Have you ever wandered into a store feeling slightly lost, only to have a friendly sales associate guide you through every stage of the buying process? You begin your journey dejected, and leave the store with a skip in your step—and a bag full of perfectly sized clothing.
Well, guess what? The same type of customer experience is now possible for ecommerce shoppers.
With website personalization, you can give each customer the personal-shopper treatment—catering to each person’s unique tastes, purchase motivations, and pain points simultaneously through a single online storefront.
While personalized websites aren’t a new strategy, the way in which personalization happens is evolving. We’re in the midst of a transition: Increasingly stringent limitations around third-party cookies mean it’s not as easy to keep track of consumer preferences. First-party data is becoming a bigger priority for enterprise retailers looking to accurately personalize their websites at scale.
This guide shares how to do that, with website personalization strategies, techniques, and examples from retailers who’ve already done it.
Traditional ecommerce websites had a one-size-fits-all approach. It didn’t matter whether you were selling to a first-time customer or a repeat buyer; a Gen Z browser or a baby boomer—everyone had exactly the same onsite customer experience.
Advancements in technology—browser cookies, in particular—meant this no longer was the case. Javascript code shed a light on exactly who was visiting your website and the actions and behaviors they demonstrated. If the cookie recorded that someone signed in to an online account on their previous session, for example, you could prompt them to do the same again next time.
However, things are changing. People are becoming aware of the data that brands hold on them, and it’s making them uneasy. Browsers are taking these concerns into consideration.
We’re rapidly heading towards a cookieless future. Apple, Brave, and Firefox have already limited their cookie-tracking capabilities. And while Google backtracked on its promise to block third-party cookies, one thing is clear: third-party data is no longer a reliable source of intelligence. New approaches are needed to accurately track onsite user behavior and collect data to use in the traditional ecommerce personalization approach.
Cookie-tracking limitations mean you can’t always see the bigger picture. When website visitors opt out of third-party cookies on your site—something companies are increasingly required to make easy to do—you can’t tell what they’re doing on your website. In other words: the first half of the personalization strategy—collecting data—becomes a lot harder.
These changes present the need for first-party data that’s owned by you and collected from your target audience. You likely already have this through data sources like:
The beauty of first-party data is that you own it: You’re not buying the same list as your competitors, containing customer profiles from a data aggregator. This gives you a unique advantage: Customers get a hyper-personalized user experience that only you can offer, based on the unique first-party data they’ve given only your brand.
A unified customer data model is the foundation of effective personalization. With third-party data becoming increasingly difficult to obtain—and always being of questionable accuracy and relevance—you need the infrastructure in place to capture owned data on your customers. This presents the need for a unified commerce platform like Shopify.
Shopify doesn’t just create customer profiles for people who’ve bought from you. Website visitors who sign up with their phone number or email address—not just through Shopify features, but also through partner apps like Klaviyo—also have a customer profile made. Every traceable action from your online store, marketing channels, and partner app feeds back to this customer profile for a complete 360-degree view of your website visitor.
Long gone are the days of a standard online storefront that stays the same regardless of who’s interacting with it. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify let you personalize your website content on the fly, depending on your preconfigured data parameters.
But your customer data must be unified for it to work at scale. For example, if someone has clicked a link to your “Candle” collection page through a Klaviyo email marketing campaign, you need this customer data linked to your unified commerce platform (i.e., Shopify) to add them to your “Candle interest” customer segments.
This segmentation is how you’ll display a different version of your website that’s personalized to that user based on your first-party data—like showing your bestselling candles in a product recommendation carousel, or a popup form that offers an exclusive candle bundle in exchange for their email subscription.
J&Co is one merchant using Managed Markets to personalize the shopping experience for international website visitors. The jewelry brand solidified their ecommerce presence in key regions with localized content and currency conversions through a single storefront. This pricing customization helped them stand out against international competitors.
“Customization and personalization are important to us, and Shopify Plus enables that,” says Jenny Kwang, founder and CEO of J&Co. “Not only can we segment customers and customize to their individual needs, we can also easily integrate apps like language translator and currency converter to help us strengthen our international footprint.”
There’s a lot at stake for your customers when they head to the checkout. They need to be confident that they’re making the right choice before they click “Complete Purchase.” To increase the odds of them doing so, your job is to reduce as much friction as possible during the checkout experience.
Web personalization makes this possible, particularly:
Ellana Cosmetics turned to Shopify’s checkout functionality to customize the experience for online shoppers. Timely upsells have since increased the brand’s average order value by 17%, helping the cosmetics retailer grow revenue by 50%.
Personalization tools help customize the shopping experience, from product discovery to post-purchase. But it all starts with a good infrastructure.
Shopify is designed to be an all-in-one ecommerce solution that powers every aspect of your business. Unify sales, product, and customer data in one back end—without the need for complex integrations to fill the gaps, or overpriced consultants who increase the platform’s total cost of ownership (TCO). It’s no wonder why Shopify’s TCO is up to 36% better than its competitors.
Merchants with a Shopify store can use this unified data to personalize communication with customers using the following features:
“Shopify has given us agility and efficiency since day one,” says Justin Alexander, cofounder of Koh. “The upgrade to Shopify Plus is now fueling our global growth without the need for additional team members, developers, or agency support.”
Personalization is no longer simply a way to surprise and delight customers—it’s officially entered the realm of table stakes. Per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, almost three-quarters of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences.
eMarketer data also shows the aspects of personalization that shoppers think add the most value:
Meeting these expectations leaves one less hurdle for customers to cross in their purchasing journey.
It’s not just your product quality, price, or brand reputation that influences customers to buy. Per Salesforce, four in five online shoppers consider the experience that a company provides to be just as important as the products on offer.
Take Skin Inc, a skincare brand deep rooted in personalization. They offer custom formulations for customers based on their unique skin concerns and preferences. Their migration to Shopify allowed this personalization to start from a customer’s first interaction with their website.
Skin Inc took advantage of Shopify’s integrations with loyalty programs and marketing tools like Launchpad, a marketing automation tool that lets their ecommerce team personalize the site without help from developers. “Shopify Plus’s integrations have been crucial in empowering us to reach a global audience and ensure that every customer receives a personalized experience,” says Sabrina Tan, CEO and founder of Skin Inc.
The results speak for themselves: Since switching to Shopify, Skin Inc quadrupled their cross-border revenue, with a 200% improvement in conversion rate—all while halving the time spent on operations.
We all know it’s cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Brands are turning to website personalization as a strategy for customer retention, while also combating customer acquisition costs (CAC) that have skyrocketed by 222% in eight years.
Segment’s State of Personalization report found that personalization drives repeat purchases and better customer retention.
Whether it’s a product recommendation carousel inspired by a customer’s last purchase or a tailored announcement bar with a unique discount code to redeem on product pages they’ve viewed, the positive (and personalized) experience, combined with targeted marketing, keeps your brand top of mind.
Analysts estimate that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone. For most retailers, the issue isn’t just collecting data—it’s knowing what good data looks like, and how to use it.
For effective website personalization at scale, particularly if you’re following an omnichannel retail or marketing strategy, you need a central data repository to store important and accurate data from multiple sources.
Case in point: Your email app might show that a subscriber has clicked a link to view the local landing page for your New York store. You then personalize the announcement bar on your site to give a discount code on their first in-store purchase—not knowing that they’ve already been. Your point-of-sale (POS) system data and email list data weren’t integrated.
Shopify’s unified commerce functionality makes this easier, without custom-coding data integrations. Sell from multiple channels—online, in-person, social media, and marketplaces included—and have all of your shoppers’ interactions pooled into one, accurate customer profile that’s accessible from your Shopify admin.
Consumers are becoming more tech savvy. Per one KPMG report, 86% of shoppers say data privacy is a growing concern. Two in five don’t trust companies to use their data ethically.
Privacy regulations—like GDPR for EU consumers and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—also impact your ability to collect data about your customers. You must show clear instructions on how to opt out, and be willing to destroy the data you’ve already collected if a customer requests it.
Because of these privacy concerns, the best approach is to merge first-party data (collected through channels you own) with zero-party data. For the latter, customers have willingly volunteered their information, often in exchange for a benefit.
Jones Road Beauty, for example, has a “Shade Matching” quiz. The incentive for the customer is clear: they get a personalized product recommendation that’s tailored to their unique needs and skin concerns. The benefit for the brand is the zero-party data it collects about the website visitor. Quiz answers share the prospect’s skin goals, type, and how they’ll use the cosmetics—all of which can be used to offer a personalized web experience.
In some cases, website personalization means adding extra code and applications to your online store. This can have a detrimental impact on website performance: the more code you have, the longer it can take for a page to render in the visitor’s browser.
Multiple studies have proven the negative impact of slow loading times on page load speeds, and conversion rates increase with every millisecond improvement in site speed.
First, make sure you’re building on a robust website infrastructure—one with reliable servers and the capacity to render HTML markup. Shopify, for example, has robust hosting servers and a Storefront Renderer (SFR) that make Shopify stores the fastest in the world, rendering up to 2.4 times faster, and 1.8 times faster on average than stores on other platforms.
Website personalization isn’t an advanced strategy—it’s mission critical in today’s modern ecommerce landscape.
Customers expect personalized experiences, and they’re willing to hand over their data in exchange for it. And perhaps more importantly: they aren’t afraid to exit sites in search of retailers that use their personal data to tailor the shopping experience.
Unified commerce platforms like Shopify make it easier than ever to reduce your reliance on third-party cookies by surfacing the customer data you already own, all in one place. It doesn’t matter where they engaged, how they bought, or which app you’re using—it’s all in Shopify, ready for you to use for effective website personalization.
Website personalization is a strategy whereby a site’s content changes based on data you’ve collected about each individual customer. This could include personalized product recommendations, translating content to their native language, or popups related to their purchase history.
Website customization happens when you make changes to a website, such as changing the color scheme, updating the imagery, or altering the layout.
Gymshark is a great example of website personalization. The gymwear retailer customizes its website content based on a visitor’s location, showing their local currency and delivery options. It also prompts people with an account to sign in.
