In the era of mature retail media, isn’t it time to stop making personalisation look like marketing and start to make it look like a service? Romain Charles explains how this works in practice
Research shows that 73% of shoppers abandon a brand after a poor experience. Too often they have to navigate a promotional maze and are bombarded with distracting offers, when what they want to do is get the shopping done.
73% is too high. That means it’s not just another stat on shopping habits, rather it’s a sign that online shopping is changing. Over 20 years of ecommerce and shopping is still too complicated online.
When a consumer opens a shopping app, they have a goal: to do their shopping! They choose online for ease and time-saving. There’s no need to go physically to the shop and they can quickly find what they need.
Yet retailers are often told that piling on touchpoints will drive engagement. This results in more messages, more mechanics, more layers – all of which lead to the opposite of the intention. Touchpoints become friction and they come at the cost of abandoned carts, which can also mean a loss of trust in the retailer.
Drop the complex maze and opt for simplicity
There is a misunderstanding about simplicity that needs clearing up. It doesn’t have to mean a poorer experience. It’s not about cutting back for the sake of it. It is about choosing the items that deserve a place in the journey and ruthlessly weeding out those that are not needed.
A simple experience is one that doesn’t distract the consumer from their original intention (to shop!). It lead to an uncluttered space where the goal of getting the groceries isn’t competing with incessant promotional noise.
Simple doesn’t have to mean neutral, either. It’s important to retain the emotion through eye-catching visuals or a surprising visualisation. Brands and retailers that manage to combine a streamlined user journey with a powerful emotional impact will gain a competitive edge.
Then, in contrast to the simple exterior, the sophistication happens behind the scenes. This is the paradox that the sector’s leading players have grasped: the more complex the underlying mechanisms, the more the surface-level experience must appear effortless. So you can keep the advanced personalisation, fine-grained segmentation and multi-stakeholder orchestration, but the technical complexity must never be apparent to the consumer.
This is where gamification reveals its full potential. When it is properly understood, it’s not a decorative layer slapped onto an existing journey. Instead it’s a lever for engagement that amplifies perceived value without complicating the process. The aim is to create emotion without creating friction.
How it worked with Intermarché
With the in-house team, we created an ultra-personalised recommendations project. It was intended to replace the brand’s standard recommendation tool and marks a decisive step towards personalising the consumer experience on its site and drive application.
It is based on three major axes:
- Shopper & Data First: Product selection is based solely on the preferences and buying habits of shoppers, without focusing on monetizing or promoting a particular brand (including private label Intermarkt).
- Adaptability to business rules: The recommendation algorithm takes into account legal specificities (Evin law and first-age products in particular).
- Use of hot data: The recommendations take into account the items in the shoppers’ basket in real time for relevant and targeted suggestions.
Here’s what this looks like in practice
Just before accessing the shopping cart on the Intermarkt site and ecommerce application, 30 products are highlighted for each customer. They can easily add them to their basket in one click before validating their purchases.
A few months after the launch, the results obtained by this new tool were more than encouraging:
- A 28% add to cart rate verus 12% with a generic recommendation
- 3.1 products added to the cart versus 1.9 with a generic recommendation
The important point is that it appears simple to the customer. Rather than promotional distractions, they are being offered a personalised service. One that is specially dedicated to them and where they feel understood individually. Thus, ultra-personalisation increases the rate of addition to the basket, but it also develops consumer loyalty to the brand.
With machine learning tools, the recommendation algorithms can continue to learn and evolve over time too. This will make it possible to further refine the recommendations made to each shopper.
Our experience with Intermarché is that excellent user experience isn’t built by adding layers and creating complexity. It’s built by knowing what to emphasise and what to remove.
Towards a mature retail media that creates value
With the focus on price, the industry has gradually blurred the core of consumer attachment. The proliferation of tools designed to make the journey more comfortable has often made it seem more complicated. Tools like AI agents generating shopping lists, make the connection between consumer and brand even more transactional.
The future of retail media will depend on the ability of retailers and brands to reintroduce simplicity. Even straight forward mechanisms, such as sweepstakes, demonstrate that it is possible to generate pleasure, enthusiasm and projection. It is by combining performance, utility and emotion that retail media will be able to sustainably change its value proposition.
After years of inflation of sponsored formats, retail media is reaching a point of saturation. Consumers are showing a need for renewal, and retailers are now faced with the trade-off between advertising pressure and the quality of the journey. Innovation can no longer be limited to optimising inventories. It must become truly useful experience, where each activation provides tangible value for the shopper. Players capable of placing the user experience at the heart of their strategy, by reconciling relevance and performance, will be the ones who will shape the market sustainably and create a solid link between brands and consumers.
Consumers want the simplicity of getting their shopping done. In the new era, the shopping experience must improve. The promotional maze is putting shoppers off and nearly three-quarters are abandoning brands after a poor experience. The way forward is to reduce that number and keep the shopping experience simple.
Author
Romain Charles is CEO of Lucky Cart
You are in: Home » Retail Media » GUEST COMMENT A new era for the shopping experience – towards greater simplicity
GUEST COMMENT A new era for the shopping experience – towards greater simplicity
Paul Skeldon
In the era of mature retail media, isn’t it time to stop making personalisation look like marketing and start to make it look like a service? Romain Charles explains how this works in practice
Research shows that 73% of shoppers abandon a brand after a poor experience. Too often they have to navigate a promotional maze and are bombarded with distracting offers, when what they want to do is get the shopping done.
73% is too high. That means it’s not just another stat on shopping habits, rather it’s a sign that online shopping is changing. Over 20 years of ecommerce and shopping is still too complicated online.
When a consumer opens a shopping app, they have a goal: to do their shopping! They choose online for ease and time-saving. There’s no need to go physically to the shop and they can quickly find what they need.
Yet retailers are often told that piling on touchpoints will drive engagement. This results in more messages, more mechanics, more layers – all of which lead to the opposite of the intention. Touchpoints become friction and they come at the cost of abandoned carts, which can also mean a loss of trust in the retailer.
Drop the complex maze and opt for simplicity
There is a misunderstanding about simplicity that needs clearing up. It doesn’t have to mean a poorer experience. It’s not about cutting back for the sake of it. It is about choosing the items that deserve a place in the journey and ruthlessly weeding out those that are not needed.
A simple experience is one that doesn’t distract the consumer from their original intention (to shop!). It lead to an uncluttered space where the goal of getting the groceries isn’t competing with incessant promotional noise.
Simple doesn’t have to mean neutral, either. It’s important to retain the emotion through eye-catching visuals or a surprising visualisation. Brands and retailers that manage to combine a streamlined user journey with a powerful emotional impact will gain a competitive edge.
Then, in contrast to the simple exterior, the sophistication happens behind the scenes. This is the paradox that the sector’s leading players have grasped: the more complex the underlying mechanisms, the more the surface-level experience must appear effortless. So you can keep the advanced personalisation, fine-grained segmentation and multi-stakeholder orchestration, but the technical complexity must never be apparent to the consumer.
This is where gamification reveals its full potential. When it is properly understood, it’s not a decorative layer slapped onto an existing journey. Instead it’s a lever for engagement that amplifies perceived value without complicating the process. The aim is to create emotion without creating friction.
How it worked with Intermarché
With the in-house team, we created an ultra-personalised recommendations project. It was intended to replace the brand’s standard recommendation tool and marks a decisive step towards personalising the consumer experience on its site and drive application.
It is based on three major axes:
Here’s what this looks like in practice
Just before accessing the shopping cart on the Intermarkt site and ecommerce application, 30 products are highlighted for each customer. They can easily add them to their basket in one click before validating their purchases.
A few months after the launch, the results obtained by this new tool were more than encouraging:
The important point is that it appears simple to the customer. Rather than promotional distractions, they are being offered a personalised service. One that is specially dedicated to them and where they feel understood individually. Thus, ultra-personalisation increases the rate of addition to the basket, but it also develops consumer loyalty to the brand.
With machine learning tools, the recommendation algorithms can continue to learn and evolve over time too. This will make it possible to further refine the recommendations made to each shopper.
Our experience with Intermarché is that excellent user experience isn’t built by adding layers and creating complexity. It’s built by knowing what to emphasise and what to remove.
Towards a mature retail media that creates value
With the focus on price, the industry has gradually blurred the core of consumer attachment. The proliferation of tools designed to make the journey more comfortable has often made it seem more complicated. Tools like AI agents generating shopping lists, make the connection between consumer and brand even more transactional.
The future of retail media will depend on the ability of retailers and brands to reintroduce simplicity. Even straight forward mechanisms, such as sweepstakes, demonstrate that it is possible to generate pleasure, enthusiasm and projection. It is by combining performance, utility and emotion that retail media will be able to sustainably change its value proposition.
After years of inflation of sponsored formats, retail media is reaching a point of saturation. Consumers are showing a need for renewal, and retailers are now faced with the trade-off between advertising pressure and the quality of the journey. Innovation can no longer be limited to optimising inventories. It must become truly useful experience, where each activation provides tangible value for the shopper. Players capable of placing the user experience at the heart of their strategy, by reconciling relevance and performance, will be the ones who will shape the market sustainably and create a solid link between brands and consumers.
Consumers want the simplicity of getting their shopping done. In the new era, the shopping experience must improve. The promotional maze is putting shoppers off and nearly three-quarters are abandoning brands after a poor experience. The way forward is to reduce that number and keep the shopping experience simple.
Author
Romain Charles is CEO of Lucky Cart
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