementing an intent-led strategy. It will have matrixed responsibility across the organisation to gain buy-in and manage the change process.
Why Intent Matters for Multi-Category Retailers
Nowhere is intent more important than for large, multi-category retailers. Historically household brands like B&Q and M&S in the UK, and Neiman Marcus in the US, relied on their brand strength, customer relationships, and wide product range to attract customers. But today, brand is less important to shoppers, and the very breadth of their offerings can overwhelm potential customers, leading to decision paralysis, and damage relationships.
By leveraging intent data, these retailers can turn their size into an advantage. With unrivalled access to deep datasets, they can develop rich intent signals that can be translated into more relevant and engaging customer site experiences whilst still continuing to add product range.
Intent is an intelligence layer that compliments your tech stack
Implementing intent-led commerce might seem daunting, but there is no big IT implementation and it doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your current technology stack. This is not a replatforming exercise that takes years with questionable results. Instead, intent is inserted as an ‘intelligence layer’ in your current tech stack adding enriching information to what is already there. Navigation, search, and product pages are quickly updated using APIs and links, not through recreating pages and other assets.
Start Small
A great way to get started and test if intent works in your business – and to get wider buy-in and support – is to pick a category that is underperforming and use this as a proof of concept. Tests can be run in weeks and the results can be used to validate and inform a wider roll-out strategy.
Ready to Become Intent-Led?
If we’ve inspired you to start to think seriously about becoming intent-led in your business and about how you could shape your site around how your customers want to shop, not your catalogue, we’d love to talk.
Click below to get started on your journey to intent-led commerce.
