Needle In An Online Haystack: Is Your Product ‘Findable’?

When done well, product findability creates a frictionless experience that connects the right person with the right product at the right time.

We’ve all used the expression “looking for a needle in a haystack.” In many ways, this idiom describes the experience of shopping online.

The internet is a gigantic, modern-day haystack that consumers have to navigate to find their specific needle. This challenge is expected to get only more difficult as the web and the information pulsing through it continues to expand. Even today customers are routinely failing to find what they are looking for in the vast internet universe—a problem called product findability.

Findability is the degree to which a shopper is able to locate information, products, and services online conveniently, easily, and on demand. While the notion of matching consumers to the products they are seeking sounds very simple, creating an environment that seamlessly facilitates it is very complex.

With the product findability process differing by product type and customer base, how retailers ultimately create frictionless experiences for consumers will vary from company to company. However, one thing that is consistent is that it often affects the entire organization, including its people, systems, processes, and customer touch points. To help put it in perspective, let’s think about product findability in terms of people, processes, and tools.

People

One challenge of product findability is that every area of the retail organization has a role to play successfully connecting people and products. But does everyone know what that role is?

When merchandisers are setting up products and defining attributes, they should be considering how customers think about, research, and make purchase decisions on that particular product. Defining product details is easy; what’s harder is looking at the product from the perspective of the customer.

Some of the questions merchandisers should be asking are:

• What features, benefits, and product attributes are most important?
• What problems does the product solve?
• What content and information is needed to support a purchase decision?
• What are the key words and key phrases that a shopper relates to the product and may search on to find it?

Marketers should be thinking about how to leverage all of this information to drive more relevant and profitable acquisition and retention marketing experiences. Content marketing, personalization, email, SEM, SEO, social media, and related landing page experiences are just some of the areas that benefit from a customer-centric product findability mindset.

In order to be successful, merchandisers are dependent on marketers to drive relevant traffic to sell more of their products. Marketers are dependent on merchandisers to provide the right assortment and product data to support their campaigns. Both are dependent on user experience to improve their efforts in connecting people and products, and technology is the method by which all functions execute their efforts. The organizational interdependencies in achieving effective product findability cannot be underestimated.

Processes

However, organizational interdependencies related to product findability can sometimes be undefined and messy. The best way to avoid this is by setting up processes to support maximizing product findability leveraging a responsibility matrix, not only within functions, but between them as well.

Defining roles and responsibilities for each process is an effective way to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. For instance, retailers may be underleveraging the valuable intelligence that comes from on-site search behavior and customer service interactions. Establishing a clear path to sharing and operationalizing this intelligence will further improve product findability.

With that said, we can’t ignore the most important aspect of product findability. Underlying all effective product findability efforts is data: customer, behavioral, and product. Processes associated with data, including data governance, hygiene, and especially accessibility are all major factors in supporting successful product findability.

Retailers would benefit from auditing their data situation in each of these areas and determining how well it supports each functional role in being able to connect people and products effectively.

Tools

In a physical retail setting, extensive planning goes into laying out the sales floor. When customers enter the store, they can very easily visually scan the store environment to see all the products that are available.

But with digital commerce, products are essentially hidden from view within the buried pages of a website. It’s the retailer’s job to employ the best tools that provide the best features and functionality for shoppers to easily find what they are looking for. But does your enterprise have the right tools?

Some questions retailers should ask are:

• Are your current tools limiting your team’s ability to execute product findability efforts?
• Are you taking full advantage of all out-of-the-box product findability capabilities within the existing technology stack?
• Are there areas of risk and opportunity in maximizing product findability across the enterprise?

However, it’s important to remember that technology itself is not a solution; it is merely a means to an end.

Product findability is a lot more than just on-site search and navigation. When done well, it creates a frictionless experience that connects the right person with the right product at the right time. And retailers that are providing frictionless experiences are benefiting with higher sales and margins, increased profitability, and greater customer loyalty.