“Experience-driven commerce” sounds lovely, but can it make online shopping better for customers? Barb Mosher Zinck goes in search of definitions – and practical recommendations.
Do you understand the difference between experience-driven e-commerce and traditional e-commerce?
We keep hearing that consumers want a better shopping experience. They say that loyalty is hard to come by these days and if you want your customers to stay (and new ones to come), you better do more than offer a list of products and a shopping cart (the traditional model).
I don’t argue that times have changed. And it’s true that the “traditional” shopping experience isn’t always the best approach when consumers have so many options to choose from. But what I’ve struggled to understand, and I expect many others do too, is what exactly is “experience-driven” commerce?
Experience-driven commerce, a definition: Here is how Adobe, a customer experience platform vendor, defines it:
Experience-driven commerce = Maximizing sales by delivering customer experiences from discovery to purchase that are optimized with insights from real-time shopping behaviors and multichannel data.
What does that mean you need to do?
Focus on the customer, not the product. Yes, you need to show your products with high-quality images and clear messaging, but you have to do that in a way that represents what the customer is looking for.