Promoting products
Designing Qubit Aura’s merchandising interface.
Think about your favourite retail brand. What made you choose that one? Maybe they’re reasonably priced, maybe they make good quality products. More than likely, one reason they’re your favourite is because you like their style, and the kind of products they produce.
As consumers we often have a set of go-to shops for various items, and for a brand, producing new and exciting product ranges is an important part of retaining that loyalty. It’s not uncommon for a website to have a ‘New in’ section to promote these items, and it’s not uncommon for people to come on to the site specifically to check it.
Qubit Aura curates feeds of products based on your previous activity, but until recently it wasn’t possible for the brand to promote these new or featured products within Aura.
Introducing Featured products
We previously introduced contextual information into Aura’s product cards. This gives users an understanding of why a product has been picked for them. When we first started looking at showing brand-picked items, it seemed that this could become another one of these contexts.
But the approach didn’t make these products stand out from the crowd. It also seemed to dilute the weight of the brand’s voice, as if it was only selected for you because it was being promoted by the brand. So we developed a badge that could work together with the contextual information. Now you can see that not only is it featured by the brand, it’s also a popular product with other site visitors.
Careful placement
One challenging puzzle we faced was working out how frequently to show these promoted products. After all, if all products have promotional badges, none of them are promoted.
Originally we looked at limiting the number of products that could be promoted. We found that setting the right limit number was very tricky because we were catering for a huge variety of different catalogue sizes. For a boutique, having 10 promoted products might work nicely, but for a large retailer with a wide range of products, 10 is nowhere near enough.
The other thing we wanted to avoid was promoting irrelevant products to people. If someone is only interested in men’s clothes, it doesn’t matter that the brand is promoting floral print dresses, it’s not going to be of interest to them. This is where the idea of a Featured badge being used to reinforce an existing recommendation came into play.
We set it up so that you’d only see featured products that were already going to be recommended to you. These products would then be promoted slightly up the feed and separated out so that you wouldn’t get multiple badged products in a row.
Reporting
It’s fairly obvious that the view counts of promoted products will go up. The really interesting part of reporting on featured products is seeing the change in interaction rates. It gives brands an insight into which products are most popular with their visitors and can inform other business decisions like paid advertising spend. It can also flag less popular products that don’t get higher interactions even when they’re promoted further up the feed.
We added featured badges to the products in the interaction table to highlight which products were being promoted. Hovering over this badge shows you the date the product was added as a promoted product. To make it easy to single out these products we also added a switch that lets you look at promoted products only.
We hope to give merchandisers more power within Aura, to allow them to reach their customers and lead them towards the latest trends.
This post is part of a series about the business facing interface of Aura. For an overview of where this sits in the bigger picture, click here.
Sarah Benson. Product Designer at Qubit — off to check out the new things in my go to shops. Give me a bell on twitter @sarahbenson18
