What is Guided Shopping?
Guided shopping is a process that helps potential buyers find the perfect product or service to fulfill their needs and move towards a purchase. It is a sales technique, applicable to almost all types and categories of selling within B2B and B2C environments.
The guided shopping process involves getting salespeople to work hand-in-hand with potential customers to connect them to products and services that fulfill their needs.
Guided shopping allows your customers to maintain control of the shopping experience, and enables them to make more confident buying decisions.
In short, guided shopping works twofold:
- It aims to understand and analyze your customer’s requirements.
- Based on these requirements, it guides the shopper toward the best purchase for them.
Why Guided Shopping is essential?
The incontrovertible truth: choice overload is fatigue.
If we don’t help your shopper to learn about their wants and requirements, they will find it somewhere else.
Today, buyers are confronted with more options and more touchpoints than ever.
The customers today are so overburdened with the choice and touchpoints that it is all too easy for them to experience fatigue conclusions, basically giving them 3 options to
- Not completing the purchase journey and abandoning the digital carts because they couldn’t find what they desired.
- Purchasing something completely unnecessary without thinking it through and ending up dissatisfied with the purchase.
- Pawning off the decision-making to another person.
Giving shoppers enough choices can make them feel like they are in control but overloading them with choices can make them feel that making a decision would bear a high risk of getting it wrong. Guided Shopping allows retailers and brand manufacturers to make it easy for consumers to stay in control, manage their options, and arrive at more confident purchase decisions.
The Solution: Shopware Guided Shopping
Everyone needs a guide in this perplexing world of purchasing. As a result, understanding what everyone requires is essential. Guided Shopping is a new feature introduced by Shopware for that.
Guided Shopping is a cutting-edge new feature that works in tandem with your existing eCommerce infrastructure and effortlessly integrates into your Shopware system environment.
You can hire Shopware Developer to create interactive live video events for your customers directly from your Shopware website, eliminating the need to transition between a presentation tool, video conferencing system, and store system. One intelligent solution for showcasing your items, engaging customers, and reinforcing brand loyalty.
How Shopware Guided Shopping can boost your business?
Consumers can do online the same things they could do in person with Shopware’s guided shopping product. Guided shopping recreates the in-store experience by asking the shopper questions that identify their needs and wants. Upon which it recommends products that are in line with the shopper’s goal.
Some guided shopping examples could include things like size guides, chatbots, or personalized recommendations. But one of the best eCommerce examples brought by Shopware’s Guided Shopping is live video consultation.
An enhanced online experience that’s inviting and informative will be a key to driving traffic into your stores and increasing sales.
Making purchase decisions easy and quick for the customers is essential to any business. Constantly declining attention spans and customer’s growing demand for simplified shopping have led the industry to create guided shopping solutions to create more seamless shopping experiences. Guided shopping aims to ease the customer journey by increasing customer’s attention spans, facilitating search and exploration and helping customers reach the last step of the purchase funnel. Guided shopping has the following features:
Features
- You can use interactive video consultations to create a vibrant shopping experience.
- In a private, interactive video consultation, you may also assist VIP clients.
- By using integrated analytics and consumer profile data you can increase conversion rate by selecting only relevant products.
- You can interact with your customers directly via video call, answer queries, and emphasize the features and benefits of your product.
- Can increase your sales by recommending customized product bundles, add-on items, or alternative products.
- One can easily understand your customers’ values, interests, and needs, as well as the elements that influence their purchasing decisions.
- You can increase your customers’ trust in your products, eliminate doubt, and drastically reduce product returns.
Industries suitable for Shopware Guided Shopping:
1. Fashion Industry
Customers are always concerned about the material of the garment they are buying online, thus the fashion business may gain more from this aspect. By purchasing throug7h guide shopping, customers will be able to view the material used in the dress they are purchasing, as well as receive advice from the consultant and view various options. As a result, the shop’s conversion rate will improve.
2. Automobile Industry
Customers who live far from the dealership, however, are unable to visit the dealership; therefore, guided shopping allows them to see the condition of the vehicle via live stream, and the dealership can engage with customers in real-time, provide them with a 360-degree perspective, and respond to their questions, allowing the customer to decide whether or not to visit the dealership.
3. eCommerce Industries
For example, if a consumer wants to buy a used mobile phone online, he or she will always be hesitant to do so since they cannot check the state of the phone live; they can only view it in images or read about it in the properties. As a result, they can use guided shopping to see the state of the phone in real-time via video. As a result, they will be able to make a quicker conclusion. It goes the same with almost every second-hand item.
Guided shopping anchors a customer-centric approach
1. Why is Customer-Centric Marketing important for a business?
There are two approaches: the product-centric approach and the Customer-centric approach.
There was a phase when marketers used to sell products based on their features instead of their requirements. This approach is termed product-centric. Everything has changed now. The market has shifted to a customer-centric approach. The products are sold by resonating with the needs of the customer.
2. How to create a customer-centric strategy for your business?
Customer-centricity is understood as aligning with all your shoppers. But it is rather a backward process. The process starts by talking to your customers, carrying out surveys or market analysis, tracking behavioral data to dividing your customers based on their statistics. This is an evolution of the market.
How does Shopware Guided Shopping assist the customers?
1. Guided shopping reduces choice overload
Choice overload can exhaust customers while purchasing and causes confusion and stress. Guided shopping helps reduce these barriers by allowing live video consultations that can guide you to your personalized search list of products that meet your requirements.
2. Guided shopping educates and advises customer
Guided shopping can be very helpful for customers when it comes to buying products with detailed and specific specifications, especially when a customer doesn’t know much about it.
Products like phones, computers, kitchen appliance, or other home appliances, have set of attributes that make them unique and these set of attributes are the very reasons the customer chooses a certain product over another.
Guided shopping allows you to choose which attributes to show to which customers so you can,
- Better promote the products your customers are looking for.
Promoting the products that your customers are looking for, at the right time.
- Personalize their search based on the attributes that resonate the most with them
Getting started with a Shopware Guided Shopping
1. Understand your customer’s profile
Your customers are either sybarite or pragmatic shoppers. Many are goal-oriented.
Guided shopping is about first outlining your shoppers so that you can offer them the right product without them having to traverse all product categories.
Guided shopping is nothing but starting a conversation with your shoppers, asking them the right questions will not only show them the right product but will allow you to get to know them better.
2. Knowing customer goals
The foremost thing before you analyze your customer’s goals is to understand them and how your products would fit their needs.
Shopping goals are changing continuously, so you also need to be updated. You can keep your shoppers interested if you focus on their goals.
Customers always change their shopping goals and its important that you keep up with that information. You can only entertain your customers if you know what they want to buy.
3. Recommend products considering customer interest
The goal of guided shopping is to match the consumer with their goal. But you also want to show information about another product that would also benefit your customer’s goal. In order to make them want to click on another product, you can recommend the product and the attribute emphasizing on the benefits the product would provide and fulfill your customer’s need.
Take guided shopping omni-channel
Guided shopping is a give-and-take process, there’s so much you can do with it. The analysis of its data can benefit all the departments from marketing to merchandising.
Profiling your shoppers deeply means understanding their purchase behavior, observing the platforms they use to shop, and how they interact with those devices. This will help your business to set up an effective omnichannel structure wherein your customers can find you on every platform they choose to visit.
Jainesh Shah
Jainesh Shah is a CEO and Co-Founder of iCreative Technologies Inc. iCreative Technologies is a digital eCommerce agency mainly serving B2B clients across the globe. With over 15 years of experience in technology and business, he is helping his client thrive in this competitive era. He is specialized in eCommerce consulting, creative thinking, generating new business ideas, and delivering end products to market in the digital space. He is working with the vision to help his partner agencies and Clients to grow in their respective businesses.
