by Trevor Nicholson, Guest Blogger, Whym

Every merchant has a puzzle that they’re continuously trying to piece together. 

The first piece is your ad platform. The final piece is your checkout experience. But there is one piece in the middle that often gets kicked under the couch, leaving a huge gap in your puzzle.

That piece is called intent. 

When intent goes uncaptured, your puzzle remains incomplete — and you end up missing out on not only sales, but on valuable data collection that can make or break your future marketing campaigns. 

But how do you capture intent? And once you capture it… what do you do with it? Read on and discover how shopper intent can totally change the game this holiday season. 

Let’s step into the shoes of the shopper. 

Imagine you’re holiday shopping for your friend online and you come across a pair of sneakers you know they’d love. You spend some time on the product page, check out different colors, and even take a screenshot, but you’re not sure what size you need to purchase. Days later, after you’ve confirmed that they are, in fact, a size ten, you can’t remember where you found the shoes in the first place — and the screenshot is lost somewhere amidst photos of your dog.

As a merchant, it’s crucial to have structures in place to not only help shoppers keep track of your products, but also to give you access to indicators of their strong interest — or, rather, their intent-to-buy. When you can see how many times a particular shopper visits a product page, saves an item, or sends it to a friend, a whole new world of marketing opens up. You can personalize ads, send reminders about specific products, create a compelling event by offering a promotion, and even plan your inventory for the rest of the year based upon demand.

But this begs the question… how?  

The key to maximizing sales beyond the holidays is capturing shopper intent. 

People spend tons of time browsing online — but not all of that time is devoted to actually completing the checkout process. The good news is that you can still capitalize on browsing behavior by capturing shopper intent through intent-to-buy aggregators — like Whym. 

One way Whym captures intent for you is through their mutually beneficial Text Me This Item button. With TMTI, shoppers text themselves items that they’re interested in, but aren’t quite ready to buy. That means no more forgotten items for the shopper, and tons of warm leads for you. 

TMTI inundates you with valuable first-party data that you can use to remind shoppers of those items they loved enough to save — and fine-tune your messaging so every text is intentional and unique. With TMTI, and Whym’s other intent-to-buy vehicles, you can prep for the holidays and harness the power of shopper intent to turn 89% of new shoppers into net new buyers. 

This holiday season, give shoppers a Plan B. 

Ahead of the holidays, shoppers will be asking themselves, “To buy, or not to buy?” Intent to buy aggregators like Whym give shoppers a third option — allowing them to save your items for later, and giving you the power to keep them coming back, again and again. 

Ready to change the way you sell? Connect with a Whym representative today to become a partnered seller. Onboarding is simple. The intent you’ll capture speaks for itself. 

Visit Whym to find out more about this new technology.