Moving products is the cornerstone of retail, a process that starts with introducing exciting “must-have” SKUs and designing eye-catching, multiplex-level home pages. But even the best-laid strategies often end with heavy discounting that results in a downward spiral that puts overall margins at risk.
Shoppers today are overwhelmed by too many choices, and when they commit to buying something online, it’s often unavailable or at least, unavailable in their size. Consumers are craving an experience that draws them in and makes them feel more connected to a brand, with price being just one of many factors that go into a purchase.
This is especially true during the Black Friday holiday shopping period.
According to Price Waterhouse, only 20% of shoppers in 2022 planned on shopping Black Friday down from 60% in 2015. These numbers are just one more indicator of a shift in consumer buying habits, trending away from the highly transactional and price-conscious, to a desire for more personalized shopping sessions.
What if Black Friday wasn’t only about markdowns and sale prices though? What if retailers could hit their margins, excite customers, and increase basket size without relying on discounts alone?
Styltics’ Inspirational Commerce™ platform is the better way. Combining elements of storytelling, visual merchandising, and personalized engagement to create a unique and memorable shopping experience for consumers at scale, retailers can easily show products in more dynamic ways than ever before.
Inspirational Commerce aims to create a full product and brand story on every product page, driving discovery, return visits, and influencing purchasing decisions.
These technical innovations and their calculable benefits to retailers were detailed in the 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study of Stylitics.
The study, commissioned by Stylitics, found, “Stylitics provides a seamless solution to a question long plaguing the apparel, footwear, accessories, and homewares e-commerce space: How can retailers create and deploy bundling and outfitting recommendations at scale? While recognizing that outfitting and bundling on product detail pages (PDPs) help improve customer engagement, boost conversion rates, and increase average order value (AOV) for shoppers, many have struggled to scale manual efforts or develop their own automated solutions.”
Through four customer interviews and data aggregation, Forrester created a composite organization, a global retailer with $500M in revenue, 20,000 SKU’s, and who manually outfitted approximately 5% to 10% of their catalog before using Stylitics.
The results were, well, inspiring.
Retailers:
- Increased Conversion Rate by 15%
- Grew profits of $2.5M in CR and AOV
- Increased AOV 10%
Additionally, these tech solutions also saved merchandising teams $1.7M in outfitting ($790,000) and image processing ($940,000) costs over three years.
A retailer’s home page is no longer a guaranteed destination for a customer’s visit to a website. So, finding ways to encourage shopper engagement, expand product discovery and make it easy to visualize an entire outfit or room should be a brand’s number one goal.
Retailers need to think beyond transactions and focus on building meaningful connections with their customers. By embracing the concept of inspirational commerce, and the tech solutions available to them, retailers will unlock new opportunities to create exceptional shopping experiences.
The benefits are in the numbers.
Read the full Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study of Stylitics.
Read the Stylitics eBook: Inspirational Commerce: Your Guide to Black Friday/Cyber Monday Success.