Enhancing Personalization With OrderCloud
Creating personalized shopping experiences should be a top priority for businesses in the ecommerce space. This is where Sitecore OrderCloud can come in and assist. Sitecore OrderCloud offers unprecedented flexibility in ecommerce management. As a headless commerce platform, OrderCloud enables businesses to curate custom shopping experiences that cater to the preferences of their buyers. This enhances customer satisfaction and drives efficiency in managing product offerings and pricing strategies. The significance of personalized shopping cannot be overstated, with it becoming a measure of the success of a businesses ecommerce offering. Through OrderCloud, businesses can leverage the power of personalization to meet the unique needs of each customer, fostering loyalty and boosting sales.
Customizing the Shopping Experience
Custom Catalogs
Presenting products that are right for the specific customer at the right price is essential to ecommerce success. Sitecore OrderCloud can ensure you do this correctly with its support for custom catalogs. Custom catalogs allows businesses to assign specific products and product groups to specific groups of buyers. OrderCloud supports any number of catalogs within your organization which can be shared among any number of buyers. This means that if you have specific products you only want to offer to some customers, but not all, you can do so on OrderCloud through the assignment of catalogs. This ensures that customers only see products that are relevant to them, streamlining the shopping experience. This also allows for targeted marketing strategies, increasing the chance for a higher conversion rate. By taking advantage of custom catalogs businesses can create highly tailored shopping environments that caters to the individual preferences of each customer, leading to the enhancement of the customer's journey and satisfaction
Product Configuration
The ability to customize products for each customer is key to personalized shopping. Sitecore OrderCloud facilitates this through advanced product configuration options, allowing for the customization of product attributes and specifications. A product can represent a physical, digital, or abstract good that you want to allow buyers to order, including the specific variant (color, size, material, etc.). OrderCloud supports very complex use cases, such as populating multiple inputs from the buyer to produce a custom, printed sign or business card-- or even the specifications for buying a car. This functionality not only caters to the individual needs of customers but also enhances their engagement by providing a sense of ownership and uniqueness to their purchases. Businesses can leverage these capabilities to offer a wide range of options, from custom sizes and colors to personalized features, thereby increasing the value proposition of their products.
Versatile Taxonomies
Having a large product category can sometimes be hard to navigate for customers. Sitecore OrderCloud addresses this problem with its versatile taxonomy system, which organizes products into categories and subcategories. Categories help organize your products into a hierarchy with different levels. Imagine a big retail store: you have main categories like Home Goods, Grocery, Electronics, Clothing, and Toys. Then, there are smaller categories under these to make shopping easier for customers. This structured approach to product categorization ensures that customers can find what they're looking for with ease, enhancing the overall shopping experience. By enabling businesses to define and manage their own taxonomies, OrderCloud ensures that the product organization is both logical and aligned with customer expectations, further personalizing the shopping journey.
Enhancing Product Discovery
Searching Catalogs
Allowing customers to discover products that meet their wants and needs is an important aspect of personalized shopping. To make this easy for customers Sitecore OrderCloud supports robust search capabilities, including keyword searches, faceted navigation, filtering, and sorting options.
| Keyword Search | Allows multiple search types based on how users search, which allows variations of matching all terms entered, exact phrases, or loser options for any term matching. Search also takes care of stemming, synonyms, and intelligent ranking. |
|---|---|
| Faceted Navigation | Searches for products will return implicit faceted attributes for you, including any custom properties you assign to your products. |
| Filtering | You can pass specific conditions to filter on any product attribute, including any custom properties you assign to your products. |
| Sorting | You can sort by one or more fields, including custom fields you have on your products. When you sort over multiple fields, you can specify sort priority such as ascending or descending. |
These features empower customers to refine their search criteria based on specific attributes, such as price, brand, and ratings, making it easier to locate the desired products. Improved search functionality ensures a frictionless discovery process, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of purchase.
Attributes and Variants
OrderCloud excels in managing product attributes and variants, allowing for detailed distinctions between products. These attributes can be used not only to help display any customized attribute of your products but those attributes can be used to search, filter, and sort. This capability is crucial for businesses that offer products with multiple options, such as color, size, or material. By managing these variants effectively, businesses can provide a clear selection process for customers, ensuring that they find the product that best suits their needs. This level of detail in product descriptions enhances the shopping experience by reducing uncertainty and facilitating informed purchasing decisions.
Variable Pricing
Pricing is crucial to whether a customer may be interested in buying a product or not. With OrderCloud you can solve this problem with the available pricing customizations. OrderCloud offers variable pricing, price schedules, and price breaks. With variable pricing you can set different prices for the same product, so an educational institution and a regular shopper could pay different amounts for a laptop. A price schedule sets the cost for a product based on the buyer or a user group. This ensures that OrderCloud automatically adjusts the price for each shopper on your website, according to their buyer group. Price breaks offer customizability on quantity meaning you can customize pricing relative to the quantity ordered. So if you buy 4 or less, the price may be $10 each, but if you buy 5 or more, the price becomes $8 each. Between price schedules and price breaks, OrderCloud will automatically set the correct price on the buyer’s order.
Promoting Products Effectively
Targeted Promotions
Effective promotion is key to driving sales in a personalized shopping environment. Sitecore OrderCloud offers advanced tools for creating targeted promotions, enabling businesses to design rule-based offers that cater to specific products, categories, or buyer groups. These promotions can be tailored to encourage purchases from new customers, reward loyalty, or clear out inventory, among other objectives. By customizing the promotional strategy to align with the preferences and behaviors of their target audience, businesses can maximize the impact of their marketing efforts and drive meaningful engagement. Some examples of how this is done are:
- $5 dollars off orders totaling over $50 dollars
- 10% off promotional products
- 20% off when you buy a set of specific products
- Buy 3, get the 4th free
- Free or reduced shipping based on order size
- 20% off a customer’s first order
Promotion Redemption
Managing the redemption of promotions is equally important to ensure a smooth shopping experience. OrderCloud provides mechanisms for handling promotion codes and setting redemption rules, ensuring that offers are applied correctly and fairly. This system simplifies the checkout process for customers and gives businesses the control to prevent abuse and manage the financial impact of promotions. Through efficient promotion redemption management, businesses can maintain the integrity of their marketing campaigns and foster positive customer relationships.
The Impact of Personalized Shopping
The implementation of personalized shopping strategies through Sitecore OrderCloud offers a myriad of benefits for both businesses and their customers. By leveraging the platform's capabilities to tailor the shopping experience, manage product offerings, and implement dynamic pricing and promotions, businesses can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. For customers, the personalized approach results in a more engaging, convenient, and satisfying shopping journey, encouraging repeat visits and long-term loyalty. In the competitive landscape of ecommerce, adopting Sitecore OrderCloud for personalized shopping experiences represents a strategic investment in customer-centric innovation and business growth.
Meet Hunter Ullett
Junior Digital Marketing Specialist
🏋🏻🧩🎵
Hunter is a Junior Digital Marketing Specialist. Although this is his first marketing role, he brings 3 years of experience in varied roles in the e-commerce industry, along with 2 years of team management experience in the retail industry. His main experience lies in assisting clients with enhancing and fixing their websites to ensure brand success. He also spent time on an inbound sales team, assisting businesses of various sizes with their e-commerce needs. He graduated from the University of Calgary with a Bachelor of Commerce specializing in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. In his spare time, he enjoys weight lifting, playing mind games, doing puzzles, building LEGO, and listening to and playing music.