Retailers have been designing stores for many years; they have a deeply evolved understanding of how potential customers shop and why they buy.
An in-store shopping experience can be both rich and seductive. Carefully merchandised products set in an environment designed to aid and augment the shopper’s visit create a journey that showcases complimentary and hard-to-resist products.
But compare this to the usual online experience: products listed in long, flat lists and organised by generic category.
This can better be described as ‘finding’ rather than ‘shopping’: customers move from list to list until they find something they might be interested in.
While the customer browses there is little inspiration beyond the enthusiasm they bring to the experience themselves.
Shoppers can be broadly split into two categories: those that are confident and those that are reluctant.
The former need inspiration and the opportunity to express themselves. They find this in abundance in-store, but like the convenience of shopping online.
They will often use the website to research and shortlist before shopping. When they cannot find what they are looking for online, many decide not to visit your store.
The more reluctant shoppers out there need advice and reassurance. They often use a website because they are less enthusiastic about shopping and prefer doing it from the comfort of their own homes.
Both groups present challenges and opportunities, but what is clear is that the typical online retail experience is currently neither compelling nor engaging for either group.
Curation is vitally important. The advice that reluctant shoppers crave and the inspiration that confident shoppers seek already exist in the work that buyers and merchandisers undertake for each store.
For any retailer, the buying and merchandising teams operate in a similar way to magazine editors: recognising, surfacing and creating styles.
The range is one of the most tangible aspects of a retailer’s brand. They use the best products to define the season's key trends and express the retailer’s identity.
They select and arrange them to reveal complimentary products and allow the customer to navigate the range in-store.
Using these techniques and the information about shopping habits that already exist is the first step towards creating a personal, relevant and indispensible online shopping experience.
Some retailers, such as H&M, are already doing this well. and product pages all offer the customer complimentary items and looks.
Both and have developed a 'complete the look' feature, which showcases complimentary items and will both help the customer and promote additional sales.
This is exactly the kind of functionality that retailers need to pioneer to improve the online experience.
Once the techniques used to create a compelling in-store experience are transposed online, personalisation technology offers the opportunity to exploit what you can't do in a store: create a unique experience for each and every visitor.
Retailers have an abundance of information about customers’ online shopping habits, such as the trends they have liked in the past, the items they have bought and those they have viewed but not purchased.
This can easily be used to make relevant recommendations, not just for groups of shoppers with similar profiles, but for each individual.
Ocado is a good example of this. while using personalised recommendations to build a tailored shopping list for you.
Everything is geared towards convenience and making it easier for the customer to shop and find what they need.
As a website builds up a more detailed profile of each customer, it quickly develops into their destination of choice, constructing a relationship with the shopper and becoming the online equivalent of their best friend or personal stylist.
This last point is key. For many people, shopping is a social experience, one they share with their closest friends.
While it may not be possible to recreate many of the emotional aspects of the social shopping experience online, there are opportunities to involve friends or families that are currently not fully utilised.
For example, everyone has a friend or two that they turn to for fashion advice. While customers are shortlisting items online they may want to share the list (rather than individual items) with their friends, either individually or through a social network.
Retailers should seek to facilitate this interaction and provide additional functionality for services like Facebook, Twitter and email that people already use every day to communicate and share things.
Online retail experiences must and will become more relevant to each individual shopper.
The technology already exists to facilitate the shift from the current focus on finding and searching to intelligent and personal merchandising.
Retailers already know how to merchandise successfully, and most already have the elements they need to create a more satisfactory online customer experience.
The most successful retailers will be those that realise the opportunities that exist by making better use of the resources, skills and people that they already have at their disposal, and use them to create an online shopping experience that inspires and persuades customers to return time and time again.