Want to stand out in the eCommerce business? Well, you are at the right place! Learn everything about the product discovery process and get ready to leap ahead.
The product discovery process is the key to unlock more sales and bring customer-facing product stories. Targeting the right customers and providing them suggestions and solutions is crucial to amplify your sales. Customers have different buying behaviors. Some are sure about what they exactly want. Some need inspiration and recommendations. Some are random browsers. So, retailers need to invest quality time in analyzing search-specific metrics that boost the product discovery process.
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What is eCommerce Product Discovery?
The product discovery process is the initial step in developing a product. It is the process of understanding your customers and developing product suits that clearly define solutions for customers’ pain points. A well-researched end goal is necessary to meet your customers’ demands. Otherwise, it would be like utilizing resources, labor power, and money for creating products that are disconnected from customers’ needs. Finding the right platform and investing time in launching products on different channels are necessary to amplify your product discovery process.
Here are some statistics from Oberlo that show US consumers’ behavior on various online platforms to discover new products:
- 24% rely on search engines to discover new products
- 22% rely on social media to find new products
- 12% use eCommerce website
- 12% look into customer review sites
- 9% count on bumper ads
How To Improve Your Product’s Market Relevance?
Stay User-Centric
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. Instead of convincing a customer on buying a random built product. It is always best to sell solutions through products. Collaboration with other departments like the sales team and marketing team will help product developers to build data-driven and solution-oriented products that are fit for the market.
Be Laser Focused
Developing a 100% laser-focused development strategy works in the initial stage. Find your ideal customers to drive market attention. Moreover, instead of trying to implement broad strategies and features, focus on prioritizing specific features and expected outcomes. Otherwise, customers may get disillusioned seeing the massive changes.
Build Flexibility to Improve Competency
Product and process flexibility are integral to build an innovative environment. The eCommerce market is constantly evolving. Only flexibility to adapt to the changes help you emerge relevant in the current scenario.
Now, when it comes to product discovery, product managers are always confused about where to begin and how to channelize communication across teams. Structuring your thoughts is necessary to stimulate actions. Let’s see below a concise mental model that helps you navigate the product discovery process.
Product Discovery: Concise Mental Model for Product Managers
1. Keep product management aligned across all levels of organizations
Inducing clarity, deciding on the particular features and expected outcome from the beginning helps you gain the trust of stakeholders.
2. Combine research techniques to address unique challenges
Behavioral, attitudinal, qualitative & quantitative research methods are needed to fill the gap. This helps to eliminate the discrepancy in what customers are saying and what they actually do.
3. Conceptualize solutions based on user problems
A solution should reinforce your product’s vision and features. So sketch ideas that are specific to user requirements.
4. Create a Prototype
It’s not just enough to create sticky notes and ideas, framing a prototype helps you analyze the impact of your solutions.
Common Product Discovery Mistakes You Must Avoid
1. Jumping Directly Into Solutions
Product teams spend 80% of their time in finding solutions and only 20% in identifying the problems. A value-based product discovery process works on the problems to find a solution. Proper analysis of issues and customer pain points is necessary to derive solutions that address problems. Many organizations launch new features or products without proper research, testing, and validation.
2. Not Including Stakeholders in Your Product Planning
Your stakeholders and engineers might be having a better idea based on their direct engagement with target customers and industry experience. Also, it is crucial to involve all the partners and people associated with the product to contribute to the entire stage. A different point of view and observations are crucial to make the product beneficial to all. But mostly, product discovery misses these insights that can leverage sales.
3. Keeping Engineers Out of the Game
It’s a common misconception that engineers come into play during the manufacturing phase. But, this is wrong and misleading. Engineers should be included in every product discussion session. This helps a product engineer to launch a new product or deliver a feature that resonates with the interest of customers.
Steps to Boost Product Discovery Process for Your eCommerce Success
1. Personalize Product Searches
80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences. Your customers belong to different demographics. Everyone has unique needs and preferences. Personalization is necessary to influence customers to shop from your online store and revisit your store.
Providing relevant and accurate search results is a struggle. Spelling mistakes, use of broader terms, or differing descriptions are challenges that hinder personalization. The advance in AI technology helps to forecast and predict market demands and customers’ shopping behavior. In concise, personalization is the much-needed leg up every eCommerce business needs to augment sales.
2. Transform No Result Page
No Result Page is a dead-end for users. Sometimes you might not be having the product customers are looking for, or else, sometimes even the best search engines find it difficult to decode the cryptic texts by customers. Either way, showing a no result page kills customers’ enthusiasm and leads to the site abandonment. In such circumstances, transforming no result pages to meaningful recommendations turns on customers’ interest even if they do not find the exact matches.
3. Create a Stellar Taxonomy Structure
Every eCommerce site needs a structure or sitemap that makes sense. Well-curated categories or product hierarchies ease the customer journey and give customers quick assistance to explore the product varieties. 75% of users leave a site if they do not find what they are looking for in 15 seconds. Providing categories based on gender, color, price, ethnicity, etc. improves customers’ retention time and makes the product discovery process hassle-free.
Recommended Reading: 8 eCommerce Product Taxonomy Best Practices that Guarantee Conversions
4. Optimize Your eCommerce Store for Search & Product Discovery
You have the finest quality product, but what if your eCommerce product pages won’t rank on the search engines? A robust SEO strategy is crucial for every eCommerce store to improve search relevance. It’s high time to consider the untapped scope in “near me” searches and optimize your eCommerce store for local searches. Moreover, Google’s new voice and visual search trends have also brought a paradigm shift by enhancing product discovery accuracy.
5. Utilize Social Commerce to Maximise Omnichannel Discovery
54 % of Gen Z shoppers in the US consider social commerce a better search option to find new products than online searches. With the boom of shoppable eCommerce, the customer-seller relationship has gone to a new extent. Facebook market, Instagram checkout, TikTok, and Pinterest shop tab are now trending online platforms to discover new launches.
6. Integrate PIM to Optimize Content
Product description plays an integral role in boosting your product discovery process. You cannot provide your customers with brick & mortar experience, but providing high-quality images and product content builds trust and loyalty by amplifying sales.
Managing bulk data export and import is a challenging part of product information optimization. Every channel has its own unique standards. If you fail to optimize content and images according to the standards of channels, you might fail in stamping impressions. A PIM tool provides you with a centralized data repository to consolidate data and streamline data flow across diverse platforms.
Suggested Reading: PIM Implementation Guide – Things to Know Before Getting Started
Stellar Benefits of Staging A Successful Product Discovery Process
- Help you analyze the value of features & how your solutions impact consumers.
- Reduce risk and target ideal customers who are likely to get satisfied.
- A better understanding of consumer demands help you cut down overall development cost and let you focus more on solutions that yield results.
- Boost teamwork and deliver products faster by identifying challenges at the initial stage.
- Combining customer research methods help to expand businesses and launch products in different demographics.
- Enhance interaction with customers thus building an ecosystem to interact with each customer and provide personalized solutions.
Excel in Product Discovery & Accelerate User Experience
Product discovery for eCommerce mitigates value risks, usability riks, feasibility risks, and business viability risks that disconnect end-users from the actual products. Valuable insights and a deeper understanding of the customer journey are key metrics to conducting a better product discovery process. Learning customers’ pain points provide you with better insights and help you create personalized products that address their requirements.
Quality information plays a significant role in accelerating product discovery. DCKAP PIM product information management tool helps you optimize your product content to provide timely data across multiple platforms without any hassles. Now leverage your product discovery process by using the best PIM tool to customize your content.
To know more about our PIM solutions and eCommerce integration programs, get in touch.
