Last week, in sunny Palm Springs, California, retailers, buyers, and a slew of other executives gathered for four days of discussions, panels, and events centered around strengthening e-commerce businesses.
One particular discussion moderated by yours truly (hi, it’s Jeena!) focused on a topic that has really never stopped being important for brands: personalized product merchandising strategies to get shoppers to convert.
On the panel were execs from Harley Davidson, Kendra Scott, ThriftBooks, Hiya Health, and Genee who shared their thoughts on strategies to capture and retain the attention of online shoppers.
We all know it’s important, but how do retailers approach it and what’s the nitty-gritty of it all? Turns out everyone had a slightly different interpretation of the word “personalization.”
John Trippe, e-commerce product manager and technical director at kids’ multivitamin brand Hiya Health, for instance, said for his company, it’s all about aligning with marketing and acquisition partners to determine what experiences consumers respond to.
“You have different motivations for the consumer…most of our customers are mothers,” he said. “They’re there in order to find the best place possible [for vitamins with] all-natural ingredients but some of the triggers might be unique…so obviously we’re thinking through the marketing campaign, messaging, and how to get that specific [trigger].”
“It’s a little bit more data-centric,” he added.
Ryan Dennis, managing director of global e-commerce at Harley Davidson, expressed similar sentiments, adding that his is a “pretty SKU-intensive business.”
“So helping consumers who are entering your site quickly narrow down on the types of products that they’re looking for, and making sure that we’re understanding who they are, where they’re coming from, what touchpoints we’ve seen with them before and even in some cases we’re working on real-time segmentation through AI tools to help us reorder, restack, or resequence product listing pages to make sure that we know who this consumer is and what types of products are going to have the best chance of converting them,” he said.
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Dennis certainly wasn’t alone in pinpointing the role AI plays in enhancing the personalization experience. Alexandra Martin, senior manager of site merchandising and optimization at jewelry brand Kendra Scott, said AI has especially been instrumental in helping the business scale.
“We are leaning on AI for many reasons [including] to scale up,” she explained. “It gives us the opportunity to be known to someone. Sometimes, it might be that we just don’t have to have all the resources. I mean, there are six people on my team…We lean on AI to help sorting in our category pages, helping [the customers in] knowing that we have some other products since not every customer that kind of goes to the top. [Preferences] feeding into AI just fill up different algorithms that cater to different types of customers.”
Martin added that it’s also helpful in creating a holistic shopping experience by enabling the retailer to upsell or cross-sell different products.
For Dennis, who oversees e-commerce operations of categories such as womenswear, premium lifestyle, and motorcycle parts, AI has helped cross-sell in unique ways. And as it looks to the future, Harley Davidson is using generative AI to build up other capacities.
“One that we’re really excited about is testing out the potential to use generative AI as a whole as a shopping concierge,” he told Retail Brew. “Our products are complex in a lot of ways and they require piecing together these three bits to make the right part or it’s just complex, where you land on our riding jackets page. There’s a seemingly sea of black riding jackets, that all are feature rich and sort of different types of riders and different types of scenarios, [so] helping to accelerate the consumer’s ability to digest that and understand what types of products they might want.”