It’s 2023. If you still haven’t adopted a multi-pronged approach to sales and marketing, you’re being outpaced by competitors. Running a brick-and-mortar store isn’t enough in the digital age. Retailers must also maintain an adaptive eCommerce merchandising storefront.
Consider this: a 2021 study analyzed more than 600 million messages in over 135,000 campaigns. Marketers using three or more channels reported a staggering 494% higher order rate than single-channel outlets.
Online sales require an organized and deliberate merchandising strategy to maximize brand and product visibility. This ensures site visitors stay engaged long enough to complete a sale. Key elements include a user-friendly online store with interactive product catalogs that reflect actual inventories.
To run an effective multichannel operation, marketers must fine-tune their messages and trumpet their unique selling propositions to reach their intended markets. But creating content for so many channels using all your products is a heavy lift. Enter Digital Experience Composition (DXC), the next evolution of online retail.
What Is Digital Experience Composition?
DXC is a design approach that aims to create a cohesive and engaging digital experience for customers across various touchpoints—websites, mobile apps, social media, and other digital channels.
It packages low- and no-code business and developer tools so virtually anyone can create and manage different elements of customer experiences. This includes content, user interface design, and personalization, which leads to a seamless and intuitive customer journey.
DXC includes three main elements:
- Front end as a service (FEaaS) capabilities, which provide operation and infrastructure for digital experiences. This relies on retailers’ content and eCommerce platform.
- A page builder and template tools like widgets enable users to control content layout, composition, and functionality.
- An application programming interface (API) integration layer that connects assets such as content and products to the digital experience. This is where DXC connects with underlying technologies such as your content management system (CMS) and eCommerce platform.
To succeed in today’s competitive markets, brands must consistently deliver highly personalized and engaging customer experiences through their eCommerce merchandising.
Keeping up with consumer trends and buying habits is already significant work. However, making sure this singular message resonates across multiple channels is also a challenge.
By leveraging a DXC framework, non-coders can create and manage engaging digital experiences that resonate with shoppers. They can then deliver those experiences through various channels.
How DXC Helps Create Better Digital Experiences
A typical eCommerce merchandising system requires several subsystems to work together:
- Headless content management system
- Product information management service
- Digital asset management system
- A shopping cart application
Achieving this is often reserved for developers and system administrators. The process then becomes so complex that marketers need technical assistance to send messages across multiple channels.
The basic idea behind DXC is that digital experiences are made of distinct components: text, images, videos, and other interactive elements. These pieces can then be combined in specific ways to deliver various experiences. This makes it easy for the various services to work together with little-to-no coding.
As a result, marketers, merchandisers, and other business users can easily create digital experiences and replicate them across various channels effortlessly.
DXC enables companies to focus on the message instead of the medium. So, teams can consistently broadcast clear and coherent messages to customers on any channel.
Instead of frantically searching for content and logging into multiple apps to apply edits, DXC lets users seamlessly create a message designed for one channel. Then, they can immediately reuse the elements and recreate the same message elsewhere.
How Important Is eCommerce Merchandising in DXC for Your Business?
For many online retailers, eCommerce merchandising is integral to the customer experience. Simply listing products and prices isn’t enough—86% of consumers will abandon a brand after just two or three instances of bad customer service. This includes clicking “Buy” on an item only to find it’s out of stock or that a preferred color or size is unavailable.
You can see why eCommerce merchandising is an integral part of DXC. Merchandising ensures your online store consistently displays the popular and trending products more likely to engage and attract customers. In addition, incorporating product information management system and warehousing data means the online store displays updated and accurate inventory levels for all items.
Using DXC, eCommerce merchandising becomes a simple and automated task for your merchandiser to manage. This is especially true for online retailers selling hundreds or thousands of products in different variants.
What to Look for in the Right eCommerce Merchandising Software
Choosing the right merchandising software is critical to provide an excellent digital customer experience. Ensuring products display the correct information, such as price, availability, and color options, gives customers the confidence to purchase. Conversely, displaying inaccurate data can push customers to abandon their carts and your brand.
The right eCommerce merchandising software also makes it easier for customers to search for an item. This includes pages that load faster than expected to avoid reaching the wait threshold that causes customers to bounce. In addition, for customers who have a habit of “just browsing,” delivering quick search results can greatly boost the chance of a conversion.
Customers looking for additional validation before making a decision also appreciate a social button accompanying each product. This links the product to social scores garnered from popular social channels.
Make Your eCommerce Merchandising Software Work for You
Implementing the right eCommerce merchandising strategy enables online retailers to provide customers with exceptional digital shopping experiences. By utilizing a DXC approach, your team can seamlessly create messages that reach consumers across multiple touchpoints. This holistic approach attracts buyers to your website and keeps them engaged until they make a purchase.
Need help? We have two revolutionary applications designed to greatly improve the digital customer experience. Smart Merchandiser reduces or eliminates shopper frustration by ensuring your store displays accurate information on each product. Only items in stock will be displayed and highlighted.
Contact us today to learn more about how Zobrist software can greatly improve your online store’s customer experience. We’ll be happy to sit down with you and develop a solution for your online retail worries.
