Inflation in 2023: The drive for innovation and value creation:

Inflation in 2023: The drive for innovation and value creation:

Will Jacobs

Inflation in 2023: The drive for innovation and value creation:

Inflation: The drive for innovation and value creation

Inflation marks a great period of change in 2023’s commercial environment. Merchants must continue to innovate in order to stay agile and respond to market changes. Technology and creative thinking continue to be the chief enabler in this storm, with the customer as the focus.

Very few ecommerce teams are operating in the same way as they did two years ago. Without the luxury of carefully managed change, ecommerce teams have been responsible for the decision-making and process levers required to adapt and survive the impact of COVID-19. Many of the merchants we work with feel they have evolved more in two years than the previous decades. With little time for reflection, ecommerce leaders have reviewed the positives and negatives from this period of disruption to inform recovery, resilience, and growth. 

But the storm is not over yet – more disruption is inevitably ahead, much of which is out of control such as risks from inflation, credit crises, climate, and more. Online stores will be challenged to continue to adapt and innovate using the right technology to provide an excellent experience for their customers. 

The customer experience must be the priority for merchants in 2023. As their purchasing power is impacted by economic challenges, what reason do your customers have to remain loyal to you, and not work with value brands? There’s a lot that retailers can do to hedge themselves from the worst of the inflation period. Our recent whitepaper on this topic looks at four key strategies.

 

Branding and Storytelling

 

Branding will become increasingly significant in strengthening the relationship with customers, and is especially important during times of crisis. The urgency for merchants to continue to persuade and captivate customers with brand values is critical for distinguishing your store from the competition. Storytelling and building an intuitive shopping experience across all online channels is key to achieving that.

 

Your technology stack

Investing in your technology stack is pivotal to delivering a seamless shopping experience from supply chain to loyalty. Giving search as an example, if your shoppers can’t find what they’re looking for within seconds, they’ll abandon your store. You can’t afford that in this time. To optimise your customer journey, the shoppers’ path to purchase must be efficient and intuitive, and the on site experience is key to achieving this.

Personalisation

If you were to ask most merchants what’s on their priority list for 2023, you’d probably see the word ‘personalisation’ a lot, for good reason. Personalisation will be especially important during the economic situation, largely due to its power to tailor the commerce experience to different people, and respond to spending constraints. It also allows you to build engagement and trust. 

Let’s make every impression relevant

Customers are now familiar with online shopping experiences and actively seek companies that provide good value and pleasant interactions along the way. Investing in friendly customer service is an efficient way to demonstrate that your company values its customers and will go the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction – which can often be the deciding factor regarding whether they make a purchase or not.

This can involve investing in employee training to ensure that customers receive the best possible recommendation or resolution for their query, engaging with clients through digital platforms, and streamlining the shopping process to make it as streamlined and user-friendly as possible.

2023 looks like it will be a challenge for merchants across industries, but it also presents opportunities – especially when it comes to technology. Retailers should invest in their customers, reviews, UGC, and brand loyalty, in addition to a relevant tech stack that drives the best user experience for shoppers and seamlessly works together. (i.e. headless architecture)

To learn more about how you and your brand can navigate the economic storm, read the paper in full here.

Findologic joins forces with Nosto

Findologic joins forces with Nosto

It’s finally official! We’ve joined forces with Nosto, the world’s leading Commerce Experience Platform (CXP).

When we first started talking about the idea of uniting with Nosto, I was surprised to discover how closely our visions for the future aligned. In fact, our internal strategy slides were almost identical, while the features were complimentary.

This presented a once in a lifetime opportunity for us because the unique strengths of each company complement each other extremely well. 

Findologic always pioneered when it came to onsite search, recently shown with our achievements around our AI Linguistic Shopping Assistant, not just focusing on the most relevant results, but also understanding the user’s intent and providing new ways of interaction with webshops.

Our product discovery story continues

This merger is the perfect fit. Why? Because we share the same mission as Nosto and want to ensure every online shopping experience is relevant, personalized, and dynamic. I’m thrilled we’re joining forces with Nosto and, together, shaping the future of online commerce experiences.  

What does this mean for you, our customers?

Firstly, nothing will change in the immediate. It’s business as usual.

You can continue to use the Findologic platform as you have done so and will continue to have a relationship with your current contact at Findologic. Your agreement will remain as is and you’ll continue to get the same commitment and value from Findologic post-acquisition. Over time, we will offer you the capability of using Nosto’s full CXP and its comprehensive personalization capabilities.

We are excited about the new opportunities this deal brings for Findologic customers. Being offered access to Nosto’s CXP will open up exciting avenues for you to benefit from a wide range of solutions that can help you achieve full-funnel personalization and deliver 1:1 commerce experiences for every shopper across every device. 

What does this mean for us, Findologic?

It means our entire staff is now part of the Nosto family and can even develop more and better solutions for you. Our HQ in Salzburg, Austria, will remain and serve as an R&D hub with product engineers and commercial teams, together serving the DACH market moving forward. Nosto supports its global customers from New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Sydney, Kaunas, and Helsinki. We’re thrilled to be adding Salzburg and Munich to that list. 

Thank you!

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for trusting Findologic over the last 14 years. The entire team–from customer service managers, engineers, marketing, sales, product owners, and leadership–are all committed to making online commerce experiences ever more intuitive for the individual shopper. This commitment is only strengthened as we continue our journey with Nosto.

Marcel Krabath

Matthias Heimbeck has been developing modern software solutions for online shops since 2008 and is Founder and CEO of Findologic, one of the world’s leading providers today. Just as a helpful sales assistant completes the shopping experience for the in-store customer – so the digital shopping assistant supports and serves the online shopper. This is exactly where our unique approach helps ecommerce businesses. We keep our finger on the pulse with our technology partners, agencies, shop systems and customers - with unparalleled results. 

How AI Product Recommendations Can Benefit Your Online Store

How AI Product Recommendations Can Benefit Your Online Store

Will Jacobs

How AI Product Recommendations Can Benefit Your Online Store

How AI Product Recommendations Can Benefit Your Online Store

If you’re an ecommerce manager, then you know the importance of product recommendations. After all, product recommendations are one of the easiest ways to increase sales and boost customer satisfaction. And while there are many different ways to push your product catalogue, artificial intelligence (AI) product recommendations are quickly becoming the preferred method for many businesses. 

There are many benefits of using AI product recommendations. From increasing conversion rates and sales to boosting customer engagement, AI product recommenders can help your business in a variety of ways. Read this blog to learn the benefits of using AI Product Recommendations on your online store.

 

Firstly, what are AI Product Recommendations?

Simply put, A.I. Product Recommendation engines are AI-based recommendation engines such as data-filtering tools that make use of various algorithms and data to recommend the most relevant products to a particular customer. 

AI product recommendations work by analyzing customer behavior and making predictions about what products they might be interested in. This information is then used to generate personalized recommendations that are displayed to the customer when they visit your site.

One of the advantages of using AI for product recommendations is that it can take into account a wide range of data points, including things like search history, past purchases, and even items that have been added to the shopping cart but not purchased. This allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of the customer’s needs and wants, which leads to more accurate recommendations.

It is influenced by search data and merchandising to ensure the shopper sees the products they are looking for. Think of it like a virtual shopping assistant. 

Today’s site search engines use natural language processing (or NLP) to analyse the search, discern intent, and retrieve the results it thinks the shopper wants. They are much more sophisticated than they used to be and are more focused on honing in on results with greater focus and more precise targeting. NLP is key to that.

 

AI Product Recommendations Are Personalized

One of the biggest benefits of AI product recommendations is that they are highly personalized. Thanks to machine learning, AI-powered product recommendation engines can learn about a customer’s individual preferences and characteristics over time. This means that the recommendations they receive will be more relevant and helpful and connect them with the products they’re looking for. 

This is important because when customers receive personalized recommendations, they’re more likely to make a purchase. In fact, studies have shown that personalized recommendations can increase conversion rates by up to 18%. If you’re not using AI product recommenders, now is the time to start. Be sure to check out Findologic’s own AI shopping assistant, LiSA here to see how you can deliver a better customer experience.

 

AI Product Recommendations Boost Sales and Engagement

If you’re looking for a way to give your ecommerce sales a boost, you may want to consider using AI product recommendations. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, you can provide your customers with tailored recommendations that are more likely to result in a purchase. 

When customers see relevant and helpful recommendations, they’re more likely to purchase those products. And when they’re more engaged with your shopping experience brand, they’re less likely to churn.  

What are the Benefits of AI Product Recommendations

There are several benefits that come from using AI product recommendations, including:

Increased Sales: Perhaps the most obvious benefit of using AI product recommendations is that they can lead to an increase in sales. By providing customers with tailored recommendations, you’re more likely to find items that they’re interested in, which leads to more sales. Additionally, customers who have had a positive experience with your recommendation system are more likely to come back and make additional purchases in the future.

Improved Customer Retention: In addition to increasing sales, AI product recommendations can also lead to improved customer retention. If customers have a positive experience with your site and feel like they’re able to find the products they’re looking for, they’re more likely to continue doing business with you. Furthermore, happy customers are more likely to tell their friends and family about your site, which can lead to even more business.

Greater insights into customer behavior: One of the side benefits of using AI for product recommendations is that it can provide you with greater insights into customer behavior. By analyzing data points like search history and past purchases, you can better understand what customers are looking for and tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. Additionally, if you see that certain items are being recommended frequently but not purchased, it may be indicative of a problem with those products or your overall site design. Either way, it’s valuable information that can be used to improve your business. 

 

Final thoughts

AI product recommendations can offer a number of benefits for ecommerce businesses, including increased sales and improved customer retention. If you’re looking for a way to give your online store a boost, consider leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.

Of course there’s so much more to this subject, and if you’d like to understand more, why not get in touch?

 

Manual merchandising – why it’s costing you and what to do about it

Manual merchandising – why it’s costing you and what to do about it

Will Jacobs

Manual merchandising – why it’s costing you and what to do about it

Manual merchandising – why it’s costing you and what to do about it.

For many online retailers, manual merchandising is holding them back. Businesses struggle to sell particular products at a given point in time, web systems are inflexible, or their merchandising strategies are misinformed, all of which lead to missed opportunities. 

However, by automating key merchandising tasks, your team can improve product visibility and support the overall business strategy. 

In this blog we talk all about manual merchandising – why it’s creating problems for your business, and how you can support kickass automated merchandising.

What is manual merchandising?

Before we talk about the problems of manual merchandising and how to fix them, let’s first discuss what we mean by manual merchandising.

When we refer to manual merchandising, we mean the carrying out of merchandising tasks without automation. 

To give some examples, this might include:

  • Implementing campaigns on your site manually
  • Manually pushing new stock when it becomes available
  • Manually ordering your products
  • Gathering analytics on your own which are often an incomplete picture

This can be frustrating for ecommerce and development teams for a variety of reasons. It’s slow, poorly optimised, and comes at a cost – to both your time and money. It also gives you a poor picture of performance and impacts conversion rate. 

 

What are the challenges of manual merchandising?

There are three key challenges when it comes to manual merchandising.

The first challenge is that many companies struggle to sell certain products and reach their targets. This creates a problem for retailers for instance, because you might have issues managing stock left over from excess promotions. When manually merchandising, you might also find it difficult to push new stock on your website when it becomes available. All of this leads to a loss of revenue.

The second challenge is that your technology platform is set up in a way that is disadvantageous to your merchandising opportunities. Conversion of key products is missed out on as a result. Additionally, you’re spending a lot of time executing tasks that would be better executed with an automation platform anyway.

The third challenge is understanding how to create amazing merchandising strategies for your products that will increase sales. Without the right tool, you won’t be able to drill down and understand how to interpret your ecommerce data. This data might include your best sellers, your new stock, or inventory management.

 

What can merchants do to solve the issue?

There are multiple ways merchants can overcome the issues of manual merchandising. 

Invest in a merchandising platform

Leveraging automation is the first port of call. 

Today’s technology platforms such as Findologic are equipped with merchandising tools that automate manual tasks and allow you to easily identify products that will increase sales on site. 

Web audit

Merchants can also find support across their whole Product Discovery experience, through a full inspection of the website from an outside perspective.

Outside help

You could also work with an external team, allowing you to better understand how best to utilise products in your portfolio that’ll allow you to increase sales and margins on your site. 

Findologic can support retailers in the merchandising of their products on their website, through Findologic’s backend merchandising features and our Business Reviews. 

Our experts can identify gaps in merchant’s strategies for merchandising their products, and suggest simple fixes that will improve conversion rates. 

Why is it important to automate merchandising?

Automating merchandising gives you the opportunity to merchandise your product discovery engine in any way that you please. A flexible backend allows you to create merchandising that best suits your business. 

Working with Findologic can allow you to understand if you’re losing valuable time and money, and having this outside perspective to leverage is important in the optimisation of the whole on site UX.

What features should you look for?

The best merchandising solutions give you full control over your merchandising, and a comprehensive set of features that drive insights, link trends, and deliver results inline with your unique business requirements – all controlled from your backend. 

 

Promotions

Promotions allow you to implement temporary campaigns across your website, on desktop and mobile to support promotions. Offers and promotions give increased exposure to products that are relevant to your customer. 

You can also place banners for relevant search terms in the autocomplete or other pages throughout navigation and benefit from full exposure throughout the customer journey. Promotions benefit retailers by making your shoppers aware of the right promotions at the right time in order to support business goals.

 

Search concepts

Predefined rules and search logics allow you to produce optimal results that convert, regardless of how broad the query was or how comprehensive of a product range you have. 

With merchandising tools, you’re able to make sense of your search queries and product feeds so you can get your shopper from A to B effectively.

You’re also able to enhance the search experience by giving your shoppers real-time, relevant results.

Product Placements

Automated merchandising allows you to benefit from product placements allow you to link specific products to key search queries. You’re able to guarantee prime position to key products if a shopper submits a related query. 

This helps you to get your shoppers to the products they want without frustration, with effective product discoverability. 

Product Bury-and-Boost

With searchandising, you can take control of your results listings and augment product hierarchies to present shoppers with valuable recommendations, or prioritise product groups in line with your business goals.

This allows you to easily fine-tune and visualize results pages to support strategic goals.

Your shopper also gets greater visibility of groups that appeal to the retailer. More info on this in our other blog post on searchandising!

Landing Pages

Search is at the epicenter for discovery. Incorporate a variety of content into your search function. Our algorithm doesn’t just search product listings, also content that isn’t included in your product feed, for example return policies.

This boosts visibility across all your content, and also makes it easier for your shoppers to discover it, reducing touchpoints thanks to direct navigation.

 

Campaigns

Automated merchandising also supports campaigns by giving you a holistic view of all their activities, allowing for simple and effective planning, implementation, and monitoring throughout the campaign’s lifecycle.

This allows you to easily fine-tune and visualies results pages to support strategy-wide goals. Your shoppers get greater visibility of specific product groups that are both relevant and that benefit your strategy. 

 

KPI tracking made simple

Measure success and derive insights via 360 degree analytics. With our Google Analytics integration, you can keep track of performance and make informed decisions based on a comprehensive set of data

 

Final thoughts

Merchandising doesn’t have to be a long and arduous process. Thanks to today’s ecommerce technology, retailers can leverage the power of automation to get all the benefits of advanced merchandising.

To learn more about merchandising with Findologic, get in touch today!

Harness the power of merchandising to increase product visibility and support business strategy.

Optimise your results pages. Control the hierarchy of particular products via our user-friendly backend in line with your business goals.

Composable, Headless, Monolithic – why buzzwords don’t matter for Calumet Photography

Composable, Headless, Monolithic – why buzzwords don’t matter for Calumet Photography

Last month, we attended the leading customer experience conference in Europe, CX1 World. 

There was a lot to be learned and we even had the pleasure of hosting a masterclass. We talked all about the blurry world of buzzwords in the industry and why there’s just one recipe for success. And, we invited Oliver Breitfeld, Chief Customer Officer at Calumet Photography to talk about their secret ingredient.  

In case you missed it, read this blog to learn more.

During the masterclass, we discussed five key topics relevant to Calumet’s success story.

But before we go into that, let’s talk about Calumet for a moment.

Who are Calumet Photography?

Calumet is Germany’s biggest photo and video retailer, part of the European Imaging Group, and has more than 200 employees in Germany. Today, there are 10 stores across the country. 

Calumet is an omnichannel retailer that has some of the most experienced consultants, which has been of huge benefit in terms of customer relations. People are buying not only from online but also offline thanks to their relationships with the consultants within those stores. 

“We’re not just selling one product. We’re building lasting relationships”, says Oliver.

There are many use cases for Calumet, whether you’re an amateur photographer or a professional. Calumet’s approach is not just about selling a product, but also relationships and providing services. You can rent equipment, get repairs, sell, exchange, which allows the brand to provide a 360 degree service offering for the customer. 

Perhaps most powerful is the business’s arsenal of experienced consultants and advisors who can help customers find the exact product they’re after in a rather complex catalogue. This is helping them stay ahead of the curve.

Relationship

Before they revitalised their online store, Calumet gathered deep insights into their users. They found that users truly valued the relationship with the in-store staff – not just the products they purchased. Customers really engaged with the newsletter for its information and not necessarily just its product pushing. 

“Calumet’s philosophy is about empowering the world of image makers, and helping them make pictures perfect. This means helping them find the right equipment, helping them understand how to use the equipment, and helping them just to talk about their hobby – which is really much more than just a hobby.”

Webshop

Calumet has been online for almost 10 years. However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing. 

There used to be an old intershop monolithic shop system that was heavily customised that hadn’t been updated in 8-9 years. It involved a lot of coding and customisation, which meant a lot of knowledge pending on one person. This was very tough for them to manage.

“The online business is important because customers are researching online – whether it’s looking into specifications, lenses, etc. Having an online store allows the customer to be informed about the subject. Hence the decision to replatform.”, explains Oliver

During the 12-16 month replatforming, Calumet left their PIM System, the middleware, and shop system, replatforming to Shopware 6 with a headless approach. 

It was important for Calumet to have a proper IT setup in place that a small team could manage. 

The photography sector

People are passionate about the products they have and the results they produce with those products. It’s more than a hobby to them. They want to talk about how they did it, most of the known photographers host training sessions where you can book a tour and go on a weekend trip with them. 

Everyone is really involved and passionate about what they’re doing. They’re willing to create a community and share information. This underpinned their entire replatforming strategy and content-driven approach.

What are the challenges they’ve faced in the last few years?

As with most retailers, the pandemic had a significant impact on the business. Availabilit and supply chain issues caused issues, but things are recovering for the holiday season. Oliver also explained that fraud is also an issue with some taking advantage of the payment system. Also it is more difficult to consult online than in person. 

“Customer experience is something that we’re always working on to get information in place that customers need – especially those customers that purchase their first camera. This is where things like guided shopping come in and help the customer identify three things: Use case, budget, product.” 

COVID

Both in store and online were impacted by the supply chain issues since the lockdown. Still around 70% of revenue comes from the offline stores. It was difficult when the lockdown temporarily closed the offline stores. Luckily, Calumet had a good and stable online shop in place, with the infrastructure to support click and collect, consulting via telephone and video. 

Calumet fared better during the pandemic than most, thanks to its people and technology. Most of the stores had a backdoor where you could just hand out packages, which was helpful due to the reliance on the brick-and-mortar stores. Nevertheless, the online offering increased. 

Of course online, there were issues such as increased paid traffic, finding new competitors, and new entrants to the market. 

Regardless, Calumet came out of the pandemic strong, with a better understanding of the customer. This success was down largely due to the multichannel approach.

It was once the case that online was helping retail to survive. Now in a shock to the ecommerce industry, we see in some areas retail taking over or gaining some of the market shares they lost to online in the past year. In other words, retail is helping online to survive.

Online optimisations

To be blunt, Calumet threw away a lot of their old technologies in favour of a new commerce platform, for good reason. 

The replatforming itself and the ability to present content in a good way and to have personalisation on the side. 

As mentioned, Calumet uses Shopware 6, but is also working with StoryBlock as a CMS. Because of the level of complex information, they require a powerful content engine, enhancing product data with content management elements. For instance, the brand brings their product listings to life with bespoke videos like these.

More recently, Calumet looked to enhancing their search capabilities with Findologic and Trbo to have the ranking of the product pages in place as well as personalisation. 

Now the brand has a very solid foundation with the platform they have and are ready to execute on what Oliver calls “real ecommerce”, and put into place personalisations, conversion rate optimisation, content marketing, and more. 

It’s early days, but Calumet is optimistic about the journey to come.

More challenges?

When you have one system, any problems that arise will be much easier to identify. When you’re working with a lot of interfaces, it can be a lot harder to resolve issues. Oliver gives several examples:

  • A PIM sending data to the shop
  • The shop sending data back to the ERP system
  • Search – everything connected through APIs
  • Hard to find where it went wrong
  • Is your staging environment the same as your live environment
  • Is there anything that was misconfigured when testing payment

Headless is a very good way to go, but you need the people and the capabilities to have more complex testing in place and in-depth knowledge of what you’re doing and where things are going and how promotions are handled, and more. 

“The biggest challenge was for us to understand our own architecture and to help send all the feeds and everything to the right direction.”

Flexibility is also a boon – if you ever want to scale your architecture and exchange a system later and bring in for instance new emailing tools, or AI layer to your search results – flexibility is crucial. 

In Calumet’s words: what are the biggest opportunities in ecommerce 

When you are a small D2C brand, your challenges are a lot different. You’re focused on getting the first traffic in, you need to have a shop that’s working and telling your stories well. 

If you’re a huge brand, your challenges are more different – price management, cost of traffic, keeping customers happy.

For Calumet, the most important challenge is keeping your customers. Managing your customer relationships is key to customer lifetime value. The cost of acquiring new customers is going up. Most customers are not loyal, because discounts are plenty and competitors are fighting for your shoppers. 

“Our advice to retailers is you need a proper strategy for managing your customer relations and having them purchasing again and again. That might be once a year, or multiple times a year. You need a strategy to attract and keep customers.” 

When it comes to technology, you don’t need to own everything in your IT department. You need an ecommerce shop system that suits your business. There might be some B2B companies that need the whole shebang – i.e. PIM systems, search, etc. that have capabilities you might not need as a small D2C. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Learnings

When facing technology challenges, you need to have clear lines of communication in your IT department and have a strategy. In case of emergencies, you need to have a method to resolve it. If customers have an issue, it will be hard to get them back. 

Have a proper testing environment. There are many things that can go wrong when you go headless. 

The most important things are done in the frontend. It’s easy to say keep the complexities away from the user, but generally ecommerce is still a far way away from achieving this. 

Another one of Calumet’s learnings has been to focus on the interactions of the customer and make their end to end shopping experience as smooth as possible. That has been key to Calumet’s success.

I’d also like to share one useful tidbit from the masterclass.

We asked Calumet what they’d like to share with other ecommerce leaders.

“The most important thing is to network, visit conventions, attend talks, listen to what people are saying, connect with them. It’s very helpful to connect with other people doing something similar. A lot of insights came when we’d have issues during replatforming, and we spoke with other businesses facing similar struggles, and how they were dealing with them. 

Before we chose the tools and platforms we were using, we chose to get in touch with customers of the product. We didn’t just rely on case studies, we dove into social proof, and talked with the people using the tools and how the project went. For anyone owning a big project, really look to the ground and get a granular understanding to truly understand how it will impact your business.”

Conclusion

The title of the masterclass was: Composable, Headless, Monolithic, Whatever- why buzzwords don’t matter for Calumet Photography

Why?

To quote Oliver, who came up with the headline, “buzzwords don’t make money”.

People frequently say you need to own your technology, but that requires people – especially on data – and this costs money. In the world of retail this presents a huge problem because margins are shrinking. Everything in the online world is expensive – from marketing to staff. 

Buzzwords are nice to have and indicate the art of the possible, but as a retailer, you need to look at TCOs and perspective. You need to look at where you are and where you can realistically be. You need reliable partnerships and a sustainable business. That’s what you need to take care of as a retailer – not necessarily whether you have the newest technology in place.

Calumet is enjoying the best of both worlds. 

Findologic joins forces with Nosto 🚀
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