What do celebrities like Kate, Kim, and Selena have in common?
They called.
But as it turns out, Kate wasn’t calling for me, nor was Kim or Selena. However, they were calling to choose Searchspring to power their websites, and this week we published a case study on why Fabletics chose Searchspring and how they’re using the power of the product.
For those new to Searchspring, either as a customer or as just a follower of my blog, there is one thing you should know: we are driving a merchandising revolution.
The days of merchandising a store have changed. The grocery store hides the milk in the back and puts the produce in the front. You enter into a colorful produce section and make your way through. They know the traffic pattern, they can fill an end cap with a ‘special buy’ or a put a strip-clip right next to that product you are touching. They know the height of the customer and where eye level is. Shelves are stocked just right so that they can increase margins by putting that product you wanted out of reach or down on the ground, and the one they want you to buy right at five feet, four inches off the ground.
Honestly, they have it so easy, it is sad.
Enter Searchspring.
Online, you don’t get to corral people and make them go down a specific path. Heck, most of the time they are landing on a Product Detail page directly, they had no path. So what you show alongside that product or how you merchandise a page in any journey is vitally important.
Over the last two years we have invested millions into our product with one mission: To Give Merchandisers Superpowers.
What sort of Superpowers?Â
We want online merchandisers to have the same ability to influence customers as a visual merchandiser in a store would have. We want to get the right product, in front of the right person at the right time and we want the merchandiser to influence it. This means we don’t hold control and tell you that some AI bot is smarter than a human. Instead, we provide the ability to let the machine do its thing when you want it to, but we will always defer to the human when they want to make decisions. AI/ML or any other fancy term you want to use will never understand the intangible things that aren’t in the data. It’s impossible for a machine to know all those MAP rules or that vendor co-op you got. And just because I bought one blender, why would I want another?
The point is, online merchandising is relatively new for most, and evolving. We want to provide the best possible tools to allow a search result page or a product listing page to be merchandised, and a journey or path to be created that has recommended products appear along the way. You will never be able to hide the milk in the back of your online store but you should be able to influence what appears throughout the journey across your site.
