Pre-emptive Shopping and product personalisation– the future of eCommerce?
With analysts and marketeers having more and more data at their fingertips, customer personalisation is becoming increasingly detailed. Pre-emptive shopping and product personalisation seem to be the next trending steps in the progression of ecommerce and this blog will tell you exactly what that means and what the future entails for online shoppers.
What is pre-emptive shopping?
Pre-emptive shopping enables customers to automate their shopping experiences i.e. create certain rules when it comes to shopping. For example, Tesco allows certain “if rules” such as…if Heinz ketchup is on offer, add it to my basket.
Shoppers essentially have the ability to create rules like this for their shopping basket and, depending on whichever conditions they set, products can be added or removed automatically.
The emphasis is on the word “can.” Items cannot be added into a customer’s shopping basket without them knowing. Everything needs to be confirmed by the customer in what is very much a customer-led system.
Experiences like these are appealing as it gives back an amount of control to the shopper. We are not at the total behest of massive retailers and this is where the strength or pre-emptive shopping lies.
It can trigger the IKEA effect where people value things they’ve helped create more than those they didn’t which can then lead to more items in the basket and increased revenue for retailers.
What is product personalisation?
Product personalisation has been around for a while now. Amazon have been showing recommended products for the last few years based on purchases and product pages that the user has visited.
However, with the increased level of data at hand, retailers can now create ultra-high levels of personalisation for their customers.
New tech can curate products and pricing based on data from the customer or customer segments. Through past purchase data, shopping behaviour data, shopping location data and predictive analytics, a highly detailed merchandising plan can be aimed at customers on an individual basis.
It will undoubtedly lead to the most complex and intuitive eCommerce CRM management tools every created as these individualised merchandising plans will be able to more accurately predict not only customer behaviour, but also customer motivations.
A combination of data from these two eCommerce methods could work hand in hand. The rules a customer sets could inform the predictive analysis of product personalisation. It will certainly help understand the motivations of customers and what they are likely to be interested in purchasing more and more.
Some say this is pretty freaky stuff but others say its pretty genius stuff. In any case, this is certainly where the future of eCommerce is heading. More data equals more accurate predictions of the future including customer behaviour. The cutting edge of eCommerce is an exciting place to be.
