Online shopping is meant to be fun.
A world of possibility at your fingertips, available anytime, anywhere. Midnight purchases in pyjamas. Trainers showing up at your doorstep like little gifts arriving from future You. Retail therapy without even having to leave your house.
Except it isn’t really like that, is it? It’s actually not that fun at all.
It could be magical but instead it’s a maze of tabs, what feels like thousands of clicks and a hundred tabs – and yet you’re still often coming up empty-handed and blurry eyed from scrolling through endless product pages.
That dream – just a few clicks away. The reality? Online shopping has become an impersonal, overwhelming chore.
That’s not a radical opinion – it’s one held by the majority of shoppers today. Criteo’s recent survey of over 6,000 global consumers found that some pretty interesting stats:
- Over three-quarters (76%) of people believe online shopping lacks surprise or delight
- Almost a third (29%) would call online shopping a chore
- 8 in 10 (78%) say they find online shopping is overwhelming due to too many product choices
These stats are pretty dire. But they’re not surprising to those of us who lifted the curtain many moons ago.
We’ve been seeing for years the ways in which online shopping has become a thankless task: consumers doomed to listlessly scroll through product listings to try and get what they want. And, too often, failing. Retailers, frustrated by disappearing customers, respond by flooding their pages with yet more products in an effort to tempt buyers. But this just adds to the overwhelm and compounds the problem. It’s a vicious cycle.
This state of affairs is hurting brands, too, and in more ways than one. We’re approaching a point where product range alone no longer distinguishes retailers and what will matter isn’t extent but experience. It won’t matter if a business boasts the biggest selection of products. They’ll lose out to the rival that shapes their site around their customers.
The current system isn’t working – for either side. What’s needed is a completely new approach.
From tedious to inspirational
Instead of focusing on providing customers with a plethora of products – or relentlessly flinging money at ads – retailers need to start thinking about customer intent.
Intent-led Commerce puts the consumer’s shopping mission (what they’re trying to achieve) at the heart of customer strategy. It’s about understanding how customers discover, find and buy products on your site and the experience of their journey.
How can this bring the energy back to eCommerce?
Well, focusing on a customer’s discovery journey leads brands to fix the ways product exploration is boring buyers and putting them off.
This means taking underdeveloped product pages and ensuring they’re built up with detailed product information so customers don’t have to work for crucial facts. It means employing new, sophisticated tagging practices – using customer intent data and automatically updating algorithms – to help customers quickly find dream products, even as trends and seasons change. It means organising products around how consumers like to shop, rather than around your catalogue of products, and leading them down paths of discovery rather than the exit door.
AI is transformative here: machine learning and AI allow retailers to enrich and update product pages at scale with intent-based information based on customer search behaviour, natural language, pattern recognition and other details. What’s created are highly detailed, living, responsive product listings – a far cry from the bog-standard, outdated product pages that continually miss the mark.
The result of all these efforts? Always-findable products, an end to death-by-quantity and new opportunities for customer discovery and delight.
A bespoke buying journey
Customers are crying out for this kind of curated shopping experience. Criteo’s report found that 43% of shoppers actively want brands to use their data to create more relevant shopping experiences. But Intent-led Commerce goes beyond common personalisation tactics that ask “who is this customer?” and then try to serve buyers what they think they need. Instead, it asks “what does this customer want to do?” and truly gets to the heart of the problem. By going deeper, it takes customers on a journey they want to be on.
Online shopping was meant to make retail more efficient and exciting. It’s now gone the other way. Faced with a barrage of products and brands who’ve forgotten service in the pursuit of choice, customers are overwhelmed, frustrated and bored. These latest findings should be a wake-up call. They’re a challenge to retailers to rethink their online customer experience and create a journey that’s both satisfying and fun.
The gauntlet’s been thrown down. Who will pick it up?
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