What is Product Discovery in eCommerce?
Why is Product Discovery important?
Where can Product Discovery take place?
How can Social Proof drastically improve Product Discovery for your shoppers?
What is Product Discovery in eCommerce?
Product discovery is the process of enabling your shoppers to find the items they’re looking for and helping them discover new items they may want. This happens at each stage of the buying journey and across channels.
Why is Product Discovery important?
If a customer cannot find what they’re looking for from you, you may not only have lost them on that visit, but potentially longer term. The inability to find relevant products can lead to frustration and high exit rates. For those in a more passive state of shopping, being able to present customers with products that are highly relevant to them creates greater brand loyalty, repeat visits and higher Average Order Value (AOV).
Where can Product Discovery take place?
Product Discovery can take place across the buying journey in both a passive and assertive manner.
| Channel/Activity | Details | Type of Product Discovery |
| Social Media | Via influencers, friends, brands and hashtags users may follow. | Passive |
| Search | This may take place across a search engine or within a retailers’ site. This is a more assertive form of product discovery, but their search term will determine how far down the buying journey they are (e.g. red dresses versus Brand + red dress). | Assertive |
| Brand Site | Once on a brand site, product discovery can take place in many sections of the site, from banners in the navigation, social feeds in the homepage, Product Recommendation blocks, Product List Pages – all the way through to cross-sell/up-sell recommendations in the Product Description Pages and Basket | Passive & Assertive |
| Email is still a highly lucrative channel for eCommerce marketers. Customising products towards audience clusters is a tried and tested model that continues to deliver strong revenue from your existing customer base | Passive | |
| Social Proof Messaging | Real-time shopper behaviour can be used to bring trending products to your audiences, not only helping with Product Discovery but helping increase conversion rates by delivering highly relevant products to your audiences at the right time | Passive |
| Site Search | Site search technology has improved drastically over time with improvements to handling misspells and providing ‘near’ matches. However, with the wrong technology in place, you will quickly lose customers when they cannot find what they’re looking for | Assertive |
| Navigation | Your navigation should be the result of rigorous consumer testing. Helping users find the right products for them in as few clicks as possible is the key to success | Assertive |
How can Social Proof drastically improve Product Discovery for your shoppers?
Social Proof from Taggstar aggregates real-time shopper behaviour to improve the digital experience and give customers the confidence to buy online.
Real-time shopper behaviour not only helps inform product recommendations to prospective and returning customers, but also provides additional information to help shoppers make informed purchasing decisions. Messages include:
- Trending items/places
- Product/place scarcity
- Most-popular items/places
- Sustainable items
- Products/places with the highest reviews (including going deeper into specific criteria such as fit, quality etc)
- Showing how many people have bought products since their last visit
- Showing how many other people have the item they are looking at in their basket
These customisable messages can be used in combination across the website, native app, social media, emails and even digital OOH.
Taggstar’s Social Proof Messaging solutions presents real-time shopper behaviour that statistically and scientifically increase online conversion rates and AOVs whilst simultaneously reducing cart abandonment rates.
