On a well designed E Commerce site, where if you are on a product page, you would not ice that a number of product listing appear below the product page. It is as if instead of the main product, the website is trying to sell you other products. It is a well crafted technique where a lot of data , consumer psychology and customer behavior goes to provide you a list of those products. It is called as product recommendation.
Product recommendation is an important piece of E Commerce puzzle that helps to choose an alternative if you are not satisfied with product that you are already watching.
Product recommendation can also include what others are purchasing , when they have looked at or purchased the product that you are looking at now.
It may also contain products complimentary to the product you are looking at, such as a HDMI cable with a new TV. The website bundles these products based on data that it possesses because of customer interaction or even based on that provided by the manufacturer and the suppliers.
Or the recommendation may be category of the product but may be unrelated to the main product page.
The purpose of Product Recommendations is to keep you hooked so that you stay on website long enough to make a good data collection target or at least sell you a higher value product or multiple products in a single order.
So how does Product Recommendation helps you as an E Commerce site owner
Increase stickiness
As discussed above, the product recommendation increases the stickiness of the website. The user has stayed on your website much longer and thus is more likely to add the product to their wish list (which gives you invaluable information) or buy alternative or bundled product.
Upping the order value
Normally a customer would just arrive at the product page from search engine search or somewhere else ( such as a direct link) and then buys the product and leave or just leaves without making the purchase. The first scenario is expected but often there is an option to entice the customer to make a large purchase and buy related items so that overall order value increases and thus the revenue
Providing more exploration opportunities
The customer which has entered your website for buying a product needs to be considered as an event to also let them know that in addition to product they are looking for there is an opportunity to either buy a higher/lower value products( such as upselling / downselling ) or there is an opportunity to sell related or unrelated items too. The opportunity also exists for customer to thus browse more of the product catalog and probably buy another product which they didn’t think of initially buying.
Customer Loyalty Enhancement
If the related product recommendations are based on solid data and research, you may find out that customers stick longer and browse more. If the person has already made a purchase, you can personalize the product much better and thus increase the time they spent on looking at the product.
Interest based marketing can help customers propel towards making decisions and reducing hesitation by increasing desire to purchase a product that is already on their mind.
Product recommendations are a great feature to add on to your product page. Combined with good data analysis and these days with AI tools can make user engagement sticky and help you make more dollars per sale and increase customer stickiness and loyalty.
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