Chapter 2: Simplify complex shopping journeys

Customers prioritize convenience all year, but especially during the busy weeks between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. Mobile devices help them discover and browse faster. And, even as overall digital commerce share decreased in the first quarter of 2023, mobile traffic and order share grew 10%.

The challenge? For commerce pros, keeping up with changing consumer behaviors is tough. Your job is to wow your customers with convenient buying journeys that capture their evolving preferences while also being intuitive and fast.

Busy holiday shoppers love the convenience of discovering, researching, and comparing prices for gifts on their phones. In fact, in Q4 2022, mobile phones accounted for 74% of traffic and 63% of orders.

So, what’s next? Make it easier for customers to buy on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and even gaming consoles. By embedding the buy button where shoppers spend their free time, you can reduce the number of taps it takes to get products to their doorstep. And, by adding payment options that save shipping information and resonate with younger users — like Apple Pay — you can increase your mobile cart conversion rate on emerging commerce channels.

Flash sales, blowout events, and huge promotions drive traffic to your website, app, and social media channels. Your goal is to keep content refreshed and consistent so customers don’t have to waste precious hours searching for products and discount codes. The only problem? When deals move fast, updating these mission-critical revenue drivers is easier said than done.

Enter headless (or composable) commerce. This architecture provides the agility and scale to make changes to all your digital channels, including mobile and social, quickly and simultaneously. Best of all? This investment pays dividends: 55% of companies that use headless attribute a high level of success to digital commerce.

Removing friction for gift-buying consumers is paramount. Generative AI helps you efficiently execute your commerce strategies and personalize experiences across all of your digital channels, so you can:

• Offer conversational site search for a more human, natural way to find the perfect gift.
• Provide a digital concierge to help customers find related products and complete transactions.
• Build landing and product pages in less time using recommended layouts and designs.
• Automate the execution of dynamic pricing and promotional strategies to keep pace with competitors, ensuring you keep shoppers’ attention.
• Optimize product descriptions for SEO that align with your brand’s messaging, making it easier for customers to find your products online.

Many customers continue their online shopping journey in the store only to face an empty shelf or rack. Now’s the time to connect your back-end systems so your store associates and customers can view inventory and take orders for delivery – all in real time. With an order management system that connects supply and demand across all channels, you can stay on top of orders from the point-of-purchase through fulfillment.

This is especially critical during this holiday shopping season as retailers face unanticipated spikes in demand from social channels like TikTok. A real-time view of inventory across each supply source prevents you from losing a sale or delivering a post-purchase out-of-stock notice. You can also use order management to enable flexible fulfillment options like buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS), streamline returns and exchanges, and ensure customers (and frontline workers) can access their order history.

When it comes to paying for (and receiving) purchases, shoppers have more choices than ever. Upgrade your physical payment and fulfillment options with an eye on flexibility and convenience:

• Payments: Tap-and-go credit cards have become the norm in the store, but don’t overlook high-growth payment options like mobile wallets, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), and Pay Over Time (POT). That will be important this holiday season as higher prices make it harder for retailers to capture wallet share. And although these options are more typically found online, they’re also growing in popularity in stores’ point-of-sale (POS) systems.
• Store fulfillment: Retailers are prioritizing convenience and giving shoppers the chance to choose their own delivery locations and windows. They’re also appealing to sustainability-minded consumers by offering eco-friendly delivery options (and even carbon offsets for delivery from the store or local distribution centers).
• In-store returns: Evolve your in-store returns process and experience with an eye toward convenience, customer preference, and sustainability. Enabling customers to drop off online returns in the store and offering contactless return locations shows you are committed to both ease and sustainability.