The first audience you want to expose your product catalog to is your shoppers. While your ecommerce website search, navigation, and recommendations are the obvious first place to do so (check our blog series in the table below to learn more about this part of the experience), there are many other ways to engage your shoppers directly—online and in-store.

In this series, we’ll show you how you can leverage composable components to build ecommerce tools that best showcase your business.

Best practices to build an online store providing shoppers with a top notch shopping experience. Best practices for eCommerce personalization Best ways to leverage AI to optimize a user conversion How to increase online sales with Search Merchandising How to boost online sales with Category Merchandising

Online Outfit Builder Tool

App: Online Outfit Builder

Medium: Online Store

Goal/problem solved: 

• Eliminate the need for customer service, support rep, or sales associate’s help
• Increase revenue by allowing product customization in a fun visual way
• Decrease production times by collecting user customization requests in real time, increasing customer satisfaction as well

Main user: Online store customer

Stitch together the in-store sales associate’s support with an online customization service into a seamless shopping experience. Online outfit builder tools allow product customization in a fun visual way, ensuring customer satisfaction, decreasing production times, and eliminating the need to schedule time for the live sales associate’s customization session.

Customers are presented with a choice of styles, materials, colors and other details, personalized for each user profile, while the product or element’s stock availability and delivery times are verified against the stock management system data, to ensure smooth transaction and customer satisfaction with the online shopping experience.

Chatbots

App: Chatbot Conversational Search

Medium: Online

Goal/problem solved:

• Retrieve product-related info
• Assist with product-related questions

Main user: End-customer inquiring about products sold online and in-store via social media platforms

Chatbots are highly useful in providing support to questions online shoppers may have. They allow users to ask questions using a normal language instead of using artificial search queries. With the help of natural language processing (NLP), chatbots extract the user’s intent from their question and offer best matching answers or trigger corresponding actions. Algolia Answers can be easily implemented into existing chatbots by directing only a part of user intents to Algolia Answers while other intents are handled elsewhere. A retailer can take their customer support to the next level by leveraging chatbots to assist shoppers with product-related questions, whether sold online, in-store, or on social media platforms. In addition to providing support related answers to customer questions, and minimizing the costs associated with the live help center representatives team, chatbots could be used for merchandising by informing customers about related products or promotions relevant to their queries.

Email Recommendations

App: Personalized Email Recommendations with Algolia Recommend & Email Marketing Automation Platform

Medium: Online

Goal/problem solved: 

• Relevancy and personalizations of the product recommendations

Main user: 

• Member shoppers
• Shoppers registered with their email in-store or online
• Shoppers who made at least one purchase in the past

Retailers win customer loyalty by connecting with each customer’s unique shopping preferences and adding a personalized touch to each interaction. Algolia enables shoppers to get relevant and personalized product recommendations directly to their email address. Integrate personalized email recommendations with Algolia Recommend and marketing automation software of your choice: SendGrid, AWS SES, Mailchimp, or Marketo. Cookie-cutter promotional emails are a thing of the past—they go directly to the digital trash bin! Make sure to connect the dots between every interaction by capturing signals from customer behavior and applying those insights across every channel, in real-time. 

Saved Search Alerts

App: Saved Search Alerts with Algolia Search & Email Marketing Automation Platform

Medium: Online

Goal/problem solved: 

• Meaningful alerts making online shopping easier and faster
• Follow up and react fast to shoppers’ needs

Main user: 

• • Member shoppers
  • Shoppers registered with their email in-store or online
  • Shoppers interested in a specific product’s availability

Allow smooth back and forth transition between shopping in real-time and async. Sometimes, the perfect product your shoppers are looking for is temporarily out of stock, backordered, or they are interested in a new catalog item that has not yet arrived into the stores. With Saved Search Alerts you can follow up and react fast to shoppers’ needs. Combining Algolia Search with the marketing automation software of your choice: SendGrid, AWS SES, Mailchimp, or Marketo to create meaningful alerts, will let retailers continue the ongoing communication with their customers, even when those are not actively browsing online or physical stores.

Want to build more?

In this series on Composable Commerce, you’ll discover how to use composable APIs to help you create innovative applications based on your product catalog.

• How to build an In-Store Product Search Kiosk and Store Locator