In an age where digital sales are channels becoming more critical to business revenue by the day, discerning sellers know they need to dial in every aspect of the eCommerce experience to stay competitive.
One of the most impactful ways you can elevate online selling paths is by adding visual commerce enhancements to your storefront.
“Visual commerce” refers to the use of visual content, such as images, digital renderings, and videos, to help sell products or services online. This type of eCommerce focuses on using unique visual elements to create an engaging and interactive shopping experience for customers, with the goal of increasing sales revenue and customer loyalty.
We’ve identified 4 specific visual commerce offerings you should consider incorporating into your eCommerce architecture to stay in favor with buyers and administrators alike. Their presence in online selling paths can help you sell more, sell faster, and maintain less.
Attribute-Based Configurators
Attribute-based configurators allow shoppers to tell the seller’s system exactly what it is they’re looking for and be presented with a list of optimized matches, instead of asking them to manually review every option the seller has until they find the just-right fit.
When it comes to visual commerce, this means shoppers are only given physical visibility into items that satisfy their end goals. They’re gently guided away from incompatible options, and given a fair amount of freedom to further customize their best-fit matches.
Legacy configurators often rely upon product-based scaffolding, which operates more like a list of line items than a true digital shop. Product-based configuration doesn’t accommodate the level of immediate, personal modification consumerized buyers have come to expect in more recent years.
3D Product Visualization
It can be hard for online shoppers to have an accurate understanding of the product they’re buying without the help of visual commerce, particularly when things like dimension, weight, or scale come into play.
By incorporating 3D product visualization into an eCommerce environment, customers can see every angle of a product, zoom in to examine details, and better understand the true nature of its features and benefits.
They don’t have to question what something would look like from the back, worry about whether or not it would fit through their apartment’s front door, or be left surprised by differences between their mind’s eye and designer specs.
Shoppers can even upload images of themselves or their living areas to use as hyper-specific reference with products they’re considering, leveraging 3D product visualization to virtually try on sunglasses with a smartphone selfie camera or place a potential garden shed against a rendering of their backyard fence.
By providing customers with a more realistic and personalized experience, retailers can increase the likelihood of high-confidence, self-service purchases.
Dynamic Pricing Rules
Nobody likes being kept in the dark when it comes to the cost of an item they’re interested in. When considering visual commerce, a buyer’s ability to access pricing information is just as valuable as their ability to see what they’re putting in their cart.
Incorporating dynamic price rules into the visual flow of product configuration and selection means that shoppers can see in real-time how their selections, modifications, and specifications will impact their item’s final cost.
Consumers are accustomed to seeing the price of products alongside their images or descriptions. Not displaying pricing information can cause confusion and frustration for customers, leading to abandoned purchases.
In visual commerce, pricing information can be displayed in various ways to help consumers make informed purchase decisions.
For example, some retailers use visual annotations that appear when a customer hovers over a product image, providing information such as pricing, size options, and color choices. This allows customers to quickly and easily view the price of the product without having to navigate away from the image.
With this pricing visibility, buyers can balance system recommendations and their own budget before hitting the actual point of checkout, and know exactly why they’re being charged what they are.
Interactive Messages
In the absence of sales representatives, many retailers question how to best provide the same product knowledge and expertise to self-serve buyers. Logik.io has built a series of interactive message modules that can easily be incorporated into online shopping paths to help bridge this gap.
Informational messages, warning messages, error alerts, and help icons supported by Logik.io can be customized to your brand specifications, contain whatever message you want to express to shoppers, and be placed intelligently on your website itself for optimal accessibility.
You can trigger error alerts or warning messages to deploy when product exclusion rules are met, include a clickable badge on specialty products that expands to show further detail, or have a pop-up reminder for your buyer to double-check their final cart before moving to the order submission page.
Being able to present information in a digestible manner at the right points in the shopping experience helps build product awareness, brand confidence, and can even end up increasing the total order value.
Use Case Scenario
Imagine an online seller that specializes in selling internationally-sourced gourmet food and beverages, such as artisanal cheeses, meats, chocolates, and wines. The seller wants to introduce a new visual commerce offering to their website to enhance the customer shopping experience and drive sales.
Here's how it could work:
The seller introduces a virtual "tasting experience" on their website. Using high-quality images and videos, the tasting experience provides a way for buyers to explore inventory and learn about the different products in a more engaging and interactive way. Buyers can customize baskets of suggested snacks and drinks to be shipped home so they can bring the tasting experience to life for themselves, a date night, or larger party.
The virtual tasting experience on the website includes 360-degree 3D product views, close-up shots of the food items, and detailed descriptions of the flavor profiles and origins of each item. Before this, buyers were only provided with a menu of options presented as line items by category, without any supporting images.
Upon entering the “Tasting Experience” portion of the website, buyers are presented with a pop-up module containing a few questions about their flavor preferences, party size, and budget. Attribute-based configuration supporting the visual commerce then spins that input against the inventory to show a possible basket containing items that align with the buyer’s palate.
The seller also includes user-generated content (UGC) such as customer reviews, ratings, and real-life photos of the products in use, to provide a more authentic and trustworthy shopping experience for first-time buyers. With UGC, the seller can also keep track of active reviewers and monitor data related to order satisfaction in new ways.
Dynamic pricing allows for a receipt-style sidebar to populate the cost of each item in a buyer’s basket and show a final price, which can update if the basket contents are changed in any way during the shop. When certain items are placed in a basket together, informational pop-ups about tasty pairings or fun facts about shared origins can add an educational factor to the experience as well.
After launching the virtual tasting experience and letting it run for a quarter, the seller reviews their overall website analytics and sales data. They find a significant increase in website traffic and sales, with customers spending more time on the website and making larger purchases. There have also been fewer order cancellations and returns, as buyers have a better idea of exactly what they’re getting before submitting their order.
The seller attributes the increase in sales to the new visual commerce offering, which has helped to create a more engaging and personalized shopping experience for customers. Increased product transparency from both the seller and other buyers encourages shoppers to walk away with more product in more confidence, and leaves an easy door open for them to return down the line.
Why Implementation Is Worth It
While some retailers may be satisfied with the pre-enhanced online selling experience, buyers won’t maintain the same satisfaction moving forward – and incoming revenue from eCommerce channels will begin to reflect that.
Taking the step toward aligning your tech stack with consumerized buyers through visual commerce means you’ll be able to keep up with, and even exceed, buyer expectations for years to come. The more engaged and attended to shoppers are within your storefront, the more likely they are to make larger, repeat, high-confidence purchases.
With Logik.io, you’ll be doing your future self and staff a favor down the line, as we’ve purpose-built our engine to scale with and adapt alongside visual commerce partners like Threekit. You won’t have to break the bank – or team morale – with visual commerce implementation, but will likely be able to see the immediate rewards.
