Is 'personalized merchandising' becoming an e-commerce reality?
While a dynamic, personalized storefront will automate some aspects of the online merchandising process, the role of the online merchandiser will become even more critical. There will always be a need to overlay the right set of business rules to align personalization with the key needs of the retailer.
Brick-and-mortar merchandisers' shift from a product-centric to a customer-centric mentality is examined in a recent report from Gartner. By starting backwards from the known profiles of shoppers in every ZIP code, merchandisers can create extremely granular assortments for each store - even down to sizing and color choices - to increase sales and create loyalty.
What struck me most about this report was that merchandisers in the offline world are personalizing their strategies in spite of the serious constraints working against them: supply chain complexity, marketing costs, shelf-space limitations and the like. Yet retailers are doing it. So, why do online retailers - who face none of these limitations - still struggle to present a truly personalized, dynamic shopping experience for each and every shopper?
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