Product Experience: The Key to eCommerce Excellence

The proposed reasons for this online migration are myriad — some have cited convenience, while others have claimed price is the major motivating factor for the switch. But increasingly, it seems that consumers are making the move to eCommerce in search of better shopping experiences — 80 percent of consumers, in fact, said that the quality of a company’s customer experience make a major difference in whether they choose to shop with them.

In other words, when it comes to eCommerce, it’s all about the experience

But how can you be sure you’re providing the best customer experience possible to your eCommerce shoppers? The answer lies in your product experience.

Product experience is the backbone of any compelling customer experience — it optimizes product data, information, and assets, creating a single source of truth for all of your products, and ensuring that customers who come to your eCommerce site find exactly the experience they were expecting. And, with Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions, your team can harness the power of product experience and use it to create a compelling experience for all of your eCommerce customers.

You don’t have to take our word for it, though. Here are three ways PXM helps make sure your eCommerce experience exceeds expectations:

1. Eliminate errors and cease customer confusion

No matter what they’re buying or where they’re buying it form, consumers like to be informed about potential purchases. According to researchers, a whopping 85 percent of consumers visit eCommerce sites to research potential purchases and help them make a decision — even if they plan to eventually make a purchase in-store.

What does that mean for your eCommerce experience?

It means that if there’s any sure fire way to guarantee your customers have an enjoyable experience when shopping online, it’s providing them with accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling product information. But while that may sound simple enough, giving customers this information is often more challenging than it seems.

That’s especially true for department stores like Myer, which often must manage massive product catalogs, or fashion brands like Kurt Geiger, which need to keep up with changing seasonal trends and product assortments. What’s more, most retailers aren’t handling this data efficiently — many still use inefficient legacy solutions like Excel spreadsheets, which often lead to errors or inconsistency in product data.

PXM helps you eliminate these errors and accelerate time-to-market by creating a single source of truth for all product information. That way, your team can make sure online shoppers are able to find any information they’re looking for at the drop of a hat, simplifying and improving your customer experience while boosting sales conversion rates and reducing returns in the process.

2. Work faster, not harder

Tom Petty may have said it best — the waiting often really is the hardest part. These days, speed is of the essence, and if your team isn’t moving quickly enough, you’re likely to lose customers to a brand or retailer who is willing (and able) to meet their need for speed.

Managing product information is often a laborious, tedious, and time-consuming process, one that forces your team to use energy and resources on repetitive tasks, leaving them little time to perfect product experiences. PXM, however, can eliminate some of these issues, and help your team work more effectively, by removing many of these repetitive tasks from your employees’ to-do lists using automated business rules engines.

PXM also offers workflow, validation, and approval features. These tools are designed to help your team identify exactly what needs to be done to optimize product information and get new items online, what their role is in that process, and prioritize the various tasks that need to be completed.

By helping your team work more efficiently, PXM unlocks their true potential and allows them to focus on what really matters — creating that accurate, consistent, and compelling content that turns shoppers into buyers. Help your team improve your eCommerce customer experience by giving them the tools they need to perfect individual product experiences efficiently and effectively.

3. Go glocal

As more consumers continue to head online when it comes time to make a purchase, they’re also increasingly buying products from brands and retailers based outside of their own country. Research shows that cross-border commerce now brings in more than $200 billion a year, a figure that has been on the rise since 2013 and accounts for one-sixth of global trade revenues.

But while consumers are seemingly more willing than ever before to make cross-border transactions, they have some clear preferences when dealing with international brands and retailers. Most importantly, they demand to do business in their own language. Three-quarters of surveyed consumers told researchers that they prefer to do business in their own native tongue in one recent study.

But simply speaking the language often isn’t enough. Your eCommerce experience also needs to ensure that consumers can find measurements and other product data in units that are familiar to them. Marketing teams must also ensure that product images are relevant and appropriate for new markets and that measurements are expressed in a way that would make sense to a local. If these assets aren’t relevant to customers, they’ll likely move on to another merchant that’s willing to show them exactly how this product fits into their climate, region, and lifestyle.

PXM helps you effectively and efficiently localize your product information to offer the best cross-border eCommerce experience possible. It helps you translate information into new languages, and ensures all product information that needs to be adapted for your new locale gets a facelift, giving international customers a compelling and satisfying experience from anywhere in the world.

Perfect your product experience

Perfect your product experience! Discover how PXM can optimize your product information, and help your team create compelling customer experiences and excel in eCommerce by eliminating errors and inconsistencies in your product information, helping your team work together more effectively and efficiently, and easing the localization process.

Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Product Information Management 101 to learn more about how PIM can help your business, or check out our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands to find out how to make sure you stay on top of the competition.