Today, about 80% Americans are online shoppers, compared to just 22% in 2000. It’s no longer a competitive advantage to have a digital display – it’s a necessity. This uptick in online shopping has the potential to hurt brick and mortar stores, unless they stop relying solely on in-store purchases and find a way to give buyers an engaging e-commerce experience. This rings true for jewelry stores and dealers, too.
While buyers’ desire for beautiful jewelry hasn’t changed, the way they purchase it has. Businesses in the jewelry market have to appeal to two new types of buyers – those who are shopping and buying diamonds online exclusively, and those who research their options carefully before going into a store to make their purchase.
To reach both types of consumers, you need to utilize all the tools available to create the best digital experience, including interactive displays and online databases, designed to enhance the customer engagement. Tactics like these continue to rise in popularity, because they meet the demands of modern buyers, especially millennials.
How can you create a more engaging, interactive customer experience to bring clients buying diamonds online back into stores? Explore four features businesses in the jewelry market should adopt to enhance the buying process and engage digitally motivated customers.
Inventory at Your Fingertips
Today’s shoppers have short attention spans and a need for instant gratification. When the expectation is instantaneous access to supply, stores need to take measures to keep up.
While you can’t have every piece of jewelry on display at all time, you can provide a view of your pieces with a robust, digital inventory system available to clients. To make buying decisions faster and easier, inventory should be at the fingertips of potential customers to scroll through until they find the perfect option.
So, how does this create a more interactive experience for consumers? Users, primed for online shopping experiences now expect information to be available with a single click. (And if it’s not, there’s a good chance they’ll move onto another vendor when buying diamonds online.) That means physical jewelry stores have to build a digital presence to match consumer expectations. When you have your inventory at your fingertips, buyers are able to view a wider variety of products at any given time.
Images and Interactive Videos
As an experienced jeweler, you’re likely able to skim a diamond grading report or read a description of jewelry, and quickly conjure an image of the piece in your mind. Customers, however, don’t have the years of experience and knowledge to do the same. They can’t truly envision the piece until they actually see it. That’s why providing images and interactive videos of jewelry is essential in today’s market.
Because consumers need to see a piece to truly appreciate it, many e-commerce stores provide countless pictures of an item, helping buyers feel sure that they’re getting what they’re paying for. Similarly, when you’re showing a customer a setting without a stone or working with them on a custom piece, they need to have a thorough understanding of the gems they’re investing in.
To help your customers envision their end product when buying diamonds online, make sure to provide a few different interactive features, including:
- High-definition images of the diamonds or jewels, allowing the client to zoom in on small inclusions and details.
- 360-degree interactive video in which users control the movement of the diamonds, showing all angles.
By providing high-quality imaging with numerous angles and views, your customer feels like the diamond they’re buying is actually in the palm of their hand.
Organized Jewel Details
Another way to provide the most interactive, engaging experience for a customer is by giving them all of the information they ever wanted (or didn’t even know they needed) about a diamond or colored gemstone. Having an organized, uniform process for providing the details on your jewels is both professional and essential.
You need to match details to images of diamonds or jewels, and then, uniformly provide these details across all your products. You’ll never be scrambling for information or digging through files to find diamond grading reports again. And, you give consumers buying diamonds online an accurate, detailed view of what they’re paying for.
To rapidly authenticate jewels and educate users on their value, adopt a system for managing your jewel details. You’ll be able to deliver all the needed details instantly, before a buyer turns to a solely e-commerce competitor.
Numerous Options
One reason online shopping has revolutionized so many industries is the sheer number of options consumers now have access to. Think about shopping two decades ago. You really only had access to the products in stores or catalogues. Today, you can basically order anything, from anywhere. And consumers are now accustomed to considering as many options as possible when they shop.
To keep up with this aspect of the e-commerce boom, jewelers need an almost unlimited database of options for their customers. Buyers expect diamonds of every cut, carat, clarity, and color to be viewable and accessible. The sheer variety of options allow buyers to purchase a diamond that aligns precisely with their specifications, and they can compare all the options available to them.
Having numerous options helps jewelers, too. You can easily accommodate buyers with any budget, ensuring you never have to turn a customer away because you can’t immediately produce a jewel that’s ideal for their needs. And with so many options organized and accessible, you can easily match jewels for custom pieces.
When you integrate these features into your jewelry business, you’re sure to keep pace with the changing market and buying habits of today’s consumers. Incorporating these digital aspects into your jewelry business empower you to engage more buyers around the world, resulting in more revenue for your business.
With these new features, you can maintain your competitive advantage over exclusively online dealers, and help today’s buyers to get the pieces they really want from a jewelry business they can trust.
Make your digital engagement even easier. Learn how Virtual Diamond Boutique can help by scheduling a free demo of our app now.