5 Minute Read

In June 2020, eCommerce grew 76.2 percent YoY, and it’s likely to grow faster still. The competition is fierce with more than 7.1 million online retailers worldwide. To win in today’s eCommerce battlefield it’s not enough to have an easy-to-use website or an eye-catching design. Your online store needs to use competitive strategies. Magento has an eCommerce platform that is full of them.  

The following 5 out of the box Magento features are powerful tools, often underutilized, that help you create unique customer opportunities, build engagement, instill loyalty, and drive conversions.

Instant Purchase

Magento is the first eCommerce leader to offer an “Amazon-like” one-click checkout as a standard feature. Now available in Magento Commerce, this new “Instant Purchase” option allows your customers to have the fastest and simplest checkout experience possible by allowing them to use previously-stored payment and shipping information to skip checkout steps. 

When enabled, the Instant Purchase button appears below the Add to Cart button on the product page for returning customers that meet the requirements. After selecting the “Instant Purchase” button, customers are immediately taken to a confirmation page where they can place their order. There’s no need to enter their address, payment information, or shipping preference. Magento takes care of all of that. Merchants who have tested Instant Purchase have found that it can shorten checkout time by upwards of 90 percent.

Instant Purchase is crucial for mobile shopping. Let’s face it, it’s painful to enter your shipping and billing information on a smartphone or even a tablet. But Magento’s Instant Purchase feature removes the friction associated with the mobile buying process. With a few clicks, your customers can complete their purchase- fast.

The Power of Leveraging

Instant Purchase leverages your customer’s familiarity with Amazon’s “Buy Now” feature to increase conversion rates and prevent cart abandonment. This feature leverages Braintree Vault, available with Braintree Credit Card, Braintree PayPal, and PayPal Payflow Pro for stored payment information. The flexibility of the Magento Commerce framework allows merchants to easily modify the Instant Purchase button text and business logic to customize their customer experience to meet their business needs.

In-Store Pickup

2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated technologies and services that allow customers to shop with as little contact as possible. Most notably, buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup saw a massive surge. According to Adobe Analytics data (via DigitalCommerce360), BOPIS orders increased by 208% between April 1st and April 20th compared to the same period a year prior. Research from Kibo Commerce found that BOPIS has grown 500% during the pandemic.

Ease of Use

With the release of Magento Commerce 2.4, in-store pick up via Magento Inventory Management makes it easy for merchants to select physical inventory locations as a customer pickup point and offer a BOPIS fulfillment option. Customers can place an order online and pick it up from a physical store. During checkout, customers can quickly find a location near them and view other essential information, such as store hours. Once orders have been placed, store associates can notify customers when their orders are ready for pickup with a single click. 

As local restrictions on businesses loosen, implementing a BOPIS fulfillment option can bring significant value back to physical store locations, encouraging shoppers to return to your store and increasing average order values. As a merchant, you benefit because it drives foot traffic. When customers physically go to a retail location they typically spend 10% more.

Intelligent Product Recommendations

eCommerce is now more than just products, it’s about meaningful experiences as shoppers interact with your storefront. Consumers spend 40% more time shopping when experiences are personalized. Product recommendations are a powerful marketing tool you can use to increase conversions, boost revenue, and stimulate shopper engagement. Research shows shoppers who engage with a recommended product have a 70% higher conversion rate.

Now, Magento merchants can seamlessly drag and drop Adobe Sensei-powered (AI) product recommendations onto pages being authored in Page Builder. Adobe Sensei automatically analyzes shopper behavior on your site, such as product views, items added to a cart, and purchases. This behavioral data is processed, along with your catalog data, to calculate and leverage product associations that produce meaningful recommendations. The Adobe Sensei intelligence services save you time by reducing the manual work required to analyze and uncover meaningful product relationships.

Improved Functionality

All of this functionality is managed through a dedicated merchant experience embedded directly into the Magento administrative interface. The straight-forward workflow provides a simple step-by-step way to create product recommendations and incorporate them into various pages of your store. Dedicated reporting provides clear metrics that help you monitor performance such as impressions, views, clicks, and revenue. 

Customer Segmentation and Personalization

Content helps consumers find you on Google and it’s a critical part of the customer experience. But content alone is not enough — today, it needs to be personalized. The online buying experience that appeals to one group of consumers may not appeal to all. Personalization is increasingly important to online retailers who want to not only engage shoppers, but also to increase repeat purchases, drive sales, and increase conversion. Stats show that 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences. Personalization has gone from an optional “extra” to being a key component in driving a successful eCommerce business.

Segmentation for Data Integration

Magento Commerce allows you to create groups or “segments” of customers using a variety of criteria. Customers can be grouped according to their location, gender, order history, navigation behavior, items added to their shopping cart, as well as various other characteristics. This data is collected in real-time, based on their journey through the website so that content can then be personalized and delivered at different stages of the buying process. 

Segmenting your customers allows you to create more personalized experiences by displaying targeted banners, meaningful related products, tailored cross-sells and upsells, and unique promotions. Customer segmentation is about more than just matching customers with appropriate product offers. It’s also about changing the way you communicate with your customers based on what you know about them. It’s about identifying your most profitable customers and tailoring your products and services to meet their specific needs. It allows you to focus your marketing efforts to increase conversions and overall customer satisfaction.

Right Targeting, Right Customers

Targeting the wrong customers can cost you — not just in wasted marketing dollars, but in higher operational costs associated with processing product returns, handling customer service calls, and responding to negative customer reviews. Conversely, targeting the right customers (with the right messages at the right time) can pay off in terms of higher conversion rates, higher average order values, and increased profits. Ultimately, targeting the right customers with segmentation is about creating relevant shopping experiences that lead to brand advocacy and word-of-mouth advertising, valuable product insights, and greater overall customer satisfaction.

“One key benefit of personalizing messages is that it recognizes the customers as individuals. By marketing one way to prospects, another way to those that have already purchased a product, and another way to long-term, high-value customers you can make your marketing messages far more compelling and effective.”

- Dave Chaffey

Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations

Most online stores present related products, up-sells, and cross-sells to consumers during their shopping journey. These are powerful marketing tools and provide an opportunity to present personalized product recommendations to your customers. Rule-based product relations in Magento Commerce allows you to efficiently and effortlessly target personalized product suggestions to increase revenue, average order value, and conversion rate.

With rule-based product relations, each rule can be associated with a customer segment to produce a dynamic display of targeted merchandise based on specific product selections, customer attributes, and more. For a product catalog of any substantial size, it would be nearly impossible to establish product relations without a rule-based feature. No more relating items one by one each time you create a new product. Rule-based product relations will save you time managing your store and allow you to focus more on growing your business.

TL;DR

Taking advantage of all that Magento Commerce has to offer is the first step towards more agile growth and satisfied customers. The power of leveraging your data, ease of use through intelligent product recommendations, and dynamic, rule-based regulations allow you to better poise your business for success. The eCommerce battlefield is ever-changing, and ornate site graphics or an easy-to-use website just aren’t enough anymore. Stay ahead, stay informed, and consider having an eCommerce agency in your corner to help you harness the power of your Magento store.