Discovery is a concept in eCommerce that aims to direct customers to the right products with the use of various tools and techniques. Shoppers can have a targeted item in mind or can be window shopping without a clear intent to purchase. Either way, a discovery-led approach provides contextual and memorable search experiences that make online shopping fun and relevant.
eCommerce discovery incorporates the different ways shoppers can search products across the customer journey. These include browsing a brand’s inventory or a marketplace, going through product recommendations, using the search bar, and more.
Benefits of Effective Discovery
- It promotes contextual search experiences. Finding your products when and where it matters, and being satisfied with the results not only increases customers’ interest in your brand but also encourages purchase.
- More customers can find you. Employing tactics that optimize product and image descriptions can widen your reach and attract potential customers looking for products using external search engines. You can rank your items high in results and increase traffic to your site.
- When you monitor closely your shoppers’ discovery journey, you can determine which products are popular in searches and use that to both drive conversions, promote your brand, and improve backend operations.
- Discovery commerce offers a great opportunity for you to upsell or cross-sell products that are not as popular as your bestsellers. You can encourage users to add more to their cart by giving more value to their overall purchase.
Discovery Best Practices
Here are some measures you can implement to increase the possibility of customers discovering your brand and your products:
- Add more descriptive product tags to promote accurate discovery.This way, the right items will appear on search results even when multiple filters and categories are applied. The product tagging does not have to be tedious, too. Visual AI enhances the deep tagging process by automatically extracting information from image data and assigning the appropriate tags.
- Leverage the search bar. The search bar is one of the starting points for product discovery. It can be the first thing a user looks for when they have a clear idea of what they want out of your website. Functions like auto-complete and image previews can be added so that even simply typing a query will return popular or more specific recommendations. You can also optimize search so that misspellings and synonyms will still surface the intended products.
- Have separate categories for bestsellers, new releases, discounted items, and more. This can increase the visibility of products that can go unnoticed. It will also make shopping according to a theme or purpose more convenient and straightforward.
- Utilize recommendation carousels. This encourages spending a longer time on your website by browsing through categories and similar products that fit your shoppers’ unique preferences.