Commerce Experiences of Tomorrow: Kick-off the Shopping Holiday Season of 2022

Talking about the commercial holiday period of the year, what can we expect from brand manufacturers and retailers? And what can organisations do that are not exactly Alibaba or Amazon? It is all about experience.

With Singles Day kicking off the shopping holiday, the expectations are high. Will this year be?another record year of global revenue?or is this year different?

No doubt inflation, the possible recession and supply chain challenges are not going to do Singles Day any favors. Or will it be the commercial light moment of the year where people can focus on the positive and the possible?

Xiaofeng Wang, Principal Analyst at Forrester is seeing the long expected change following through this year, being:?From intense promotion to focusing on content.

Next to simplifying promotion to be a more straightforward offering in the range of ‘buy for x value, get y off’, it is all about the product, commerce and customer experience. This with the goal of increasing the customer loyalty and focusing less (but still a good amount) on one-off gross merchandise volume (GMV).

New-ish channels like livestream commerce is taking to new levels for many merchandisers, and influencer and virtual influencer marketing is trending up as well.

It is all About Product, Commerce and Customer Experience

Forrester said it best, that?great product experiences start with great product data. Product Information Management solutions like Akeneo, Dynamicweb and Inriver help marketing and product teams ingest, enrich and distribute product data. But it would be selling the possibility of a PIM system short.

With a PIM you can fuel great product experiences across owned, and rented channels like marketplaces. Being able to show rich and accurate product data across the multitude of channels gives consumers the chance to read and understand fully what the product is all about.

Maybe it needs to have the right size or dimensions, the material might need to be sourced locally or you want to see it in action through short videos. All possible by leveraging the Power of PIM.

Building the commerce engine on-top of rich product information of course feels like a great idea. But often you need to go further. Personalization in ecommerce has a direct result on conversion and bottom-line. Of course, the whole direction the internet is taking with GDPR & cookieless world isn’t making things easier.

And, as Gartner states, personalization can be complex and a tough cookie to crack. But Machine Learning and AI can play big roles in this for organisations that have the traffic. Solutions like Personify XP builds profiles and visitor segments automatically and can rearrange page sections on the fly ensuring individual build commerce experiences real-time.

Building on top of rich product data and customer profiles, there is still the element of offline promotion. In commerce, print is not dead. But it does need to keep up with modern times. Everyone is getting swamped online with ads and offers landing in inboxes every minute. How can you stand out from all that?

The answer is going offline!

Send personalized print to your customer base with offers that would, sometimes literally, fit them. Combine available product information, with online behavior segmentation, all going into your CRM or CDP of choice and then using a solution like priint to get it to paper.

Using this data to send personalized offerings through direct mail at scale. Not only will this increase the customer commerce experience, but the effect of such a campaign combined with a digital continued experience path will have a direct measurable impact.

By Eric Jan C. van Putten.