Because of the current growth of crowdsourcing, your ecommerce business can now use popular opinion to improve sales and efficacy utilizing an innovative, user-driven model.
There are a few ways your ecommerce business can use crowdsourcing, and understanding these key points will help orient your business towards the customer’s needs, increasing both sales potential and usability.
What to Leave to the Crowd
Crowdsourcing means getting large groups of people with knowledge of your type of business to work on aspects of sales, ideally optimizing certain functions in a way that a single mind couldn’t.
Search relevance, product categorization, and copywriting are three things best left to crowdsourcing. Crowdsourced search results and product categorization will make sure customers find exactly what they’re looking for, while crowdsourced copywriting will make your product descriptions stand out, and include the information customers want to read.
Who Is Doing The Work?
Lionbridge, a crowdsourcing company, employs over 100,000 workers. This means that not only is the crowd working on your ecommerce site best tailored to suit its needs, but that your crowd is as diverse as it is knowledgeable. Because of the variety implicit in such a large pool of employees, you can ensure that crowdsourced functions will work for the largest amount of people possible.
Nonprofessional Workers
Deliv is an ecommerce startup using nonprofessional drivers to deliver products on the same day that they’re ordered from large retailers for a low cost. Like Uber and Lyft, who popularized a similar business model, these drivers cost less on behalf of the business. Delegating business management processes to non professionals can save money and improve service quality. When possible, this is a great way to boost efficiency.
Customer Feedback
Another startup, Fancy, sells products by assessing customer preferences and tailoring product recommendations to these preferences. While Amazon, for example, employs an algorithm to try to accomplish the same thing, Fancy’s results are more effective.
Ultimately, the site helps customers find what they’re looking for, rather than what a computer thinks they’re looking for. And Fancy’s success shows that customers are willing to put in a little extra effort to describe their own preferences if it means higher quality service.
Marketing Campaigns
Lay’s recently let web users come up with ideas for new flavors, which have even spun off regional variants. This marketing campaign was highly successful, with many blogs offering feedback on some of the more out-there flavors.
This works for two reasons: customers are essentially getting exactly what they want, and because of that, will purchase a radical food item partly on the basis of the interactivity of the ad campaign, while these radical flavors are creating buzz due to their uniqueness. Your ecommerce business can similarly assess exactly what your customers want and subsequently offer it to them.
Pleasing Customers
Simplicity and effectiveness are two qualities most customers appreciate in an ecommerce business. With that in mind, incorporating strategies that can improve upon these two qualities will give customers a better baseline with which to start.
Point of sale software is one way you can simplify your web store. By improving transactions on the customer’s end and business management on the store’s end, a small software upgrade can mean greater sales potential. Doing what you can on your own to please customers will leave crowdsourced efforts more room to push your business that extra mile.
More and more businesses are incorporating crowdsourcing into their business model. By keeping these strategies in mind, you can make sure to please customers and stay ahead of the game.
Owen Andrew is a journalist in Southern California with a background in ecommerce. He enjoys sharing his knowledge and experiences with others in the same field. Follow him on Twitter for more.