Jan22273 The eCommerce Experience Merchandising platform, GrapheneHC by Advanced Commerce, uses revolutionary new software that allows clients to control product sequencing, searching, and recommendations within its online store. André Brown of Advanced Commerce tells us in his own words what has led the company to winning Best End-to-End Online Merchandising Platform – 2022. The paradox of choice states the more choice we have as consumers, the harder it is to make a decision. As we have entered the digital age, there has been an explosion of choice – the physical boundaries and constraints of floor space in a shop are removed online and in a bid to offer great service and grow revenues, more and more choice have been offered, and this is making it harder and harder for consumers to make decisions. Merchandising in the online world is really about controlling the product display sequence. This is a retailer’s way of helping shoppers navigate the paradox of choice by showing relevant products that a customer would like instead of trying to show every product in the catalogue. Let’s face it, if you have a product catalogue of 3,000 products we know there is no chance of a customer viewing all of them. “Shoppers’ attention spans are short, so the decisions we make about what to show first in any and every part of our online stores is becoming increasingly important,” explains André Brown. This type of merchandising happens all the time in a brick and mortar store. They are carefully laid out making sure the right blend of products based on price, stock level, popularity etc are displayed throughout the store, and the last 18 months have really emphasised the need for this kind of merchandising online. André says with regards to the pandemic and to the influx of custom, “We have had a monumentally seismic event in COVID that has driven online sales with lockdowns preventing store visits, and then ongoing restrictions all adding to consumers deciding to shop online instead. I saw some statistics that stated there has been something like 40% year on year increase in online orders and that has driven attention to online merchandising as retailers realise they are taking a lot more money online and they need to manage the customer experience effectively or lose the sale. And retailers are finding as they merchandise their online store and they take control of their product curation it has a waterfall effect on things like conversion rate, average order value, volume of orders, and even returns and cancelled orders.” Most merchandising platforms work on a one dimensional ‘boost or bury’ logic - boosting items that are popular to the top of the page and ‘burying’ unpopular items, but this logic makes the assumption we all like the same thing and it makes it extremely difficult for new items to gain popularity. “Our platform allows retailers to use a blend of attributes such as popularity, margin, availability, trending, price etc to determine their product sequencing. It is computationally complex to do this quickly in real time, which is why most technologies out there use really simple merchandising techniques like boost or bury, but we have solved the complex nature of this and are able to do it really quickly, giving average page load speeds of below 100ms. I think that the question ‘how do we offer better online experiences to our customers’ is really accelerating the growth in eCommerce technologies and headless commerce is allowing retailers to connect the best technologies to their current eCommerce platform which is why GrapheneHC has been built to connect with any eCommerce platform,” André adds. The question ‘how do we offer better online experiences’ also drives right to the solution of the paradox of choice. Merchandising our online stores is a start, but it doesn’t solve the paradox of choice, it merely changes the products that are displayed to the customer. The solution to the paradox of choice is using merchandising to show customers the products they want. Those that are really navigating the paradox of choice, those that are truly giving the best online experiences ensure their online stores and brick and mortar stores treat their customers the same and have a merchandising strategy taking into account everyone is different, using personalisation tools to change the product display sequencing based on the user, or user decisions. Ultimately, this is what GrapheneHC does. It gives retailers all the tools they need to visually merchandise their online store and provide a curated product display sequence that is personalised to the shopper, meaning customers find the right product quickly and easily, which in turn has a waterfall effect on increasing conversions, average order values and revenue. We have built GrapheneHC to become the gold standard of online merchandising and it outperforms competition in speed, breadth of functionality and price. GrapheneHC is a merchandising Rolls Royce for the price of a motorbike and with this – amongst many other things – is driving the company forward. Contact: Martin Adams Company: Advanced Commerce Web Address: https://advancedcommerce.io
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