Our CEO and Founder Luigi Matrone, a world-leading expert on eCommerce and digital consumer trends, was invited to be an Alcon Gaze keynote speaker at the inaugural event on 18th September. This was the first ever Alcon Gaze, a conference hosted by Alcon where international business leaders gather for lively discussion on the future of eCommerce and to hear top speakers share exciting new insights and trends.
Alcon itself, a global medical device company specialising in eye care products, is currently in the process of a digital transformation in partnership with eBusiness Institute and is considered to be an eCommerce leader in its sector.
For those that weren’t able to attend the conference, we wanted to share some highlights and key insights from Luigi’s inspirational speech entitled ‘Is price all there is to win online?’.
Key takeaways from the Alcon Gaze Keynote
Luigi believes it’s essential to give his audiences key, actionable insights to take away with them. We’ll expand on the three he gave Alcon Gaze attendees in the following sections, but in brief they were:
- Winning Online beyond Price: #Experience
- A great Experience needs great Content
- The World is Mobile and your Content should be too
Winning Online beyond Price: #Experience
The key reasons why people choose to shop online. Image source: Shutterstock
Shoppers have five motivations for shopping online:
- Convenience
- The ability to shop anywhere, any place, any time
- Looking for the best deals and prices
- Variety of choice
- A personalised shopping experience based on their preferences and behaviours
And people really do love to shop online, with online sales expected to reach $4.2 trillion dollars by 2020[1]
But the battlefield is changing and shoppers are demanding even more from their online retail experience.
“The Shopper Experience is the new battlefield brands must conquer.”
It’s not just about slickly designed interfaces. Online shoppers are looking for shopping experiences that delight and thrill them.
They want unique, immersive experiences like those provided by new technologies like Augmented or Virtual Reality. They want greater convenience and fewer obstacles to get in their way when researching and purchasing products. They want personalised suggestions based on intelligent data that reflect who they are and what they really like.
“A great Shopping Experience is not just about design. But also about the quality of content.”
A great experience needs great content
Consumer shopping decisions are very much influenced by quality content. Source: eBusiness Institute
The type of content provided by brands and eRetailers has been proven to influence conversion rates, with Product eContent quality influencing 77 per cent of shoppers in their choice of retailer, and 46 per cent of consumers saying that the quality of visual and written content very significantly influences their shopping decisions[2].
Indeed, quality content is no longer a luxury but a necessity, with the average consumer expecting eight images and four videos per product page on an eCommerce site. One in four have even abandoned a potential purchase because of poor product information[3].
Product eContent benefits eRetailers for the five following reasons:
1. Drives choice of preferred eRetailer
2. Engages consumers to spend more online
3. Purchase decision-driver, both online and offline
4. Decreases the number of returns caused by poor description
5. Raises SEO rank on external search engines, such as Google
Attendees were given the examples of how our work in improving their Product eContent had helped lift a coffee brand’s sales by +190 per cent and a pet food brand’s by an astonishing +460 per cent.
The world is Mobile and your Content should be too
Image sizes – and Mobile Hero Images – have a vital role to play in creating a great experience for those shopping online with their mobiles. Image source: Nescafé
In the final section, the Alcon Gaze keynote audience was given the vital message that brands and eRetailers should be taking a ‘mobile first’ approach to their content, leading with the incredible statistic that nearly half of all transactions in APAC (Asia-Pacific) countries are made via mobile[4].
“When it comes to content, you have to think ‘Mobile First’.”
This was followed with the stat that +80% of mobile traffic is on screens smaller than 5 inches, making Mobile Hero Images vitally important.
Mobile Hero Images, in which eBusiness Institute has considerable expertise and success in helping significantly improve brands’ online sales, are basic product images meant for mobile phone screens that have been optimised to facilitate and improve the mobile shopping experience.
They provide simplicity and clarity, relying on the four elements that shoppers need to know in order to make purchasing the correct product quick and simple: brand; format; variant; size.
“The smaller the screen size, the harder it is for shoppers to identify the basic elements required to select the right product. Mobile Hero Images solve this gap.”
The audience was introduced to eBusiness Institute’s Mobile Hero Images guidelines by way of clarifying their importance and the processes involved.
Laying down a challenge
The speech closed with a challenge to attendees – and, indeed, it’s a challenge that readers of this blog should also undertake – to run a full Shopper Experience Analysis on their websites and benchmark them against others like yours. And to get in touch with us if help is needed in doing so.
In conclusion – winning online is about far more than just price
As this Alcon Gaze keynote has clearly demonstrated, the shopping experience and the quality of the content that goes into making it are far more important to today’s online shopper than simply price.And, with an increasing number of people doing their online shopping on their mobile devices, it’s vitally important that you take a ‘mobile first’ approach to your content, or else risk losing potential buyers along the way.
This article was written and created by the eBusiness Institute team.
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Sources
[1] https://99firms.com/blog/mcommerce-statistics/
[2] https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2017/01/the-truth-about-online-consumers.pdf
[3] https://www.slideshare.net/frenchweb/the-shotfarm-product-information-report
[4] https://www.criteo.com/insights/criteo-q2-2018-performance/
