How to Make Personalization of Products Work for Your Ecommerce Store?

Right from things they own to things they give, people love products that are an indication of their individuality and reflect their interests. Ecommerce owners are very well aware of the fact that personalization is a perfect way to drive substantial business growth. Hence, for creating personalized products like handbags, shoes, T-shirt and jewelry, eCommerce store owners provide customers with a product customization tool.

A survey conducted by MyBuys Inc. and research firm The E-tailing Group Inc, revealed that 40% customers prefer to make purchases from retailers that consider their preferences. So what is making personalization of products important in the year 2017 and how can the e-retailers make it work for themselves? Let us understand.

Undertake personalization efficiently

Through a product designer tool, ecommerce store owners enable customers to design their own products using different colours, designs, styles and fonts. This might sound easy when described. But implementing the design and getting the product ready is a different story altogether. In order to execute this process, e-store owners should do the following.

1. Create the front end of the store in such a way that it becomes easy for the customers to give an individual touch to different products. There should also be a facility to have preview of the products so that the customer can know what it will look like in real life.
2. Mass production of personalized products is where most of the companies go wrong. A strategy to process every order must be defined and followed. But this should be done without compromising with the profits.
3. Apart from the above mentioned points, location is another important aspect to be considered. Are you willing to manufacture and assemble products at the same facility? This is a very important question to ask yourself as you will have to send all your products to other location for customization or shift all your operations to a single facility. You can decide all this based on your cost structure and budget.

Know how much customization to offer

Certain e-store owners let customers design a whole new product by providing a blank space whereas others offer predefined templates and customers can make changes to it by using different fonts, texts, colour, clip art etc. There’s nothing like the facility of full-fledged customization as it will keep customers connected to your brand and boost your business. You need to decide how much customization you want to offer.

Whatever you do, make sure that the designing process isn’t complicated, unsightly and is full of different options as this might overwhelm the shoppers and they would think twice before visiting your store again.

Fulfill demands in real-time

Demand and supply have always been the most important elements for any business related to customer goods. When it comes to personalization, it gets even more crucial to take care of them. The profitability of your business totally depends on how you deal with these elements. You have to decide how many products will you mass produce according to default specifications and how many will you keep for personalization.

It is also very important to keep yourself updated about the ongoing market trends, expectations, operations, orders, returns etc. In case the demand for a particular product goes up, will you be able to get the materials needed to manufacture new products? Knowing about these things will help you know what is needed on urgent basis and what can wait. If you do not have real-time information, it can get very difficult to fulfill the demands of your customers on time.

Be ready for the future

It is high time for the ecommerce business owners to understand that personalization is important. Customers not only decide what the product should look like but also how and when it should be delivered. You must get your supply chain organization in place if you want to follow the trend. Also, if you want to offer your customers with exclusive bespoke products, you must invest into a personalization tool or software that helps them to create what they want.

Several entrepreneurs have a preconceived notion that installing a web to print software is an expensive and complex affair. But it is not at all the reality. There are ready to integrate Magento based web to print storefronts available which just need to be configured and you are good to go. However, you must make sure that the tool works according to your business requirements and helps your customers to design what they want.

We hope that the above points gave you the much needed clarity about treading on the way to customization. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to dive into the thriving market of personalization now!