
Common E-Commerce Personalization Pitfalls to Avoid
Common E-Commerce Personalization Pitfalls to Avoid

Written by Casey Botticello
It’s 2022, and businesses are swiftly shifting towards personalization in their e-commerce strategies. The pandemic-induced lockdowns in the past two years have shaken business profit foundations to their cores, and a virtually-guided business venture is the only way out of this hell-loop. This includes avid use of e-commerce personalization strategies to maximize profit margins and receive higher ROIs.
A state-of-art directory towards establishing personalization in e-commerce is surfacing across online businesses. Online marketers have observed a 20% increase in sales by using personalization as a priority strategy while selling their products.
Additionally, 80% of consumers are more likely to return to the website that offers them personalized services. Typical consumer behavior suggests that they visit a particular website in hopes of locating their ideal product. So, when this product is customized to their exact choices, they will keep coming back for more.
However, 63% of digital marketing businesses lack the correct technology and tools to personalize services. So, even though your business may have the tools and expertise, it is natural to fall into some common pitfalls while undertaking personalization. These mistakes may occur in the initial phase where you’re trying to figure it all out or may even occur at a later stage in the business growth.
Implicit vs. Explicit Intent in Personalization
A curious point of interference by businesses, while they are undertaking e-commerce personalization strategies, is to conduct the exercises through an implicit and explicit intent.
Implicit Intent in Personalization
An intent to understand your consumers occurs implicitly while trying to understand their behavioral patterns when they are navigating your website.
A few standard blueprints to understanding consumer behavior implicitly is through tweaked page layouts in sync with consumer preferences, notifications, and specific discounts offered on the website, which pop up on the screen as they are about to leave the page. Besides this, the system of recommendations can also be used to offer similar products to the ones they were navigating.
The Issue with Using Implicit Intent in Personalization
When there is a concrete objective set of rules to guide you through a process, there is little left scope left for creativity, and the possibility of searching out new developments in a project is bleak.
The same is the case with using implicit intent in personalization. Using a monotonous set of guidelines to judge the consumer’s behavior restricts it to a singular viewpoint.
84% of consumers prefer being observed as humans and not numbers, so by exercising this restrictive viewpoint, businesses overlook the potential of unlocking new and note-worthy elements that they could target.
Explicit Intent in Personalization: Success Story
The Search Bar. This is an imperative tool on your website that empowers consumers to dictate their desired searches, proving to be an important data collection unit for businesses.
By granting them the choice of spelling out their wants, businesses can then navigate their choices, pair it with the implicit intent, and build the hallmark personalized audit for their consumers.
Businesses should then focus on striking a balance between what consumers desire and what the company wishes to advertise. This is the secret to effective personalization.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid in E-Commerce Personalization

5.Personalization in all its glory is a dead nail if you use it incorrectly or are continuously experiencing unintentional pitfalls. Here are some common mistakes businesses make while undertaking the strategy of personalization and how you can fix them:
1. Less Personalization
Your personalization scheme will not make the cut if you have a one-goal strategy in mind. Something like, “I want to personalize the products for my potential customers.” This can be a wide-based strategy for any and every business out there.
What makes a difference is if you garner a specific plan central to your personal business goal that ventures from the beginning of navigation till the end product is purchased.
The Fix- Glood.AI can help you locate the friction points on your websites that consumers always end up navigating to at regular intervals. Use these points as milestones to curate your much larger and more intricate strategy. Utilize the elements of acquisition, merchandising, communication, and promotions to mobilize a clearer idea.
2. Personalization without the Correct Tools
An inherent “herd mentality” plays at the back of most entrepreneurs’ minds when they discover a newly evolving strategy. For example, personalization is the new talk of the town. So naturally, businesses will mindlessly invest in all the e-commerce personalization tools, only to discover that most of them don’t fulfill their purpose.
A lack of the correct tools generally leads to higher costs and a stagnant ROI.
The Fix- Understand your specific industry, its generic and specific requirements, as well as the consumers you cater to. Platforms such as Glood.AI are equipped to help you understand your business requirements and accordingly help you choose the right personalization tools, thereby minimizing the loss factor.
3. Personalization on a Single Channel
Statistics show that 73% of consumers use multiple platforms to cater to their daily online shopping needs. So if you’re focusing on the personalization constricted to only one website, chances are bleak for your businesses to take off on an unprecedented scale.
The Fix- Acknowledge the multiple avenues in which your business can carry out personalization activities and be informed of how you can exercise an omnichannel personalization strategy.
4. Not Taking Advantage of Real-Time Data
Some online businesses make the grave mistake of relying on historical or cold data on their websites to determine personalization strategies. This information will not prove vital if your customer has already satiated their need with the product.
The Fix- The idea is to find a website partner that provides your company with Big Data architecture to venture on to have a more intricate personalization goal. Glood.AI is your one-stop solution to attain all the real-time data your consumers navigate on your website.
5. Personalization Without Testing
Standard personalization tools and methods may be beneficial to some businesses, while to others, they may not stand the test of time. The goals, consumer behavior, and strategies are unique to each business, and no brand should focus on optimizing a standard tool that has worked for two others.
A hypothesis to an effective strategy is not enough to reap its benefits.
The Fix- Instead, an A/B format of testing should be applied to finalize the tool relevant to your business and the market it caters to.
6. Using Personalization as an Add-on Necessity
Most businesses use personalization as an add-on to their central business strategy. However, when used correctly, it can positively transform business gains, and with the right tools, your business can earn unprecedented profits and higher ROIs.
The Fix- Using personalization as a central strategy to enhance your consumer experience will heighten your business traffic. Glood.AI helps you create an omnipresent channel strategy that targets an all-rounded approach towards e-commerce personalization.
7. Skipping Micro Targets during Personalization
In the chaos of sticking to a consumer **personalization** strategy, some imperative micro targets are left out. For example, if a consumer on your website is purchasing a mobile phone, it’s only inevitable that they will branch out to another website that sells mobile cases for the same model. If you cut out that extra time by suggesting them a mobile case from the same phone model, chances are, consumers will purchase both.
The Fix- Glood.AI is a commerce experience platform that can be your best friend when it comes to identifying the potential pairings to a product bought on your website.
8. Personalization Stagnation
Initial progress through a successful personalization strategy set-up is great. Consistency and constant evolution take it from great to fabulous. However, most startups give up on their strategies after some initial success.
The Fix- Your business needs an all-encompassing strategic analysis tool that will keep your head in the game and constantly provide you with potential milestones and evolution in the navigation activities taking place on your website.
9. Blind Faith in AI
While AI is the future of essential personalization, it makes extremely calculative decisions, and all the results it curates for your website to follow are purely based on data judgment. Following the earlier agreement to treat customers like humans and not data books, having blind faith in AI will not cut it for you.
The Fix- Creating manual strategies, custom content, and self-drawn imagery provide more dimension to understanding personalization on a deeper level.
A Blueprint to Personalization Implementation
Glood.AI is a leading commerce experience platform that will take your personalization level to another dimension. Using personalized suggestions online as well as specified marketing strategies, they keep strict tabs on your on-site consumer behavior and trends and finally choose the correct brands and tools for you to optimize your personalization goals.
All in all, they are your ideal personalization catalyst as they sift out the best ingredients for effective strategies that your brand can follow and also pick up on real-time data to provide you with a thorough path to walk through.
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