5 Steps To A Better E-Commerce CX

How Retail Dynamic Imaging Supports Vital Business Strategies

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Retailers often contrast brick-and-mortar and e-Commerce shopping experiences and fret over

how to bridge their differences via omnichannel strategies.

But the fact is, customer experiences across channels actually are converging. Stores are getting more

tech-infused. Thanks to advancements in tools for interactivity and visual engagement, shopping online can

now deliver intimate, interactive encounters that bring a product to life, even on a 2-D screen. Advanced

imaging tools can enable shoppers to view fully personalized or customized products in real time, see items

they have selected together in one image, and deliver advanced capabilities, such as interactive zoom and

pan that truly leverage the immersive power of digital technologies. These features drive-up customer

satisfaction and conversion rates.

Despite its relative youth, e-Commerce shopping already has developed some conventions that are

holding it back from fully reaping the possibilities of its digital medium. While product hierarchies, for

example, served retailers well as e-Commerce took hold, they have never truly reflected the combination

of purposeful shopping and opportunistic browsing that characterizes brick-and-mortar shopping.

Advanced imaging tools can enable shoppers to view fully personalized or customized products in real time.

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Product hierarchies are one reason online consumers target a product, locate it, buy it and leave, while

in-store shoppers place other unplanned items in their carts as they move through a store. Online is

configured for buyers; it isn’t set up for shoppers, who prefer browsing and discovery.

Powerful advances in retail dynamic imaging make it possible to break such paradigms. These tools bring

next-gen interactivity and visual engagement to the e-Commerce customer experience. That is a real

advantage in driving success. RSR Research found retail “winners” are much less likely to say they are being

out-innovated in engaging with consumers than other retailers (winners 29%, others 38%), according to

Digital Selling 2017: Getting Real About Shopper Journeys.

By leveraging retail dynamic imaging, retailers can drive top-line benefits that increase sales and loyalty,

while also saving time and money through more efficient business processes. With advanced online

capabilities in place, e-Commerce shopping can deliver mix-and-match capabilities that the traditional

brick-and-mortar experience is unable to match. Together, the online experience using retail dynamic

imaging with the touch-and-feel capabilities of brick-and-mortar is giving today’s digitally savvy consumers

the complete omnichannel shopping experience for which they are looking.

Online is configured for buyers; it isn’t set up for shoppers, who prefer browsing and discovery.

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5 Steps To A Better E-Commerce CX

Many consumers have trouble visualizing — just ask a realtor trying to sell a fixer-upper or a house painter

offering only tiny paint chips for color selection.

The same is true in retail, online or in-store. Show one item accompanied by an array of small color

swatches or options, and many consumers hesitate to buy. What does that cobalt sweater look like in gray,

if it is not in stock or in a photo? Will that chair look as good in leather as it does in cranberry fabric? What

if I add nailhead trim and change the wood to mahogany?

Advanced imaging technology enables a shopper to view thousands of customization options that

transform an encounter with a product — then view the product from a 360-degree perspective, or

zoom in on a detail. Being able to explore these differences creates the serendipity that enriches the user

experience of shopping online — increasing the likelihood of pressing the buy button, as well as increasing

site stickiness and customer loyalty.

When a retailer offers a fully rendered image of the product with all of the desired options, conversions

increase substantially. Due Maternity, an online retailer targeting pregnant women, added LiquidPixels

LiquiFire® Operating System (OS) to their website. Pages providing 360-degree product views out-

performed the standard pages having only two-dimensional static images. The conversion rate for these

products increased by 27%.

Online retailer Barrington Gifts leveraged LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS to provide a carefully curated

e-Commerce experience. Now shoppers can choose their team’s colors, and then browse products with

these colors already applied. Clicking on a product takes shoppers to an individual product page with

customization options, such as engraving or embossing. The customer then sees in real time exactly how

their customized product will look. This fun and interactive tool has been a hit with customers, driving an

increase in conversion rates.

CASE IN POINT

CASE IN POINT

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1Customize Every Interaction By Displaying Real-Time Color, Style, And Accessory Changes

Personalization and customization are valuable. The global personalized gifts market is forecast to grow at

a compound annual growth rate of 9.1% between 2017 and 2021, according to Research and Markets.

“Personalization of a product by the customer — either online or in a store — offers more

engagement with the product and the brand,” reported Boston Retail Partners in Personalizing the

Customer Experience, 2017. “This, in turn, makes the purchase more of an experience creating a lasting

impression with the customer and generating further brand loyalty.” RSR’s Digital Selling 2017 report

found that 40% of retail winners and 47% of others see creating more personalized experiences in digital

channels as an opportunity to address their business challenges.

A key capability in personalization/customization is the ability to display the product exactly how it will

appear — a date engraved on a ring, a logo on a shirt or mug, drawer pulls mounted on a cabinet door, etc.

Without seeing the final product, consumers hesitate to proceed.

Wine gift retailer Personal Wine added retail dynamic imaging as part of a website revamp. Now, instead

of having to show two separate images as a proof for its customers’ personalized wine bottles, LiquidPixels

LiquiFire OS enables Personal Wine to provide a live preview of exactly what its customers’ orders would

look like. By leveraging LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS, Personal Wine increased its e-Commerce conversion

rate by 12%. This interactive shopping experience led to more engagement throughout the buying

process and, in turn, enhanced the overall shopping experience.

“The key is making less work for the customer,” said Personal Wine CEO Anthony D’Addeo. “By making

the buying process easier and more enjoyable, we’re ensuring customer loyalty and hopefully

inspiring advocacy.”

CASE IN POINT

2Personalize Product Offerings By Showing The Exact Font Or Graphic That Will Appear On The Item

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Real-time dynamic images enable retailers to present a compelling and accurate picture of a customized

and personalized product. This visual builds the trust that drives conversions. Research by PowerReviews

found 72% of consumers regularly or always seek out visual content prior to purchase.

Customization and personalization tools also make online shopping fun. Consumers can play with the

possibilities, experimenting with the tool in a way that triggers new ideas — and new purchases. By

enabling the shopper to share these virtual images via email or social media, this effect multiplies. Now that

shopper becomes an influencer making an impression on friends, family, and followers. Shoppers can visit a

site, explore the products exactly as they wish, and share their customization with others.

Montana Silversmiths uses LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS to power its Buckle Builder online custom

configuration tool for belt buckles. Use of LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS contributed to a 91% increase in

Montana Silversmiths’ custom order business, with customized orders now making up more than one-third

of the website’s intake.

CASE IN POINT

3Increase Conversion Rates On E-Commerce Sites By Giving Shoppers The Confidence To Know Exactly What They Are Purchasing

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“Click here to finalize your order.” It is a simple instruction with some ominous implications — did I get it all

right? Did I accidentally click on the wrong item or color?

Retailers need to remove every potential stopping point on the path to conversion. They must also prevent

shopper disappointment and high return rates.

A shopping cart with text but no image, for example, becomes a point of friction in the shopping process.

Displaying thumbnail images of selected products, with the shopper’s customization and personalization

applied, eliminates this disruption to conversion.

Thumbnail images can also enrich the shopping process, such as displaying the tie the shopper is now

considering on the dress shirt they have already added to their shopping cart, to ensure a good match and

drive conversion.

Unfortunately, the ability to scale images is not a feature of many e-Commerce platforms, so until now

retailers had to manually create these smaller images. Dynamic imaging removes this task, automatically

scaling (and optimizing) photos properly for these uses.

4Provide Thumbnail Photos In The Shopping Cart To Build Order Confidence And Drive Conversions

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Email, display, and media ads are powerful revenue drivers. But timing is everything, and stale emails or ads

with expired offers or an out-of-stock promoted item do nothing good for retailer revenue.

However, while the text content of an email is final once it leaves a retailer’s server, the images are not. It’s

not until a consumer opens the email or views the ad that an email client or browser calls out to external

servers to retrieve the media. That opens up the opportunity for the retailer to dynamically serve highly

targeted, time- and even location-sensitive images in that email or ad.

Via advanced retail dynamic imaging, the image could be a sweater in the particular color that consumer

just browsed but didn’t purchase, and an ad with a coupon specific to that consumer containing a barcode

that is also personalized. It could be a new promotion because the 24-hour sale has ended by the time

the email is viewed. Images can be sensitive to where they are opened, with the promotion depending on

whether there is a store near that location. Images can even change should an email get forwarded. More

than one-third (34%) of consumers told eMarketer in June 2017 that personalized content is important

when deciding whether to buy via a brand’s email.

Using retail dynamic imaging, the retailer or service provider sets up rules to apply in anticipated situations,

and the LiquidPixels LiquiFire Imaging Server automatically applies these rules to serve just the right image

for the individual need. The server also senses the size and format needed, such as sending Google’s WebP

format, a method for compressing images without losing visible quality, if the browser accepts WebP. An

advanced retail dynamic imaging system can offer a nearly infinite range of options for building effective

recipes to individually target consumers via images that will be meaningful to them.

5 Deliver More Relevant Emails And Ads With Data-Based, Time-Sensitive Updates

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Automation Delivers Bottom-Line Results

Dynamic imaging has a powerful impact on shopper engagement; but it also automates back-end

processes for the retailer and streamlines image delivery to an impatient consumer.

By automating processes and activities traditionally handled manually, dynamic imaging presents a substantial

opportunity for cost savings while opening up new opportunities to drive revenue. It does this by:

Automatically Formatting Images For Different Screen Sizes

Creating product images for most retailers is a highly manual process that entails shooting photos, digitally

retouching them, and then recreating each image in seven to 11 different sizes to work on desktop sites

and various sizes of mobile devices, in display ads, in emails, thumbnails, and so on. It’s a costly process

that consumes time and talent while limiting options and freedom for designers. Add more colors and the

burden multiplies.

This is a classic case of humans serving computers rather than the reverse. Dynamic imaging puts things right

by automatically scaling, color draping, and optimizing photos for each use case according to pre-determined

and modifiable recipes. It does so much faster and at a significantly lower cost than any manual process.

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A sophisticated dynamic imaging platform automatically identifies the format demands of the incoming

image request — JPEG, WebP, and so on — and sends the correct image. This not only prevents humans

from having to create those images, but it saves bandwidth. Without dynamic imaging, the image server

must send a large image for a browser to rescale, consuming more bandwidth. Sending only the correct

size image translates into faster load times and a higher likelihood the image will be viewed.

Retailer Save My Bag uses a custom configurator from BeUnico along with LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS

to enhance customers’ ability to design a bag online and see exactly how it will be delivered. Product

images are generated in real time, with realistic photo quality, and available in every desired resolution

from high-res for zoom to low-res thumbnails for the shopping cart. This solution significantly reduced

the amount of Save My Bag’s still photography and post-production work. Being able to visualize a

customizable product in real time greatly increases the likelihood of a shopper becoming a buyer.

Selecting And Displaying Numerous Images That Personalize And Customize The

Shopper Experience

Once designers are free from time-consuming manual resizing tasks, such as replanning layouts for

different screen sizes and producing multiple images in different colors, they are free to fully leverage their

talents to create compelling content. A well-designed retail dynamic imaging solution equips designers with

powerful tools to personalize and customize the shopper experience according to the interests, tastes, and

history of individual customers. In fact, designers already using these tools consistently create innovative

new uses unanticipated by the application developers.

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CASE IN POINT

Optimizing Page “Weight” To Ensure The Fastest Load Times

If a page takes longer than three seconds to load, 53% of mobile users will abandon the page and look

elsewhere, according to Google’s report The Need for Mobile Speed. Nearly always, the primary contributor

to a page’s weight — or the amount of data it sends to fully load — are the images.

For every image, the dimensions, resolution, file format, and compression all interact to contribute to the

quality of the image and the number of bytes in its file. Most retailers are forced to aim somewhere in the

middle, making trade-offs to accommodate the most screens and each browser’s accepted formats. Since

not all use WebP, for example, retailers would need to either create separate files by browser or forego its

benefits. This degrades the customer experience for many shoppers.

A sophisticated retail dynamic imaging solution can automatically analyze each image on a page and

determine the optimal settings for resolution, file format, and compression to deliver the highest-quality

images in the shortest amount of time. It can also optimize differently for mobile versus desktop versus

tablet, etc., and even differently for each photo on the page or for different levels of connectivity and

other variables.

By optimizing the images, dynamic imagery can save 40% to 50% of the bandwidth used for imagery with

no perceptible difference in appearance, driving down content delivery network costs for retailers and

bandwidth use for consumers. That enables retailers to take full advantage of, say, the iPhone’s Retina

display, to make the best possible impression for users of that device while serving other devices at their

own best combination of settings.

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When designing its new website, playset maker Kids Creations knew it wanted a custom configuration

tool that blew competitors’ clunky, slow tools out of the water. “The new website needed to be user-

friendly, load quickly, and work well on different browsers,” said Brennan Deitsch, Kids Creations’ Online

Marketing Manager. Web designer Trademark Productions suggested LiquidPixels for enhanced imagery

and software. “With the Design Your Own tool from LiquidPixels LiquiFire OS, the image loads well and

quickly,” said Deitsch. “Images are layered well and provide a great representation of our product.

Customers actually see exactly what they are going to get.” Now, an impressive 30% of Kids Creations’

sales come directly from the Design Your Own tool.

Enabling Interactive Zoom and Pan

Retailers have a real estate problem when it comes to enabling the zoom and pan function that helps

consumers get up close and personal with a product. To provide that capability, they are often forced to take

a big, beautiful image and scale it down to fit the intended space, or make it take up the consumer’s whole

screen. Even then, the largest possible size is limited to the dimensions of the smallest screen a consumer

will use to access it. This degrades the experience, so the consumers cannot quite see that trim detail or knit

pattern that tells them if the purchase is a yay or a nay — or watches the image hijack the whole screen.

A sophisticated retail dynamic imaging solution employs intelligent pixel streaming. Images are instantly

sized and scaled to the capabilities of whatever device the consumer is using. That means mobile images

can be zoomed to the fullest level while maintaining a light user experience. The ability to quickly and

fully rotate, pan, and zoom into any portion of the image with optimal resolution and viewability drives

conversions while conserving bandwidth.

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CASE IN POINT

Conclusion: Retail Dynamic Imaging Transforms Online Shopping

Consumers who feel free to explore, discover, and engage are more likely to discover and convert. But until

now the online customer experience has not encouraged browsing and playing online. Advanced retail

dynamic imaging brings next-gen interactivity and visual engagement to the e-Commerce customer

experience. By customizing every interaction, personalizing product offerings, showing real-time

images of custom products, providing thumbnails in carts, and adding dynamic images to email, retailers

can deepen engagement, boost conversions, and attain a streamlined experience and lower bandwidth

consumption for retailers and consumers alike.

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LiquidPixels leads the imaging revolution. Built on open standards, our LiquiFire Dynamic Imaging

Solutions integrate into existing Web and workflow environments, enhancing product creation and

visualization, while reducing production costs. LiquidPixels makes its patented technology available

as a hosted service or via on-site enterprise servers with solutions that may be tailored to each of

our customers’ unique needs. Please visit us at www.liquidpixels.com.

866.808.4937

1.888.603.3626

Retail TouchPoints is an online publishing network for retail executives, with content focused on

optimizing the customer experience across all channels. The Retail TouchPoints network is comprised

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info@liquidpixels.com

info@retailtouchpoints.com

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