Since the pandemic, there has been a steady increase in interest in outdoor sports. Consumers not only want to participate in outdoor activities but look to performance-enhancing gear to make these experiences elevated and more comfortable. To educate consumers about the benefits behind outdoor apparel attributes while guiding them to the perfect product that fits their needs, brands use Product Finders. To give you an example of how a Product Finder works for the outdoor apparel industry, we look at hiking shoes.
Hiking shoes are an incredibly attribute-rich product. And many of these attributes translate poorly to the everyday hiker (e.g., ‘arch length’, ‘rebound midsoles’). For more experienced hikers, brands need to point out the differentiators between their attributes and those of competing brands.
The challenge for selling hiking shoes in eCommerce is, therefore, threefold:
To build a Product Finder, consult your Crobox team. We have specialists in behavioral design, data, and eCommerce, experts that you can leverage to ensure your Finders are high quality. For enterprise clients, we can tailor your finder to your needs.
This mockup of a Hiking Shoe Finder is built as a generic prototype. We can customize the design based on your brand, tone of voice, and questions you want to ask your users.
All you have to do is match your product fields to Crobox’s system to start building your Finders at scale. At Crobox, we continuously pull product feeds using Periodic Fetch so that we aren’t just getting data once but in a continuous environment. This ensures that all the product information we are leveraging is continuously kept up to date.
Once your feed is uploaded, you can take a backseat – we’ll take it from here. We supplement your product data with product benefits and attributes from your category. If you want to have more control over this process, the Crobox App is at your fingertips. Enriching the data from your feed is crucial to creating the best Finder experience for your users.
Once you have the most enriched product data, you can start building. With Crobox, you can either choose a template or build your entire Finder experience from scratch. With the support of your account team and our in-house behavioral psychologists, we make sure you ask the right questions at the right time.
For example, choosing to ask about gender will change the options based on the results (Dynamic Answers). Here, you can choose to have:
But don’t ask too many questions! Users could drop off and bounce if there are too many barriers to reaching the final recommendation.
Your questions should also show benefits over attributes. For example, instead of asking ‘how much ankle support do you need?’, we change this to ask, ‘how much weight will you carry?’, and then determine what ankle support is needed.
Once you recommend a product, choose your clear call-to-action (CTA) in a way that will facilitate further product discovery.
Once your Finder is live, you can immediately gain insight into how your customers are interacting with your assortment. To visualize all this in one place, we offer a customizable dashboard, with widgets you can play around with. Plus, you can export and share your dashboard across departments.
The hiking shoe market is full of visually similar products with vastly different technical specifications. Product information can also be very complex and difficult to navigate without high-touch guidance. What’s more, sports and outdoor shoppers gravitate towards guided selling like few others do - the greater returns, increased order values, and skyrocketing conversion rates are a testament to this.
