2014 September 16 Archive - EXEIdeas

The term “online store personalization” sounds like a name for a fancy technique for advanced developers, but in truth, with the right set of plugins anyone can optimize their online store. In this article we will focus on useful solutions, which you can apply to make your online store more functional and customer friendly.1.) Enabling social shopping:Social shopping is one of the best ways to make your customers feel at home, while they shop at your online store. Most online retailers add social media links on product pages and allow customers to create wish lists and share them with friends. But there are plugins, which go one step further and show us all how amazing social shopping can be. LoopIt is a great example – thanks to the plugin you can add “Ask your friends” button to every product page. Customers, who click on the button, can start a conversation with invited friends and ask them for advice. The best thing about the plugin is that it is not only useful to the buyers, but can be also used by retailers as a means of researching what customers really think about products and how they make their shopping decisions.2.) Recommending products:The main goal of online store personalization is to be able to recommend products, which will be interesting to customers. This requires a lot of analyzing: the history of purchase and customer’s behavior on the website are valuable resources of information about customer’s shopping preferences. Without a proper software, it would be impossible to conduct such research for dozens of customers at the same time. Luckily, Magento users can choose Commerce Stack – an add-on, which allows to manage related products and make accurate recommendations. This plugin generates recommendations automatically, however, retailers can also manually recommend products and choose which products they want to cross-sell or upsell.3.) Currency Converter:If you sell your products to different countries, it is important to provide your customers with a multi-language website and add a plugin to your store, which automatically converts the prices of your products to local currency. Some plugins are also able to determine the country of the visitor based on the IP address and convert the currency automatically.4.) Connecting With Your Customers:More and more online retailers decide to use LiveChat as their basic means of communicating with customers. One of the main advantages of this application is the information it provides about the user. And it is not the typical information you would expect, for example, you can easily find out which keywords led the user to your online store, which page the user is currently displaying, etc. You can use this new information in your conversations with customers and it can help you better understand your customers’ concerns.For every functionality described in this article you can find a proper plugin, however the names and types of plugins vary between different platforms, so be sure to check with your developer or Magento development company what kind of plugins are most recommended for your type of platform.About the Author:Alex Buka is a writer and Social Media Marketer in the Magento web designers company with 3+ years of experience in SEO, IT copywriting and social media management.Find Me On GooglePlus | Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter