Oct 20, 2022
3 min to read
As the holiday season approaches, we mark the occasion with gatherings and feasts among family and friends. That means more shopping in stores, on our favorite eCommerce sites, and on marketplaces. How can you set yourself up for success this upcoming holiday season?
It’s the fall season, and everyone in the Northern Hemisphere are preparing for the winter. Animals are gathering food and storing it for later use, and people are essentially doing the same thing — as the holiday season approaches, we mark the occasion with gatherings and feasts among family and friends (this happens in the Southern Hemisphere too!). Certainly, after the past few years, we all hunger for the ability to gather together and celebrate the season.
Fall also heralds the start of holiday gift-giving. And that means shopping in stores, on our favorite eCommerce sites, and on marketplaces. Perhaps we even get gift inspirations from imagery and posts we see on social media.
Research we’ve conducted shows that the kind of product experience you deliver heavily impacts the customer journey and whether shoppers buy your product. And by product experience, we mean how shoppers and buyers interact with and understand the information you provide about your products in your sales channels. Is it accurate? Is it complete? Do the images match the description? Does the description match the product? Essentially everything about your product that’s available for a shopper to see defines their product experience.
The product experience also can directly affect your bottom line – if the product experience you offer isn’t compelling, shoppers will go elsewhere, and they might not come back. Our 2022 B2C Global Survey found that 2 out of 3 shoppers will abandon a purchase due to a bad product experience. These days, customers are inundated with choices and options from thousands of brands, so give them any excuse to go looking for someone else’s product and they’ll take it.
The good news is that not all hope is lost – your team just needs the right tools and systems in place to support a cohesive omnichannel strategy. For example, Akeneo customer City Furniture found that by adopting product experience management, they were not only more productive in creating a good product experience, they also managed to increase revenue.
Your customers truly are hungry for a good customer experience, and that starts with the product experience. And in a literal sense, no industry gets this more than the food industry. Technical data about food products is possibly the most important information that food manufacturers and sellers provide – because errors and omissions can literally affect consumers’ health, safety, and well-being. Disclosures about ingredients and allergens are mandated by law in most, if not all, countries. And in some countries like the UK, they have extended these legal requirements to include pre-packed food prepared and sold on premises which went into effect in late 2021.
Making it easier to manage data about allergens was one of the reasons that Turner Price initially adopted Akeneo PIM. As the pandemic dramatically affected their wholesale distribution business to restaurants and caterers, they shifted to a B2C model and checked to ensure their product experience for consumers made the grade, and so they would be in a better position to comply with the new UK regulations. We cover more about the requirements for accurate food product information in our food services whitepaper.
It’s time to get ready for those holiday customers who are hungry for good product experiences. It’s prime shopping season for food, gifts, and really all types of products. You’ll want to put forward the best possible customer experience you can, and that starts with your product information. Nailing the perfect recipe of the right people involved, the right processes in place, and the right dedicated tools can be tricky, however a user-friendly PIM tool, like Akeneo PIM, empowers your entire organization to activate your product story across every owned and unowned channel, setting your team up for success this upcoming holiday season.
Ready to revolutionize your product experience? Get started by requesting a demo of Akeneo today, and let us show you how to create truly omnichannel customer experiences.
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