The other day, I was browsing through my Woo-store statistics to check which products were working well. It was a necessary evil since I had to plan my marketing strategy for best-selling products. The problem is, I am easily frustrated with WordPress’ native analytics system. Most of the times it is a quick look at the Dashboard to see whether the overall sales are within my profit margins, check revenue, and manage the inventory.
Don’t get me wrong. I love WordPress and WooCommerce and sometimes a guilty realization does creep up that I need to take a deep dive into analytics to help boost sales on my store. But the fact remains, I am easily frustrated with WordPress’ native analytics system. 😛
We’ve all been there, right?
Unfortunately, this tendency also makes us miss out on opportunities to upsell our best products to the right audience. Google Analytics gives us a clear idea about how well our store is doing, but it takes painstaking effort and a whole bunch of filters to find out which products are the most popular ones. As to why they are popular, figuring that out is a whole different game altogether!
The Ideal Scenario?
Ideally, there needs to be a way of identifying which products are trending on the store so that conversion strategies can be designed accordingly, with ease. No complicated charts, please!
The advantage of having this insight is that you can get a direct look into the customer’s mindset while purchasing the product, create a buyer persona based on their purchase history, or even alter product prices as the trends on the store change.
How Would the Trending Products Identification System Work?
The system would have an algorithm for checking which products are trending on the store, based on some key factors, such as:
- How many times the Product/Product Page is being viewed
- The number of times a product is added to a Cart
- The actual number of purchases and abandonment rate
- The duration for which the product is added to the Cart
In conjunction with the analytics data tracked, these factors would clarify some of the most important buyer perspectives.
- The number of times a Product/Product Page is viewed gives an idea about its requirement in the market and the SEO-friendliness of the page (assuming you have targeted the right keywords and are following SEO best practices)
- The number of times a product is added to a Cart after a visitor views it on the landing page gives you an idea about whether the product matches people’s expectations, considering price range, features, reviews, and competitor analysis
- The actual number of purchases give you the percentage of conversions, signifying the number of people your product appeals to and confirms the price factor. Conversely, if the product is abandoned after being added to Cart, there is a 90% chance that was because of the price (high shipping/no discounts/spiked delivery charges)
- Lastly, the duration for which the product was added to the Cart gives you the other reasons for cart abandonment; maybe the person just wasn’t in the mood to shop or had to rush off for some reason
Based on this information, you could clearly identify which products are working and which are not, along with why they are working and why they are not. This, in turn, would help you modify the price of the product, making it more economically feasible for your visitors.
All this information would be in the form of detailed, yet easy-to-parse sheets, pie-charts, and complete reports on the popularity of the product, the reasons, inventory, and projected trends. You could also create separate reports for the most-trending and least-trending products.
At the front-end, these trending products would be highlighted in a designated area on the website, in a list format.
Some Optional Features
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Auto/Manual Price Modification Options
The administrator would have the option to set up automatic modification of the price based on the analysis of the trending product, or alternatively, manage the process manually.
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Pricing Thresholds
The solution would need to have pricing threshold settings for every product/category. This would include the percentage reduction/increase in price for non-trending and trending products.
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Provision to Exclude Certain Products from ‘Trending’ Category
After identifying which products are trending, you might want to set only selective products from the list as ‘Trending’. In such a case, there needs to be a provision to exclude certain products from the said list.
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Wishlist Integration
Integrating a user’s Wishlist would give you an opportunity to assess their purchase patterns and notify them accordingly, when any of the products from their wishlist, or relevant to it, are displayed as trending.
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Setting up Trending Product Bundles
Instead of simply displaying trending products, you could think of displaying trending product bundles, where all the trending products belonging to a specific category are bundled together and have an additional discount on the bundle price.
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Notifications Setup for Store Owner
Notifications can be sent to the Administrator every time the product rankings on the trending list change.
Discuss Your Requirements for a Trending Product Identification System
So far, so good. Now let’s see what can be done to ensure that the trending products are easily visible to your relevant audience.
How to Display Trending Products?
Trending product classification could be primarily in three ways – by category, time, and attribute. So, every time your visitor browses a particular category, they can see the trending products in that category.
Alternatively, you could also set up a fixed timeframe during which these trending products will be visible, say for a day/week/month. Another option could be to have an attribute as your foundation stone for displaying trending products. For instance, you could set a color, size, or price range as the basis for showing trending products to your audience.
The idea behind this classification is to enable visitors to find the most relevant products, as per their interests, without even having to search for them.
Also, the principal advantage of being able to gauge what products are trending on the store, and which ones will be trending soon, time and resources can be dedicated to repricing these products and marketing them better.
Let’s discuss this aspect further.
The Principal Advantage
As you’ve seen, one of the main advantages of identifying trending products is that they can be conditionally repriced within preset margins to increase the total revenue.
For instance, if you observe that a specific variation of a t-shirt is selling a lot better than the others (most-trending), you could condition the price to increase by 2% if the product quantity falls below 10.
Similarly, if another variation is not doing well (least-trending), the price of the product could be temporarily decreased by 2% to induce customers to buy it, for a fixed duration or until the product quantity reduces to a fixed amount.
The advantage of such price modifications is that you can make consistent revenue out of your trending products and bring your other products to the eyes of the world as well! There’s more – you could actually modify pricing per customer, rewarding loyal customers buying trending products with additional coupons or discounts.
Hello, sales. Did you just rocket through the roof? 😉
A Ready Solution
Creating each of these features independently can be a bit of a chore, so it can be better to incorporate all these features. This would be a single custom solution to identify trending products on a WooCommerce store that helps in effective price modification.
A clear and precise idea about the products that are currently popular (and about to be popular) amongst your client base can help you make an informed decision about the marketing and pricing strategy for these products.
These insights go a long way in boosting your revenue, as it is not a game of trial and error anymore. You know exactly which products are trending and can dedicate your resources accordingly.
Above all, understanding customer interests and fulfilling their requirements quickly and easily increase customer loyalty exponentially. You know what your visitors expect and if you remove all unnecessary noise that gets in the way, there is bound to be a definite upswing in your conversions!
What do you say? Any suggestions you would like to share? Let’s discuss!
Have a similar requirement? Get in Touch!
