Are you as personalized as you think you are?

85% of companies claim to deliver a personalized experience to their consumers. However, only 60% of consumers agree.

Many e-commerce companies are quick to claim that finding information on their website is easy and that the experience they provide their users is highly personalized. Most users, however, starkly disagree and user dissatisfaction remains a prevalent issue.

What makes for a great shopping experience?

The difference in perception between companies and consumers can prove to be a significant obstacle if ignored. It becomes crucial for companies to actively bridge this gap to stay competitive or enhance their competitiveness.

When you think about it, there's nothing more bothersome than trying to find a product or piece of content you’ve been looking for, only to be met with a terribly slow site or a search function that isn't understanding what you mean.

It’s a given that speed and smooth visuals are very important for a great experience on the site. But a recent study done by Google on search abandonment shows that a good search with high accuracy is more important than anything else.

Aligning business goals with user experience must be prioritized, given that 80% of users leave a site after an unsuccessful search, with as many as 82% of them avoiding coming back if they’ve had trouble with search in the past.

For this reason, a positive search experience and the increased likelihood of additional purchases are intertwined, making it even more important to ensure that search and recommendation features are working seamlessly.

The quest for authenticity

The only way you’ll succeed is by committing yourself to a deeper understanding of users. Making your users feel understood by providing them with a fast search function, which is also personalized in real time, should be the cornerstone of every adjustment and improvement.

This will build trust and create a sense of authenticity around your brand - things that contribute to increased user loyalty.

The study by Google also shows that if you provide a good search experience, users are more likely to make additional purchases other than those they came to the shop to find. The choice of adding more items to your cart is a no-brainer if all the items you are being recommended are highly relevant, and maybe even interrelated.

Moreover, the study reveals that 68% of users will abandon a site if they encounter difficulties or delays in finding the desired information.

Needless to say, user experience is everything. But often making this happen for e-commerce businesses means managing a lot of complexity.

How to navigate complexity to meet user demands

E-commerce managers are constantly confronted with the enormous task of orchestrating a seamless experience across a spectrum of channels, such as websites and mobile apps.

For this reason, it becomes necessary to know how to grapple with a variety of challenges, including navigating through multichannel management, managing complexities within extensive product attributes and catalogs, and addressing the constant rise in customer expectations.

It’s a task that demands careful management to ensure cohesion and consistency. That’s why the adoption of a MACH architecture emerges as a strategic imperative.

The modular nature of MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) architecture offers a next-level approach to enabling businesses to deploy specialized search solutions.

This, in turn, ensures a real-time analysis of all relevant aspects of user intent, contributing to enhanced search result accuracy and system adaptability.

A central principle of success in this environment lies in the delivery of meaningful and relevant search results to users. The emphasis on real-time responses, aligning with the user’s immediate intent, is paramount.

This ensures not only operational efficiency but also a tailored user experience that resonates better with the instantaneous needs and desires of customers.

A modular architecture is an advantage because it allows you to combine services that, together, allow you to ensure search functionality during peak demand.

No one can afford to have delays in displaying search results, causing frustration with users during Black Friday or Christmas shopping.

3 tips to ensure that you’re as personalized as you want to be

For you to make this happen, you must ensure the data needed to provide better accuracy. With that said, here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re optimizing your search to provide better accuracy.

All you have to do is ask

You can no longer allow yourself to be blindsided by your own perceptions. It’s critical for business success to be deeply connected to your users, knowing exactly what they expect when navigating your site.

A lot of it can be solved with the right technology, but don’t forget the most basic tool of all: ask! Make sure to ask for feedback, look for solutions, and actively incorporate them.

Look for tools that can help you solve enterprise complexities without compromising the need for simplicity. The faster you can connect more deeply with your users, the easier you can meet and adapt to changing demands in modern global e-commerce.