How to improve product discovery on mobile?

It is important to improve product discovery on your e-commerce site

According to a Fevad study, 68% of Internet users do not return to a site if their experience was bad. 54% of them abandon their navigation if the choice is too complicated and 34% leave the website after 10 minutes.

It is therefore essential for e-commerce sites to offer a clear product discovery and manage to capture the attention of consumers to convert this attention into sales.

Especially when the catalogs are large, the consumer is more likely to get lost and frustrated.

Product discovery also includes the processes used by an e-commerce business to introduce new products to its users:

Via item recommendations

With push, optimized merchandising and a coherent display logic

Or with a search bar allowing access to articles using keywords.

E-commerce navigation is not adapted to product discovery on mobile

In 2021, Internet traffic is dominated by the use of mobile devices, in 5 years the use of mobile devices has multiplied to reach 55% of global Internet traffic.

For fashion, this figure is even 70%! Two out of three clothes bought online are bought on mobile, where consumers are solicited from all sides.

However, on desktop or on mobile, the e-commerce navigation is exactly the same.

It is necessary that mobile browsing reinvents itself and totally detaches itself from classic browsing as we know it.

Users are more and more solicited during their browsing and have less and less attention to spend on e-commerce. So we need to find new ways for product discovery to engage and convert.

How to optimize product discovery on mobile devices?

When consumers arrive at a fashion e-commerce site, they are confronted with a brutal reality: the difference between what they imagined buying and what they can find on the site.

This reality is also true on mobile, where customers have even less space and time to spend on proposals.

It is therefore necessary to find different ways for consumers to find what they came for, but also to be seduced by the article proposal.

Some tips to optimize your product discovery

There are different ways to proceed to optimize the product discovery on an e-commerce:

• Having a welcoming, engaging and clear site, the first impression is essential. On average, a user spends about 40 seconds on a mobile page and consults 6 of them. You have to succeed in capturing their attention during this short period of time so that they continue their exploration.
• Make navigation as simple as possible, consumers are over-solicited by all kinds of advertising, so it is essential that the e-commerce site is simple and clear.
• Let consumers buy what they see: when using different visuals, tag the clothing used to facilitate product discovery.
• The use of different technological tools to improve product recommendations with artificial intelligence solutions.

How to surprise users on mobile with product discovery?

However, all these recommendations are not really innovative, consumers on mobile demand to be surprised and to find new ways to navigate.

And according to a study by Contentsquare, 40% of consumers abandon their searches just after seeing a single page of an e-commerce.

This figure is increased to 45% for mobile browsing, proving the need for clear and engaging product discovery.

It is no longer acceptable for mobile e-commerce to be a responsive version of desktop e-commerce sites: all the most popular apps like Instagram, TikTok, Tinder and others have adopted swiping as their navigation standard.

So how could the fashion industry seize this new trend to inscribe its own codes?

Dynamic look recommendation: a tool to improve product discovery on mobile

To offer a truly innovative product discovery, dynamic looks are an excellent alternative:

Consumers can choose the mannequins they identify with and then see any piece from the collection directly worn by that mannequin.

Then simply swipe like on any mobile application to modify the outfit of your choice and compose infinite looks. This technology allows for a new way of browsing on mobile: shoppers can explore the entire collection in a single experience without having to scroll to the bottom of the page to see all the items on offer.

Many use-cases are to be imagined, engaging the customer through gamification to push him to compose a maximum of outfit is an excellent way to increase retention.

Finally, another proposal could be a random mode, proposing a random outfit to the consumer, allowing him to discover possibilities and compose something that looks like him.