🌟 How a product finder helps your online store to scale up

Almost all online stores start small and even many larger online stores - in terms of order numbers and revenue - try to remain as small as possible in terms of operation. Because large means more hassle and more distraction.

But a small(er) operation also has its limitations and challenges. How do you ensure that you can spend enough time on projects that contribute to your (growth) ambitions?

Over the past few years, we have worked directly with 150+ online stores (large and small) and seen how product finders help them grow in a scalable way. These are our three main learnings:

#1 - Higher conversion

Increasing e-commerce performance is a priority for every online store. And the higher the conversion, the better the result.

Product finders have a direct and structural impact on the conversion of online store visitors. A customer converts much better after going through the product finder.

And to maximize the impact, we work together with our online stores to get as many customers as possible to use the product finder. Because more product finder users equals more high-converting visitors.

#2 - Less time for customer service

Time is scarce. Especially in smaller e-commerce organizations. However, this is at odds with the need to serve customers well.

A customer who takes the time to email, call or chat is valuable. Helping them is critical and almost a guaranteed conversion. However, these urgent customer questions almost always come at the expense of the more important, but less urgent tasks - such as thinking about the procurement strategy for next year.

With product finders, you offer customers a helping hand in the moment that matters and you put their problems, situation and wishes at the center. As a result, they can independently make the right choice and contact with customer service is less often necessary. This leads to a lower burden on customer service.

An added benefit: you also help the people who would not have taken the time to contact your customer service.

#3 - Safeguarding internal knowledge

In e-commerce organizations, product knowledge is a scarce commodity and is often centralized with a few individuals or one person - in smaller stores often the owner, in larger ones the product manager.

This means in concrete terms that customers with a substantive product question must be answered by that specific person. This is of course undesirable because it interrupts and postpones other tasks.

However, training an (additional) employee in the ins and outs of a product category is not always easy and logical. This quickly takes three to six months, while it is uncertain whether this investment will yield anything due to the competitive labor market (read: are you going to invest 4 hours per week for half a year in transferring knowledge when the risk is considerable that someone will leave after 1 or 2 years).

With a product finder, you safeguard internal knowledge and make it directly accessible to others. A new customer service employee who has just started can immediately give advice on fire alarms by themselves using the product finders to advise customers (via chat, email or phone).

This distributes the expert knowledge better in the organization and increases scalability.

In conclusion

Implementing a product finder is yet another task and another investment for you as an online store. Yet the effort is limited and we assist you through our advice and actions. More importantly: you immediately notice the impact on your most important e-commerce KPIs and you free up important team members for other tasks. This makes investing in guided selling a win-win-win for your online store.