How Crobox tackles product data to transform the discovery experience

In retail, choices saturate the market. We’ve never had so many sports, home, and beauty brands as we do today. And as 2024 approaches, curation is emerging as online shopping’s biggest differentiator.

When you can guide customers through their shopping journey and link directly to their needs at the right place and time – you’ve got it waxed.?

To capitalize on this shift, my advice to retailers is this: set a compass toward personalized product discovery. Some popular examples could include things like size guides or chatbots. But, at Crobox, the product finder reigns supreme.

This guided selling tool helps narrow down choices for your customers and acts as a filter to match a customer with the perfect product for them. This works by:

• Listening to your customers’ wants and needs
• Selecting products that meet these
• Giving tailored recommendations
• Showing relevant information to increase shopper confidence?

Providing your shoppers with an accurate and efficient search experience enhances satisfaction, drives sales, and lays the groundwork for future growth.

Elevate your guided selling experience with high-quality data?

Our customers increasingly run into data issues that prevent effective product discovery. And the success of a product finder is directly tied to the quality of the product data that underlies it.?

Good product data has become the lifeblood of a modern guided selling experience. It's the difference that makes your catalog irresistible, helping customers easily find what they need. However, for your product finder to work best, the data can’t be messy, missing, or incomplete. It needs to be rich, detailed, and effectively organized.

Quality data and a well-structured product taxonomy are foundational elements for implementing a successful product finder on your website for several reasons:

• If data is incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent, the search function may return irrelevant or incomplete results.
• Good data helps shoppers find products based on their attributes, categories, and characteristics, making the browsing experience more intuitive.
• When users search for a specific product, a well-structured taxonomy can help your website suggest related or complementary products, increasing the chances of upselling or cross-selling.
• A well-structured product taxonomy and accurate data help index your products correctly and result in better rankings for your site.
• Product finders are also scalable in nature when new products are added to an assortment or when expanding into new categories.

Helping you discover your data goldmine

At Crobox, we transform subpar product data into a goldmine of enriched content. Our tech lays the foundation for crafting product discovery experiences that resonate. Here are some of the ways we do it:

We let you test data ideas in a live setting

Data is an essential resource for every organization today, and retailers are investing a lot to obtain new data, create new products based on it, and enhance it for improved product discoverability.

We simplify this by providing a dedicated space in our app where you can enrich your products with benefits and seamlessly connect it to your customers through a product finder experience. All of this happens in a secure space where you can delve into your data and build a compelling case for your business – all without disrupting the harmony of your central data system (or encroaching on your IT department’s valuable time).

By easily creating an upstream data feed, you generate a feedback loop into your data hub, making your new data available for a wider range of your business.

We convert product data into revenue-boosters

The key to success in this endeavor also lies in ensuring customers grasp tangible benefits and how it can enhance their lives. This is where humanized product data comes to life.

Picture being able to cross-sell and upsell products to the right audiences, thereby increasing Average Order Value (AOV). Since embracing our offering, Crobox customers have witnessed up to +52% Conversion Rate improvements and up to 16x ROI increases – all within a few weeks.

We fix your procedural shortcomings

Managing product data through spreadsheets can be a daunting task, resulting in lengthy delays in getting new SKUs to market. This inefficiency multiplies when dealing with a growing array of SKUs each year. However, with Crobox, the process becomes streamlined and efficient.?

Leveling up your eCommerce experience requires the integration of cutting-end, hands-off technology to automate, optimize, and scale the process to its fullest potential.?

Making the link between product data and product discovery

Establishing a good product taxonomy to support even greater product discovery is somewhat of a lengthy process. But making the link is an essential step towards success. Here’s an overview of how it will go:

1. Customer research: We start by delving into consumer preferences and compiling a list of preference properties – a crucial step towards tailoring product recommendations. This means we focus on shoppers’ specific likes or dislikes by studying analytics and doing some product feed analysis.
2. Product profile creation: At the same time – through product interviews and desk research – product profiles are created to categorize products based on their functional, physical, and commercial properties. This step enhances the accuracy of product recommendations.
3. Benefit identification: After this, the process shifts to outlining the distinct benefits of products, providing a customer-centric interpretation of product features aligned with specific shopper needs. This identification process involves product/industry consultation and technology benefits analysis, yielding a list of benefits per profile.
4. Attribute matching: Detailed features of products are then highlighted through feed import and scraping to get a comprehensive overview, resulting in better product matching. These attributes, ranging from highly relevant to less so, form the basis for deriving product benefits.
5. Content tailoring: The guided selling aspect follows, focusing on creating rich content experiences customized for specific finders. Through customer research, language analysis, and consulting brand voice documentation, the content is tailored based on customer profiles, improving satisfaction and decision-making.
6. Product recommendations: The final step in the process is personalized product recommendations, generated based on user input through the product finder experience itself. These recommendations, powered by enriched taxonomy and AI algorithms, complete the shopping experience, increasing conversion rates as they go.

Invest in an experience that sets you apart

In the upcoming year, it's all about channeling your energy into a focused strategy that goes deep rather than wide. Competition is getting tougher and shoppers are demanding more convenient digital shopping options. It’s best to iron out the kinks in your systems, solve any nagging issues, and invest in your customers' success. This will allow you to pour resources into sculpting a user experience that outshines the competition.?

To tackle this mounting complexity, it's high time to embrace good-quality data to give you a competitive edge. By offering our category knowledge and industry expertise, we get to provide you with a data governance framework and product finder experience that works.

If you’d like to see what we can do for you, leave a comment, send me a DM, or book a demo with us today!

This is the third entry in a series of posts on this topic. You can read the first one here and the second one here .