I recently sat down with Steve Sivitter, CEO of 1WorldSync, who’s passionate about continual improvement in many areas, but especially customer satisfaction.
In our interview, Steve talks about the critical importance of product content and the role it plays in whether consumers abandon their shopping carts, make a purchase, or return a product. In fact, 70% of online shoppers say product content can make or break a sale. He also shares his thoughts on how brands can meet their customers’ expectations and earn their loyalty.
Gary Dremik: What do consumers prioritize most — and have the highest expectations about — when they shop online? How can brands and retailers meet those expectations?
Steve Sivitter: Consumers from different generations have different priorities. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, while U.S. shoppers in general consider a flexible return policy as “Important/Very important,” Gen-Z (64%) finds it less important than their Millennial (77%), Gen-X (77%) and Boomer (80%%) counterparts.
However, all generations say it’s “important” or “very important” that retail websites are user-friendly, with percentages ranging from 75% (Gen-Z) to 85% (Boomers).
Also, important, or very important? The ability to pick up and return purchases from or to stores according to Gen-Z (53%), Millennials (65%), Gen-X (60%) and Boomers (55%).
The best ways for brands and retailers to meet or exceed those expectations? Having easily navigable e-commerce shops with clear, accessible information about their products and content consistency across every platform or channel consumers engage. Accurate information enables customers to make properly informed decisions, knowing the item they receive will match their expectations.
Drenik: What consequences do brands face when product content and imagery don’t align with consumer expectations or the item once it’s received?
Sivitter: Customers return items for many reasons. The second most common reason online purchase returns? The item doesn’t match its description or imagery on the website.
A failure to meet expectations violates customer trust. Dissatisfied customers won’t stick around if this situation happens often, and many will bounce after just one time. Disappointed customers may leave negative reviews, influencing potential future customers to shop elsewhere. Eventually, you’ll see a drop in revenue as brand reputation suffers.
Drenik: The National Retail Federation estimates that consumers returned $816B worth of goods last year. What are some of the issues associated with such a huge volume of returns? How can retailers decrease the number of returns they receive? Where does an omnichannel product content approach fit into the solution?
Sivitter: High return rates are causing significant issues for retailers seeing increases in refund and promotional abuse, account takeovers and friendly or payment fraud.
In 2020, over 10% of total U.S. retailer sales were returned, and 6% of those returns were fraudulent. Last year, returned merchandise nearly doubled from 2020’s. Every return leads to lost sales revenue, but that’s not all. Overhead costs associated with conducting the sale (like shipping), return shipping, repackaging, and restocking or disposal erode profits, too.
But all is not lost. Retailers can decrease the returns they receive by following these best practices.
- Prioritize creating clear, accurate product descriptions and imagery, along with verified customer reviews, and ensuring consistency across all your platforms.
- Create a consistent policy explaining how customers can return products. Ensure the policy is clear and easily found on your website.
- Use customer service to address consumers’ concerns by training your teams to respond efficiently, accurately and with empathy.
An omnichannel content platform can help you to provide a seamless customer experience no matter where consumers shop. When you include rich product content and ample, verified user-generated content like reviews, sizing information for clothing and customer photos in PDPs, you give customers the information necessary to make an informed decision.
PDPs should include engaging, informative, high-quality content that includes measurements or dimensions, materials, sizes, color, pricing, shipping options, availability, a high-level overview of the product’s features and benefits and accurate images and reviews, where relevant.
When selling your products across multiple channels, keeping track of changes and updates can become monumental, creating opportunities for errors or inaccuracies. An omnichannel platform lets you make changes in one centralized location, and the technology rolls out updates across all channels where the PDP resides.
Drenik: Short for duplicate, “dupe” refers to poorer quality and cheaper alternatives to luxury items, including clothing and accessories. What do you attribute to this movement’s popularity, especially among Gen-Z consumers? How can brands build consumer trust, especially as household and luxury brands fight against “dupe” culture?
Sivitter: #dupe culture is racking billions of views on social media platforms like TikTok. Owning a dupe has become a sort of status symbol more so than a way to save money. As marketing professionals like Northwestern professor Jacqueline Babb say, “It’s a flex to have the dupe.”
Fast fashion companies like Shein or Temu have also become popular thanks to creators and influencers sharing their purchases on social media. And because they don’t use official luxury brands’ logos, their products aren’t considered counterfeits. But the designs emulate luxury items, making them especially attractive to Gen-Zers.
Access to less expensive goods — combined with an increased ease of impulse buying — has fueled growth of such models. However, some of the bigger legacy brands aren’t concerned about the dupe culture because their policies align more with what Gen-Z consumers want: more accountability for where their money goes.
So, while many Gen-Zers may purchase dupes based on retail influencers’ social media posts, this generation is also more socially conscious and aware of working conditions and sustainability issues. This awareness presents an opportunity for brands to position themselves accordingly.
To counteract these trends and build trust, brands should continue focusing on what they do best: creating and selling well-made products, championing, and incorporating sustainability into their business practices, and backing it all with quality content that both informs their audiences and leverages the validation of the crowd via verified product reviews and user submitted imagery.
Drenik: Speaking of brand trust, what role (if any) should AI-generated product photos play in e-commerce retail? What are the benefits of including these photos? Drawbacks? What advice do you have for brands opting to incorporate AI-generated photos in their marketing?
Sivitter: AI allows brands to streamline their product photography processes, with rapid image creation leading to shorter times between product launches, improved time-to-market, and faster image updates across all channels.
However, brands and retailers have very specific imagery needs, with the images they use accurately representing the products — no exception. While generative AI succeeds in creating approximations of great imagery, it hasn’t yet reached a stage where we can rely on it to produce exact images for an e-commerce PDP.
Traditional photography remains the most engaging (and often most economically efficient) option for producing images to attract and engage online shoppers — and accurate images decrease the likelihood of product returns.
One area where AI shines is in image editing. For instance, it’s faster (and cheaper) to fix damaged product packages that arrive at the photography studio than ship them back; AI post-production tools can help with those fixes. Additionally, CGI can fill gaps where manufacturers lack the physical package but have a .jpg of the art. But while AI supports CGI and 3D model creation and gets you 50% to 90% closer to the finish line, you still need a human guiding the tools and making those final adjustments.
Product marketers are relying more on generative AI to create backgrounds and context for lifestyle product imagery. However, poor execution can reflect on the product, making it look cheap or fake. If you’re using an AI-powered shortcut, edit carefully and use it judiciously to avoid the “uncanny valley” effect.
Drenik: Thanks, Steve, for your insights on steps retailers and marketers can take to ensure that consumers who purchase items are less likely to return them because the content and images provided on the website aren’t true representations of the product. I also appreciated your reminder that even the best, most accurate content mean little if a brand’s or retailer’s website isn’t easily navigable, and the content isn’t consistent across all channels and platforms shoppers visit.
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