For anyone involved in e-commerce, or any online startup for that matter, personalization is probably already a buzzword. It’s a term that every would-be online CEO is harping on in by-the-hour boardrooms, and for good reason. The reality is that e-commerce personalization has become a fundamental part of the online shopping experience, one that users expect to see. Not having at least basic personalization features in place can make an online shop feel dated, and the shopping experience tiresome and inefficient.
The problem is, shopping personalization is being turned into the spoiled child of the e-commerce optimization world by all the attention it’s been getting. Sure, it’s incredibly important in the modern online marketplace, but it shouldn’t be prioritized over more foundational concerns in the design process. These include UX/UI (User Experience/Interface), navigation and performance.
Let’s discuss some of the bases we need to have covered before we start thinking about personalization in e-commerce, and how to avoid becoming the proverbial sheep when implementing it in an online shopping environment.
The Grandmother-Smartphone Fallacy
So Gran’s knees aren’t what they used to be. When Idols comes on, it takes her so long to draw the curtains and make a cup of tea that she misses half the episode. This seriously undermines her ability to discuss how rude, but fetching, that Simon boy is with her book club friends.
As a loving grandchild who knows about “that computer stuff”, you immediately identify a 21st-century solution to the problem. You hook Gran up with the latest Android smartphone, linked to a home automation system that would make Bill Gates smile internally. You spend hours teaching her where to tap and make her a handy reference card with a picture of you on it. Gran is amped. Now she can draw the curtains, dim the lights and get her kettle boiling, with just a couple of touch-screen taps.
A week later, your phone rings. It’s Gran. Her PVR is playing The Expendables 3 in an endless loop, the cat may or may not have been trapped in the automatic curtains for a week, and people keep delivering pizzas to her house, despite her being completely certain that she never ordered them. You moonlight as Gran’s pro-bono IT support technician for two months, until one day you fabricate a story about home automation turning out to be a communist plot, and you help her remove every piece of technology from her home.
Focusing on personalization features for your site or app, before you genuinely understand the situation, needs and motivations of your users, is subscribing to the Grandmother-Smartphone Fallacy. Technology, on its own rarely solves problems. In fact, when not implemented from an informed position, technology often creates more problems than it solves. Without a deep understanding of how a given technology might help you to better solve the problems that your prospective customers have, any investment in that technology will prove wasteful. This overarching concept absolutely applies when it comes to e-commerce personalization.
The Foundations that E-commerce Personalization Should Be Built Upon
There are several fundamental design and architectural considerations that must be covered, before your e-commerce business can begin to take advantage of the power of personalization AI. Before you even think about how to implement e-commerce recommendations, or try to decide which product recommendation engine would work best for your store, these bases need to be covered. Here are just two of the most important examples:
Navigation and Presentation
This is no longer just about using intuitive copy on your buttons and making navigational menus easy-to-use. Now, we must ensure that the interface looks and works great on a huge variety of devices and platforms. Speed and ease of navigation shouldn’t be compromised, regardless of how a user chooses to access the store, and it is often necessary to create several UI versions to achieve this. It’s also critical to ensure that your store is navigable, even on slow connections.
The Funnel
The sales funnel is in no way a remnant of 90’s sales culture. On the contrary, considering and evaluating every point in an online store’s sales funnel can be the determining factor between success and failure. Consistency of message is essential; the customer experience should feel seamless from clicking on an ad, to checkout. Understanding where exactly in the funnel you are winning and losing customers is going to be one of the most important considerations when implementing personalization features in the future.
Mind on your Money, Money on Your Mind
It’s not uncommon for online startups to want to secure capital for personalization features as part of their establishment costs. After all, these things cost “Amazon money” right? Not true. With the rise of third-party machine learning solutions, it has become possible to implement scalable and customizable personalization solutions, without having to develop them from scratch, and absorbing the associated costs of doing so.
Don’t believe it? Speak to the people who are helping e-commerce businesses intelligently implement personalization solutions every day. Liftigniter.
