How can college stores enhance customers’ eCommerce experience? By offering shoppers filter options and recommendations, it is easier for site visitors to choose the best merchandise for them. At the MBS Spring Forums Systems Training event, college stores learned about MBS’ website tools that can help make merchandise stand out.
When stores add features like filtered searches, product badges, associations, meta tags and reviews, shoppers have the necessary tools to quickly find the merchandise or product that best suit their immediate needs.
Manager of Customer Education Wayne Jones led the webinar, sharing tips and resources stores can use to bring merchandise to customers’ attention. Through MBS inSite, stores have a variety of options to customize how merchandise appears and advertise it throughout the site. During the webinar, Jones walked through many tips, including:
- Web catalogs, item association, type code separation and creating filters
By narrowing down what displays, shoppers can easily find the items they want to purchase. By default in the MBS system, customers can filter by price or sale merchandise. Stores can select to include additional filters like color, size, brand or other defining attributes. Once filters are enabled and sent to inSite, they are immediately available for shoppers.
- Suggested sell
This feature recommends other like items or associated products to customers when they view an item.
- Item ranking/review
By enabling reviews and rankings, past customers are able to leave product reviews which can increase the confidence of current shoppers. For example, every shirt that is size medium isn’t the same size. If a shopper sees reviews saying the shirt runs large or is true to size, then it will better inform what they order and give them more confidence that they will get what they want.
- Course associations
When a customer comes into the store to buy their course materials, associates can recommend other purchases like notebooks, binders or calculators. Course associations can do the same thing. Merchandise can easily be associated with specific courses, so students can see the recommended merchandise for the course when they go to get their textbooks. - Meta tags
These description tags may not be directly seen by customers, but they can influence search results and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). - Badges
Badges can easily be added to merchandise to help draw extra attention to the item. New, on sale, best seller, etc. Stores can choose the best badges for the displayed inventory.
To learn more, watch the detailed webinar providing tips to make merchandise stand out.
