04 May 09 Sheep Theory: E-commerce Product Placement
Soy milk does not need to be refrigerated until opened, so it never used to sit in the supermarket fridge next to the regular milk. Not surprisingly, it didn’t sell very well. Milk that’s not in the fridge? That’s just too weird for most of us used to buying fresh milk. Soy milk eventually got repackaged and put on a shelf next to all the other milk and hey presto, it started selling. And now on to product placement in the virtual world:
How do you decide what people see on your homepage? You let your customers decide.
Majority rules in the world of e-commerce. If a lot of people are buying a particular product, then it’s very likely that others will also want that product on the basis of what is effectively a very powerful recommendation from their peers. Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve, while not created for this purpose, is still a clear illustration on how a little known product can be catapulted to stardom and it teaches a valuable lesson: Speak to a narrowly targeted audience of people who will want your product.
So, it makes sense to identify potential products that could fit the bill as early as possible and then give them some homepage real-estate. To do this, mine your data and display what other people are buying through visualizations of:
- Your daily / weekly sales stats. (Bestsellers)
- Things people desire (Wishlists)
- If Customer A buys product X, then display products Y and Z that Customer B,C,D bought who also bought Product X. (Keep up now
)
A note on product pages: The primary objective of the product page is to get the prospect to add the featured item to their shopping cart and then easily complete the order and pay you. However, the product page also offers ample opportunity to cross-promote and up-sell your prospect by enticing them with related products, thereby increasing your Average Sales Value. The classic example is Amazon’s Better Together feature which recommends the top 1 or 2 other titles that are commonly bought with the item in question and offers the entire bundle to you at a slightly discounted price. (A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.) This is made possible by analytics driven decision making.
16 Apr 09 Analytics Driven Decision Making
What do the numbers say? The beauty of e-commerce is that everything can be tracked and measured to your benefit.
- Track where the buyer came from, what they bought, at what time, on what day and in combination with which other products.
- Understand what page layout converts best by conducting A/B and multivariate tests.
- Use IP addresses to know what geographic location your traffic is coming from and customize what is shown on your landing page accordingly. More customization can be done for repeat visitors by using cookies. For example: Recommend new items based on their previous purchases.
With access to timely, accurate and actionable data, there is no reason to do things ‘on a hunch’
Read more:
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
Tags: analytics
