Giving shoppers reasons for buying more may be a matter of telling stories, online or offline, but what works and what are the potential pitfalls?
From Amazon’s ‘if you like that, you’ll love this’ recommendations, to the giant Toblerone proffered at the WHSmith till, retailers’ attempts to cross-sell – both good and bad – are evident wherever you shop.
Good cross-selling means sizing up shoppers and then seeing, based on the selections that have been made, what incremental sales can be achieved – and new technology means the opportunities for doing this have never been greater.
Click and collect, styling screens and retailer apps all offer opportunities to sell shoppers more than they were originally looking for, but all of these methods have their shortcomings.
Take Nike. The sportswear giant is about to start testing a mobile app that will recognise shoppers when they enter a store and open up “exclusive product” for them.
The app also allows customers to check product availability in that shop, reserve stock before arriving in-store – items are collected from an in-store locker, ready to be tried on – and use cashierless transactions, meaning a swifter exit.
“When people walk into a store, it is one of the few occasions when they might put a phone away”
Guy Smith, Arcadia
This is a trial for Nike; Portland, Oregon and The Grove, Los Angeles will be the first stores where the app can be used.
This sounds like a considerable adjunct to the shopper experience, but it is not without its potential problems.
Guy Smith, design director at Arcadia, points out that smartphones can be a selling obstacle in a store: “You have to face the fact that when people walk into a store, it is one of the few occasions when they might put a phone away and you don’t want to distract them from looking at the shop.”
This was evident at Carrefour’s hypermarket in the Euralille shopping centre in the eponymous northern French city. The grocer developed an iPhone app to help shoppers navigate their way to promotions in-store.
All good, except you will miss a lot of what’s on offer.
Couple this with the fact that the app takes shoppers directly to an area of cut-price, lower-margin goods and a recipe for grateful, profit-eroding customers has been created.
Apps and cross-selling therefore have to be used with a certain amount of caution if the aim is to have shoppers wandering around a store looking at their phones, as it may lead to them ignoring the efforts of the visual merchandising team to create an engaging environment.
As seen on screen
An alternative is installing screens that make suggestions about products that go well with the items under consideration.
Both Benetton in the UK and fellow fashion retailer Express in the US have been trying this approach in flagship stores.
Benetton opened its new three-floor UK flagship in March and shoppers entering the home of brightly coloured knitted jumpers will find tables with inset screens.
Wave a garment carrying a ticket with a chip in it in front of the mirror and a world of items will appear that might be teamed with the lifestyle implied by the garment selected.
The options may not actually be for sale in the store, but it provides a tacit hint that the retailer understands who the shopper is. This is a soft-sell alternative to the Amazon-style ‘like that, love this’ recommendations.
Perhaps rather more direct is the styling screen that confronts shoppers in Express’ store on Madison Avenue, where the retailer makes screen-based additional purchase suggestions based on what a customer is buying and what is in stock in the store.
WGSN head of insight Lorna Hall points out that installing hardware in-store is a more expensive approach than apps, which is why many retailers have opted to go down this route rather than following Benetton and Express’ lead.
Can mirrors add some magic?
Chinese online giant Alibaba believes magic mirror technology can entice shoppers to buy more product in-store.
The etailer’s mirrors create almost life-size avatars of users – currently the software turns anyone into a Han Chinese-looking version of themselves – on which a range of outfits can be tried on.
These magic mirrors may add some theatre to the store, but Arcadia’s Smith highlights they are expensive and questions whether seeing an avatar wearing a garment is a greater incentive to buy than a decent display that “tells a merchandise story”.
James Bidwell, co-founder of consultancy Re-set and a former marketing director at Selfridges, says there is a rise in the number of people who don’t care how they are sold to: “Generation Universal are that group of young customers who are channel-agnostic and are happy to be sold to in whatever manner suits.”
This means that there will a place for both technology and good old-fashioned visual merchandising to aid cross-selling. But it is clear that digital and mobile-based cross-selling is in its relative infancy – much remains to be learnt and innovations are sure to come thick and fast.
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