Individual product feeds

Online Shops in the area of fashion are known to be fancy and at the cutting-edge of technology.
Nowadays prominent brands like Zalando or About You strengthen the customer relationship by using personalized product recommendations. The best examples are the recently launched product feedsYour Zalando” and “Your Feed“: On a separate page the customer is presented a completely tailored choice of products that change with every click, purchase or rating by him or other customers with similar profiles. Exactly the opposite of the static product lists which are used in most of the existing online shops.
Furthermore also the popular eBay Marketplace personalizes your shopping experience with its “eBay Feed” feature.

Individual product feeds
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Why are online shops still so static like websites in the 90s?

Let’s be honest: there really should be more innovation here. Besides some popular positive examples like ABOUT YOU (http://www.aboutyou.de) or Amazon the vast majority of online shops look more or less identical like yesterday, last week, last month: boring product lists wherever you look, static CMS pages where the only dynamic thing is the annoying newsletter box that pops up.
From my consulting experience in the last years I’ve learned, that in most cases shop design relaunches are only done every few years. Due to costs or low priority the online shop is not seen as a continuous optimization process but rather a one-time investment.

Why are online shops still so static like websites in the 90s?
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Comparing offline and online product recommendations

Many Magento shops offer product recommendations like the well-known “Customers who bought this also bought”. Everyone knows these recommendations from various global e-commerce players. The product recommendations are generated by several sources like e.g. the clicks and sales of a customer compared to the masses – which means to other customers in a shop.

Let’s adapt this special kind of product recommendations to the offline world and use a clothing shop as an example. Think of a visit in an offline shoe store. You enter the shop and look around for finding the right shoe. Eventually you don’t even want to buy something but just poke around for some inspiration.

How do you get your recommendations in an offline store?
You’re looking around and you will mostly find a standard categorization for different kinds of shoes: sport shoes, high heels, loafers etc. – on the right side for ladies and on the left for men. Eventually you find some marketing banners hanging from the ceiling and making special offers. This classical way of finding the right product is very well known to all of us and is approved for many decades. This phisically quite exhausting offline shopping experience is also supported by not overexerting us with thousands of different shoes.
Compared to the online world this seems to be a very complicated way of finding the right shoes. But the huge difference is that you normally don’t have this immense mass of different shoes compared to most online shops. This mass of products makes the big difference why you need to get products recommended which are matching your personal profile. If you don’t know what you want you can get lost and overstrained very quickly. In the offline world it is much easier to get along with the offered product range.

Personal contact is very important
The main advantage of the offline shopping experience is the personal advices you get by the more or less self confident customer consultants. If you like her or him and the advices are matching and presented nicely, the chance of buying is much higher.
In the online world automatic product recommendations can do some of the jobs of an offline shop customer consultant. And they can even learn more about the customer and improve their advices. Also the huge bunch of different products can be an advantage because every kind of customer type can be catched. And the poking customers are also still known when they visit your online shop the next time to really buy something.

A possible conclusion
Both worlds have their advantages. Of course. But more and more customers around the globe appreciate the online experience with a much bigger product range and a comfortable way of comparing products. Great personalized product recommendations like “Customers who bought this also bought” can be a very helpful way for customers browsing through large product catalogues and also for shop owners to offer the right and matching products. Or even upsell other products compared to a selected product.

Comparing offline and online product recommendations
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Once bought, forever haunted

Not long ago someone told me: “Once, at Christmas 2009, I bought the movie Austin Powers for a friend of mine in the probably most known online shop out there. Since then, this shop recommends Mike Myer films via email and online to me – every single year during Christmas time. What’s up with them? I don’t even like Mike Myers!”.
Yes, this is probably an issue that everyone of us knows quite well. We regularly buy birthday presents for our family and friends. And afterwards online shops “think” that we bought this stuff for ourselves.

Once bought, forever haunted
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Reduce large product lists in mobile shops by presenting only relevant products to your customers

As everybody knows Mobile Commerce is a trending topic these days (e.g. here). Designing an online shop for mobile devices is all about reducing elements and the rethinking of existing page structures to make them more adaptive to devices with constraints like bandwidth, screen size, storage amount, button sizes etc.

Reduce large product lists in mobile shops by presenting only relevant products to your customers
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Why every shop owner has to offer personalized product recommendations

1. Product recommendations – never heard of that
Mostly all of us have seen the well-known Amazon “Customers who bought X also bought Y” slots that recommend products to you when you have once visited their website.  That’s it – after all you already heard of product recommendations and also probably used it.

Why every shop owner has to offer personalized product recommendations
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