Why Metadata? Support Shop the Look, Personalisation and Customer Buying Decisions

With ever-increasing adoption of AI, personalization and other digital tools it is possible to increase brand loyalty, improve conversion and consumer experience while serving cost-efficiency initiatives such as increased turnover, more strategic buying and up to the minute inventory counts. Powering these tools is meta-data that helps retailers track specific characteristics of your products and your customer’s buying and shipping behaviors. It’s likely your teams are already discussing how to best use data to inform your business decisions and back-end data analysis operations. Read more to explore all key-applications.

The Ever-Growing Relevance of the E-commerce Market

Online shopping has firmly established itself as a dominant force in the retail industry, and it shows no signs of slowing down. An astonishing 39% of shoppers now favor the convenience of online shopping, surpassing the 21% who still prefer in-person shopping. Even more remarkable is the fact that online shoppers continue to spend at an impressive rate, with 77% of them maintaining or increasing their spending compared to the previous year.
Airon White, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at BigCommerce, aptly summarizes this trend by stating, “Online shopping is giving people more freedom and flexibility, and I don’t think the trend will go down.” With such resounding confidence from industry experts, it’s clear that e-commerce’s influence is poised to grow even further.

Unleashing the Power of Production Flexibility, Personalization, and AI with Looklet

AI can learn what a shopper wants by collecting data throughout their journey. Looklet’s most notable feature is that it can store and ingest item metadata to analyze, aggregate, and improve conversions. In Looklet photo production, only one item entry is required during shooting, either by hand or with an automated shot-list integration, which attaches predefined item attributes (metadata) to every shot.

Metadata empowers your brand to customize product image styling within the image itself, based off of insights and data from consumer browsing and purchasing trends.

In Looklet’s styling software you can create a variety of PDP images that style a single garment with multiple styling items efficiently. In minutes you can personalize images for each consumer’s browsing experience, tailored to their individual or regional preferences.

With Looklet, image customization is streamlined, eliminating costly reshoots. Not only does this stretch your marketing budget, it increases customer lifetime value by providing products that customers are more likely to buy.

Looklet’s Shop The Look: Enhancing Lifetime Spending with Data-Driven Insights
Boosting customer lifetime spending is a top priority for any e-commerce business. The age-old wisdom of product, place, and time is ripe for a digital transformation. Looklet’s “Shop the Look” empowers you to present the right complementary products to the right customer, at the right time, seamlessly.
With “Shop the Look,” you can showcase suggested pairings directly on the Product Detail Page (PDP). Link multiple SKUs at the time of the photo production process. Once these item images are live on your e-commerce site the pre-defined pairs display for your customer directly on the page. This feature ensures that customers receive conversion-driving styling suggestions in line with your brand’s creative vision.

On-site Search / SEO Optimization
Images that contain metadata can have that data crawled and documented on various search engines, even your brand’s own website search functions. By offering customers a chance to search for what they want, conversion can be lifted as the likelihood of purchase rises. Most consumers click and buy directly when offered relevant items directly in search engines such as Google.

Out of Stock No More
Looklet’s software can integrate into your inventory systems. No more out of stock images in your product photos! A visual notification in our styling application Look Creator allows your team to avoid exporting images with out-of-stock items while also allowing any out of stock items that have been styled with in stock items to quickly be removed from the image and swapped with an in-stock item. With a few clicks the newly styled image has only in-stock items and is ready for export and the next step of your publication process.

Boosting Internal Buying Efficiency and Accuracy
Recently the global economy has experienced increased inflation that puts pressure on already slim margins. In response, businesses must rethink their buying decisions and inventory management. Looklet plays a pivotal role in this process by unlocking embedded image metadata.
As a result, your team can track, tailor, and analyze browsing and buying trends and provide actionable insights for region-specific buying decisions. Now that you can adapt your strategies, your business can ensure that it purchases and stores the right products. Sell-through rates are maximized and inventory numbers are kept low.

Economical Image Production with Looklet
Aside from the many benefits already mentioned, Looklet offers substantial cost savings in image production. These savings provide you with the opportunity to revisit incentives such as free shipping and returns, known drivers of cart abandonment that can negatively impact revenue and profits.

Staying Competitive in the Age of Technology
The importance of adopting new technology cannot be overstated. The question is not whether to implement AI, personalization, and big data into your creative operations, but rather, which tools offer operational efficiency during production and the ability to harness a wealth of customer and buying behavior data.
Our highly experienced team can evaluate your current creative operations stack, data projects, and AI projects. Our goal is to implement Looklet in a way that supports your AI and personalization goals and helps you create a new way of working that leverages Looklet’s features while integrating seamlessly into your creative production workflow.

In Summary
Winning in e-commerce requires businesses to remain attuned to their customers’ evolving needs, tastes, and rapidly changing shopping preferences.
Through Looklet’s array of personalization tools and Shop the Look Functionality, your team can stay at the forefront of retail technology and the AI revolution. By leveraging Looklet, you’re not just adapting to change; you’re driving it. As e-commerce continues to evolve, those who embrace innovation and data-driven decision-making will emerge as the true winners in this dynamic landscape.

Sources & Suggested Additional Reading

1. Global Consumer Trends Report: Discover What Motivates Your Customers When They Make Purchases Online (2023)
2. Global Consumer Report: Current and Future Shopping Trends (Trends for 2023,from Q1 ‘22 survey)
3. Artificial Intelligence in Fashion (Forbes Article)

image source: https://www.dataversity.net/fundamentals-metadata-management/

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Discover how our AI powered e-commerce solution combines the best of both worlds: real and AI generated models, along with advanced virtual dressing room technology to enhance your digital dressing experience. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can support your brand, feel free to reach out to us through the ‘Contact Us’ form at the bottom of this page!