Holiday gift shopping: The annual tradition that brings joy to some and grief to many.
It's a task that starts off simply enough with a shopping list. But once you’ve checked it twice — or more — and added more acquaintances, work colleagues and long-lost childhood friends, your dread surfaces. How do you shop for people you barely know for items you can’t predict at a price you can’t estimate?
It only gets worse when you start your online research ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Even if you do have an idea for Aunt Gina’s third-youngest stepson — Harry Potter, for example — Google isn’t much help. A search for “Harry Potter” nets you results around the Wikipedia page, the official Wizarding World website and even Game of Thrones star Kit Harrington’s favorite character — but not the personalized gift suggestion you need.
While online shopping has the potential to make your holidays brighter, e-commerce has not sufficiently evolved to make finding that perfect gift a simple — and even enjoyable — experience. It’s time for retailers to step up and develop an improved seasonal strategy that delights shoppers for the entire year.
Think about shopping from a gift-seeker’s perspective
Brands can start by thinking of “seekers” as the higher-order outcome we are looking to achieve. In this case, shoppers are seekers of the perfect gifts. At our company, we empower brands to cater to seekers by using machine learning algorithms to analyze their true needs and provide them with highly personalized shopping experiences. Smart brands are reorienting their processes so that instead of selling you a product or service, they are mining your information to meet the thing that you seek.
For example, one of our clients, Uncommon Goods, offers a digital tool — the Gift Finder — to find your perfect gift. You enter your relationship with the recipient, along with their interests, and the tool reveals a variety of gift options. My search for a friend who enjoys cooking, entertaining, home products and the TV show The Good Place returned a recommendation for the “7 deadly sins glasses.”
The idea was just what I was looking for — even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
Rely on data to remember shoppers’ preferences
I see even more evolved services coming out of Walmart, which is starting to outpace Amazon in its seeker-centricity. Walmart subsidiary Jet.com offers a text-based interface for gift buying that saves and catalogs your loved ones and their preferences. Come next year, your holiday list is built, complete with great recommendations, on the first day of your shopping process. Imagine that — done in a day, and with perfect gifts.
Start your e-commerce wish list now
Retailers may feel overwhelmed when considering where to start on improving gift-seekers’ shopping experiences. But they don’t need to leverage fancy, cutting-edge tech like augmented reality or virtual dressing rooms to grab shoppers’ attention and loyalty. Pay attention to tips that actually meet seekers’ No. 1 need: finding the items they are looking for — even if they don’t know what they want.
• Apply customer data to everything: From the moment a gift-seeker enters a website, they start dropping digital clues about their desires and preferences. Don’t let this information go to waste — use it to understand the customer’s interaction with your product or service and how it can be improved to meet their needs.
• Lean on cloud solutions to get to the ‘why’: It’s not enough to understand what a gift-seeker is looking for. The best brands need to understand why a gift-seeker is visiting their site — be it experience, convenience or quality of product — and then apply that information to improve outcomes. This process involves stitching together headless, cloud-based tools and services in a digital flow that naturally enables shoppers to achieve their desired outcome.
• Get back to basics: The best e-commerce experiences should be like a theme park ride — delightful, satisfying and with no hint of just how much work goes on behind the scenes. Yes, a seamless, modern shopping experience relies on data, APIs, AI, cloud and other complex modern technology, but all customers should see is the perfect gift, reliably delivered, through a straightforward purchase process. Paired with a compelling brand and lifestyle story, your brand now has the formula that really matters this holiday season.
You’re not dreaming. The future of holiday shopping looks nothing like the early days of the web. Seeker-centric shopping is taking hold and will revolve around brands deeply understanding shoppers and their preferences. The list will grow automatically, learning from your interactions on Facebook or other social networks. Their likes and dislikes will be embedded. You’ll start with a prebuilt list and then curate it, all the while teaching AI to do better the next time.
The brand that wins your business will help you not just with the shopping experience, but with the post-shopping experience, learning from data around how or whether the product was used, enjoyed or regifted.
The age of seeker-centric shopping is coming. Hurry, Santa.
