Jewelry Ecommerce Features
While jewelry ecommerce might not look like the most obvious place to begin an online vending career, the evidence from the jewelry sector might be enticing enough to convince many entrepreneurs that this is the ideal place to start their e-commerce journey. There are several considerations that will determine the success or failure of any new jewelry venture.
Fast fashion’s influence on costume jewelry
The accelerating rate of turnover in fashion has created game-changing technology in the apparel sector. No sooner has a haute couture garment appeared on the catwalks than it’s available in the shops of mass-market retailing. Even before the glossy magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan have featured designer outfits, those same outfits have been copied in sweatshops around the world and appear in online boutiques at rock bottom prices. This might sound like a reason not to get into jewelry ecommerce but in fact it’s a major driver for potentially high profits. With retailers offering as many as 12 ‘themes’ every year, customers are likely to seek jewelry and accessories to harmonize with their new fast fashion clothing.
Being able to load new products, update inventory and make up-selling suggestions are all vital to success in the fast fashion market. Just as top brands use their shop windows, their Instagram accounts and social media shares of celebrities wearing their clothes to drive sales, a high flying ecommerce jeweler will use 3D views of jewelry, suggestions about what other customers purchased alongside the piece currently being viewed and their own social media channels to create a call to action for sought-after fast fashion accessories.
Jewelry ecommerce - the need for speed
But for a jewelry ecommerce vendor this opportunity requires them to be able to engage with customers and meet their needs with speed and flair. That’s why Shopping Cart Elite has advanced search filters that give customers fingertip control over the search process. These auto-generated search filters drawn on product specification data to produce curated shortlists of products based on a range of search times from price to carat weight, from cut to color, to give precise product details that match customer needs.
As every retailer knows, browsing customers are most easily converted to buying customers because they immediately identify that their needs are going to be met on this site. Issues such as abandoned carts are often the result of partially unfilled need, for example when seeking jewelry, a customer will often search for a day to night look that requires a partial change of accessories such as hoop earrings to accompany a classic pendant for the day, and diamond studs to take the same necklace into the evening. Being unable to obtain all their requirements easily leads to customers leaving the site. For any site to succeed, it must be able to produce search results and fulfil orders rapidly, which means any jewelry ecommerce site is only as good as its software.
Fine jewelry - the investment effect
Whilst fast fashion has altered the landscape of fashion and costume jewelry retailing, fine jewelry has been impacted by a completely different set of considerations. Fine or investment jewelry: classic watches, diamond rings, wedding and eternity bands, has always been purchased with two distinct sets of criteria. The first set relates to financial value - cut, weight, carat and scarcity. The second set relates to intrinsic value - provenance, style and craftsmanship. Obviously these two sets of criteria overlap, for example scarcity can apply both to the absolute rarity of a certain gemstone but also to the relative rarity of its provenance and craftsmanship element - a Tiffany diamond ring will outsell a similarly composed diamond ring created by an unknown craftsman because the Tiffany ring will hold its value better.
The online watch and jewelry market had an annual revenue of $6 billion in 2015 and is growing at around 13 per cent per annum. The market for watches purchased online is growing at twice the rate of the bricks and mortar sales and is expected to generate 10% of the overall online jewelry market revenue by 2020. This means that jewelry retailing online has become a much more masculinized industry than anybody predicted. Being able to offer your pages via themes that appeal specifically to a male audience is likely to be a key factor in succeeding with fine and investment jewelry enterprises and this requires software that can both generate themed pages rapidly and seamlessly and turnaround gathered data to tailor page content to customer metrics.
Investment jewelry used to be an entirely hands-on experience, usually undertaken through a well-established local jeweler, but today this process has become completely different. Over three quarters of people planning a fine jewelry purchase now undertake research online. This means that a jewelry e-commerce site has to deliver a range of attributes to win the confidence of the fine jewelry purchaser. Endorsements and testimonials, high-level security features, prominently displayed brand names and clear, rapid access to personally tailored information are all features of websites that are succeeding in selling investment jewelry to online purchasers.
Jewelry Customization and Personalization
One place that e-commerce jewelers succeed better than bricks and mortar stores is in the area of customization and personalization. While this has traditionally been limited to engraving, sometimes undertaken in-store but more often sent out for completion, online jewelry retailers can extend this element of choice into many areas such as:
Extending choice is a major disruptive element of the online jewelry industry. Being able to offer unique accessories that resemble items popular on social media but personalized, for example, to harmonise with a birthstone or a particular shade of gold from which other jewelry is made, gives online retailers an undoubted advantage over their bricks and mortar counterparts.
- Engraving
- Creating rings, including selecting diamonds from databases
- Embossing
- Selecting fonts
- Putting together elements to construct jewelry such as charm bracelets, christening necklaces etc.
Extending choice is a major disruptive element of the online jewelry industry. Being able to offer unique accessories that resemble items popular on social media but personalized, for example, to harmonise with a birthstone or a particular shade of gold from which other jewelry is made, gives online retailers an undoubted advantage over their bricks and mortar counterparts.
All that glitters is not gold - but effective rendering makes gold gleam
There’s nothing like the ability to scrutinise an object - and if your ecommerce website doesn’t allow your visitors to examine every element of your jewelry they won’t buy. Jewellery retailers in London’s Hatton Garden diamond center still give their customers a jeweller’s loupe to allow them to see into the heart of every diamond they are considering - an online jewelry vendor needs to offer a similar level of detail. It can be a challenge to find a platform that gives as much browsing satisfaction as being able to handle and examine objects, but the search for supportive technology need not be arduous as long as you begin with an understanding that second-rate graphics, rendering and resolutions will lead to a second-rate buyer experience. Investing in the best graphics you can obtain and in technology specifically designed to support jewelry ecommerce will deliver success.
Details like the Shopping Cart Elite Ring Customizer Slideshow allow browsing customers to investigate potential jewelry purchases in previously unimaginable detail. Through easy to use option buttons, they can ‘build their own ring’, choosing settings and carats, sizes and prices in an infinitely adjustable fashion until they have designed the ring that meets the every need. While the jeweler’s loupe lets Hatton Garden customers see what’s in front of them better, SCE allows online customers to create something that doesn’t yet exist, giving fingertip control to the client and ensuring absolute satisfaction when they press the ‘buy’ button.
Jewelry ecommerce - the inventory effect
Perhaps one under-recognized benefit of ecommerce is that inventory control and insurance issues are substantially reduced. This offers three major benefits:
- Lower overheads - without the need to insure stock held on the premises, there’s a huge cost center reduction for the online jeweler.
- Reduced operating capital - for many jewelers finding the capital to outlay on enough of a range to stock to make a good show can be a major limiter to progress, for jewelry ecommerce this isn’t such a problem, as virtual stock allows them to offer an almost unlimited range of stock without requiring capital expenditure that breaks the bank.
- Inventory control - the ability to manage inventory from a virtual standpoint means that much of the guesswork is taken out of running a jewelry outlet; instead of having to estimate what will sell and what won’t, the online jewelry retailer is able to balance income and expenditure based on an unlimited inventory that requires little cash investment from the vendor.