Shopify product pages and shopping experience personalization is what customers are looking for in the e-commerce business nowadays.
With the spread of the dangerous pandemic Covid-19, E-commerce has further strengthened its position as the way of the future.
Online shopping has been expanding so quickly that the global online shopping market reached 4 trillion in 2020. The US, one of the countries with the leading average eCommerce revenue per shopper, is expected to have 300 million online shoppers in 2023, that’s almost 90% of the country’s population!
Many businesses saw this as an opportunity so they started building their own e-commerce stores. In order to be successful in this business, it takes more than just quality products or competitive pricing because there are tons of rivals out there and the pricing has now become more and more transparent.
“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost.”
Table of Contents
Statistic showing the importance of having a unique Shopify product pages and shopping experience
Recent research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) proposes that greater personalization boosts customers’ spending therefore retailers are trying to identify new approaches to engage their customers with in-store experiences. According to BCG, “when the shopping experience was highly personalized, customers indicated that they were 110% more likely to add extra products to their cart and 40% more likely to spend more than they had planned.”
What is a customer shopping experience and how can I personalize it?
Defining customer shopping experience
The term customer shopping experience refers to the sum of every touchpoint, engagement, thought or feeling that occurs or is exchanged between the customer and your brand — as experienced from the customer’s perspective.
It may sound too theoretical, but to make it easy for you to understand, the shopping experience is when an ad from a store pop-up on your Facebook page, the landing page that appears when you find the ads intriguing and click it, when you browse the Shopify product pages to find the things you need,… The sum of all of these little engaging activities between you and the business is what makes an overall shopping experience.
Definition of touchpoints in online shopping experience
Defined as the various interactions that people may have with your brand – occur before, during, and after a visitor becomes a customer.
These little engaging activities as stated above, we call them “touchpoints”. Easy to understand, right?
Example of an overall online shopping experience
Jason is interested in basketball but he’s a beginner. To start playing basketball he first needs to buy a basketball itself. He types in the google search tool “sports store near me” and ItalySport appears on the first page. He decided to click on the page because the address is near his house. This is Jason’s first “touchpoint” with the store and is also considered a pre-purchase touchpoint.
He decided to click on the page. After that, Jason types in the search query of the store “basketball” and they recommend lots of products related to basketball in the Shopify product pages. Jason also finds out that he also needs to have basketball shoes. Consequently, he decides to buy both. Jason adds a basketball and a pair of shoes to the cart page then he chooses a credit card as the payment method. He received the products after 1 day through shipping. This is a during-purchase touchpoint.
Afterwards, he received an email from the store to leave any feedback and also another email to give Jason a voucher. This is an after-purchase touchpoint.
Hope these basic examples help you understand an overall online shopping experience.
Definition of the act of personalizing shopping experience
Personalizing the shopping experience including customizing these little touchpoints to suit the needs of each customer segment.
Too theoretical? Let’s look at 2 examples below.
Examples of customizing touchpoints starting with Shopify product pages
One of the most basic parts in customizing a touchpoint is to add customized features on the Shopify product pages. Remember the time when you bought a product online and had to call the store owner to inform them about the size, the colour,… Now you actually can choose all of these features online through the Shopify product pages from size, colour, customized features, designs,…
You can also add relevant product recommendations based on customer behaviour. Remember Jason from the previous example? Obviously, Jason is interested in buying products related to basketball so the next time Jason visits the store, the store will recommend products related to basketball.
Why should I do it?
Advantages of creating a unique Shopify product pages and shopping experience
Improve customer retention
Meeting personalized expectations starts with understanding each customer as an individual with unique needs and preferences. Acquiring that kind of understanding takes time but it definitely pays off.
By learning customers’ needs and preferences up front, companies can design experiences that make them feel safe and comfortable when shopping. This makes it easier for customers to break decisions barriers, therefore, they can easily get what they expect from the stores. Consequently, customers will regularly come back to your store because they always conveniently find what they are looking for. This increases customer retention, consequently, leading to an increase in profits. According to a study by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Increase average order size
When you’re making the customer feel engaged and comfortable with your brand, they tend to buy more. In a recent survey from Monetate, Marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences. A survey from Epsilon also pointed out that 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.
Reduce return
Ever wonder why your site has high visits but also high bounce rates? Probably because you hadn’t personalized your store well enough. There are lots of competitors out there that offer unique shopping experiences so there’s no way that your customers are going to stick to a site that offers none. Look at it like this: You have two options. Shop from an eCommerce store that is bland and works like every other site on the Internet, or shops at a new and unique store that offers customization features throughout every touchpoint including Shopify product pages and in-depth information for improved shopping accuracy. The answer should be clear.
Create a competitive advantage that’s hard to imitate
Unlike product quality or pricing that can be easily copied nowadays, highly personalized customer experiences, when offered to millions of individual customers by using proprietary data, are difficult for competitors to imitate. This should create a very strong competitive advantage that differentiates you from opponents and the opponents in order to compete with you will have a tough time imitating what you’re doing.
How can I do it?
Everything starts with data collection
Data collection means you collect the data of the visitors through touchpoints, after that, you can use this data to customize visitors’ experiences accordingly.
“The cornerstone of personalizing any step in your customers’ journey – from discovery to purchase and to repeat purchase – is data collection”.
As a result of understanding the need for a personalized shopping experience, there are many platforms created to do just that. These platforms are driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning; which track on-site and customer data points in real-time and then deliver a unique personalized experience to each site visitor (whether window shoppers or customers).
However, the strategies you applied will depend on the size of your business, customer’s base as well as the tools you’re using. Some personalizations are best used only for big businesses but some can be applied even for small ones.
General guideline on what to personalize
| Data segments | What can be personalized | Tools to help | Business size | |
| Traffic | Traffic Segments: Geo, Returning vs First Time Visits, Referral Traffic, Device | Currency, Content, Product Display On Category pages, Onsite Popups | Exit Intel, Nosto, BigCommerce has an inbuilt currency converter | Small, mid-tier and enterprise |
| Push Notifications | Traffic: Geo, Name, Onsite Behavior | Announcements | PushCrew | Mid-tier and Enterprise |
| Pricing | Customer Location, Customer Type i.e. returning vs first-time customers, Product price | Dynamic Pricing | Omnia, Prisync, Wiser | Mid-tier and Enterprise |
| Post Purchase | High-Value customers | Packaging, Product recommendations | Thank-You Cards and Personal Notes | All businesses |
| Personal Data | Name Gender Location | Onsite Popups, Onsite product recommendations, Email product recommendations, Paid media recommendations, Welcome messages | BigCommerce, Nosto, Exit Intel, Justuno, Omniconvert | Small, mid-tier and enterprise |
| Paid Media | Funnel Data: All Visits Product Page Views Category Page Views Add to Carts Checkout Sessions Purchases | Retargeted Advertising on Facebook, Google, Content Discovery Platform | Perfect Pixel, Criteo, Perfect Audience, Adroll, Taboola Outbrain | Small, mid-tier and enterprise |
| Onsite Search | Search queries | Search results, Product recommendations | Algolia, SearchSpring | Mid-tier and Enterprise |
| Onsite Product Recommendations | Product | Product displays on category pages, Upsells and cross-sells on Product pages, Cart and Checkout | Rich Relevance Nosto, Segmentify | Mid-tier and Enterprise |
| Newsletter Subscribers Cart Abandonments New Customers Repeat Purchasers High-Value Customers Non-Purchasers | Newsletters, Marketing automation, Product recommendations, Sales Offers, Special Events, Surveys | Klaviyo dotmailer | Small, mid-tier and enterprise | |
| Checkout Page | Customer Data, Geo Data | Location information i.e. default to the country of shoppers’ IP address, One-click checkout | BigCommerce | Small, mid-tier and enterprise |
| All-In-One Personalization Platform | Customer Data, Purchase History, Onsite Activity, Marketing | Single Customer View | Ometria, Monetate Barilliance | Enterprise |
Brief definitions about 6 broad traffic segments and how to acquire them.
There are many forms of data each with its own specific features that you can use to customize the shopping experience but If you’re a beginner you probably need to understand the 6 broad traffic segments and what you can do with them first.
New visitors, returning visitors (non-customers) and returning visitors (customers).
This segment is easy to understand. New Visitors are those navigating to your site for the first time on a specific device. For example, if you visit a flower store website for the first time using your iPhone 12, you’re recognized as a new visitor.
You’re interested in the store and later coming back but this time you use your laptop, you’re still recognized as a new visitor simply because you use a different device.
Now, if you continue to use your iPhone 12 to access the site and buy flowers for mother’s day then you’re recognized as a returning visitor.
The next time you visit the site using iPhone12, you’re recognized as returning visitors (customers), because you’ve already bought a product.
Example:
This helps to make visitors save time when going back to your site by simply showing the products they’ve recently viewed so they don’t have to manually scroll through a bunch of products again.
Traffic sources.
The visitors come to your site in many different ways: direct traffic, search traffic, referral traffic and social traffic. Knowing where the visitors are coming from and then you can personalize the content that directly focuses on them helps increase the conversion rate.
Example:
Traffic from Amazon ads might have more intent of buying products than traffic from Facebook, so customizing landing pages by adding 1-time coupon codes or limited-time promos.
Geolocation / IP address.
E-commerce makes it easy for consumers from all over the world to buy products across the globe. Even though you’re from an office in Vancouver or on a trip to Japan, you can easily buy products from let’s say the U.S in just a few clicks. That’s why it’s hard to understand the importance of location when it comes to the online experience.
However, in reality, location is essential for conversion. There are “three C’s” behind how you should customize your site for increased conversion:
- Culture: What someone from Florida wants from your site might be different from someone in Vancouver. One person might be looking for winter coats, another for bathing suits.
- Currency: The person from Vancouver will have Canadian dollars to spend, not American ones so you need to adjust currency based on the customer’s geographic location.
- Commute: If you have brick and mortar locations then you’ll want to show different maps of where they can visit to potential customers in Vancouver and Florida.
Example:
Just simply changing the content on the landing page and currency based on geolocation makes a huge difference especially for Shopify business.
Behavior.
Understanding the behaviour of the consumers can make you stand out and keep customers coming back to your site because every user has a pattern that reflects in their purchase decisions. Understanding these patterns and segmenting users according to their behaviour will help in targeting them better the next time. For example, behaviour can be based on which products and categories the shopper interacted with after they abandoned their cart.
With 74% of customers becoming frustrated when they receive marketing content that has nothing to do with their interests, it’s time for you to try to understand their behaviour and deliver content that best suits their needs.
Example:
With the large base of products with many unique features, the customers sometimes may find it difficult to find one that suits their needs. Understanding the pain point of the customer so Roka decides to make a quiz and recommend products that are relevant to the consumers.
UTM parameters.
“UTM” stands for “Urchin Tracking Module.” UTM parameters (also called UTM codes) are snippets of text that you can add to the end of a URL; these snippets help you track where website traffic comes from if a user clicks a link to this URL. UTM parameters can be added to a link that provides Google Analytics (as well as other tools) with more information about each link.
You can use UTM parameters to track where the visitors are coming from (Facebook, ads campaign,…)
Example:
The button uses URL with these UTMs:
?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Responsys&utm_campaign=111017190001&utm_content=2017_11_09_O_TGiving_NoSt_SDTest_NoCoup_2&ut
With the UTM snippet added, the business owner now knows exactly where the traffic is coming from.
Device
Increasingly, customers are using more than one device to interact with brands. Nowadays, people use multiple devices from laptops to mobile phones. And if you’re still using the same website format for multiple platforms then you’re doing it wrong.
“One in six dollars spent online is spent using a mobile device, making optimization integral.”- Marketing Charts
Make sure that everything is optimized for a mobile experience on-site, from navigation to checkout. In your marketing communications, make sure that emails are mobile optimized and calls-to-action are easy to click.
Example:
Serve specific content to browsers on mobile devices ( featuring best selling products more prominently on category pages for mobile shoppers ).
For example, PartakeFoods creates a separate mobile landing page for mobile users.
As you can see, the mobile screen has less space than its counterpart – PC. So instead of putting all of the products into the landing page, PartakeFoods only tries to show 1 product at a time.
These things too advanced? You can start with Shopify product pages customization
Customizing the Shopify product pages creates a unique shopping experience for your customers, therefore, making your store stand out from the thousands of others competing for the same audience.
This is essential and the most basic customization if you want your online store to survive and thrive!
Most of the customers nowadays expect your stores to have products that can be customized so if you don’t have these kinds of features on your product page, you might as well lose all your potential customers. Out of all the e-commerce stores out there that offer a full range of customizations for their products, why should they buy products from a page that gives them absolutely no options to choose from?
List of things you can do with your Shopify product pages
Add size chart and color swatches
The Color swatch and size chart feature lets your customers choose between all of the available colours or sizes of the same products without having to navigate to another page or writing notes. This can help improve the user experience by a large margin.
It’s time for you to start adding size charts and colour swatches to your page!
Add other customized features
There are numerous features that you can apply to the product page according to the product you’re offering and the range of options you can provide such as: allowing the customer to choose a design they want, add text to the products or even upload an image and add it to the product.
This feature is what makes your store stand out from other competitors, the customer has opportunities to choose every element of the final product and therefore increase the chances of them buying the product. Learn more about how to add product personalization to your Shopify product pages here.
Smart, relevant reviews
Thinx reviews contain helpful information about each reviewer—height, period management habits, size purchased—letting buyers hone in on the feedback that is most pertinent to them. And the fact that they add this feature on Shopify product pages help customers decide to buy products faster
These extra helpful reviews not only build trust with a brand or product but also build purchase confidence.
How to add Shopify product pages features and other features to my online store?
There are two main ways to add these features to Shopify stores: using Shopify apps and outsourcing.
Apps
To add this form, the most simple way is to install a Shopify app. This task can be served by numerous apps in the Shopify app store each has its own unique features. With each task, I would like to recommend 1 to 2 most popular apps which receive positive feedback from the Shopify community. You can also go online and find apps that suit your needs as there are numerous apps available for Shopify users nowadays.
Adding color swatches
- Starts at $7/month
- Shading and Image patterns: Use Color and Image Swatches with your Shopify item options.
- Choose between an assortment of sample themes.
- No programming/coding aptitudes are required. (The App consequently gets introduced and works consistently with your subject).
Adding size chart
- Free
- Create unlimited size chart campaigns
- 11 ready-to-use templates to apply instantly
- Allow attaching images and videos to the size chart
- Place the size chart button on any position on the product page, collection, and homepage
- Support two styles: floating or inline-link button
Outsource
For adding customized features such as: allowing the customers to add text, patterns, pictures to a product,… you should outsource because each store has specific features they want to add and apps cannot fulfil the needs entirely.
By editing the code, the experts can help you customize your product page features in the most flexible way. You should also consider using an outsource to add the above features because most of the apps require you to pay on a monthly basis and this can be costly in the long run. For hiring an outsource, you pay once and the team is there to help you forever. You save money and also save time because there are experts there to help you do the job!
Here are the greatest advantages of hiring a third party adding email newsletter forms to your Shopify store:
- Make your store stand out by showcasing your uniqueness rather than relying on ready-made things like applications.
- Ensure professional results: Shopify specialists will deliver a high-quality result.
- Cost-effectiveness: Pay once and use it for the rest of your life
- Reduce time consumption on technical jobs and focus on business operation activities such as preparing email marketing.
- Support your business 24/7 for any needs of urgent assistance.
Conclusion
Successful eCommerce brands know that there is no better way to make an online customer feel special than through a personalized shopping experience. This approach should not be limited to only luxury brand marketers – It’s an approach that most online merchandisers should adopt to increase the connection between their brands and customers. When a customer feels engaged to a brand, both royalty and sales skyrocket.
It’s time to implement the above techniques in reality. As a certified Shopify partner, HappyPoints are happy to assist you to add:
Colour swatches to the product page
Size chart to the product page
Customize features on the product page
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any further concerns.
Writing Reference
[3]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalization-mobile-commerce-todays-retail-environment-abhi-vyas
[4]https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/personalize-content-by-referral-source
