Imagine that you sell in several markets at once. Some of your categories are a perfect fit for customers in one country but make little sense in another. You also have a group of professional buyers who need to see a range of products that your regular customers don’t. Right now, everyone lands on the same catalog, and everyone has to scroll past things that were never meant for them.
It’s a common situation for growing ecommerce businesses. The catalog grows, the audience diversifies, and suddenly a single, identical storefront for everybody starts to feel like a compromise.
One catalog, many audiences
The more types of customers you serve, the more it pays to think about who should see what. A few typical examples:
- A product line that’s only relevant in specific countries or regions.
- Categories designed for a particular group of customers, like wholesale or professional buyers.
- Products you want to make visible to specific users only.
Showing everything to everyone means visitors spend time filtering out what doesn’t apply to them. Worse, they might find products that aren’t meant for their market or their customer profile at all.
What product targeting does in MagicFront
MagicFront’s product targeting feature lets you, in the platform’s own description, “target the visualization of categories and products by user, user group, country and area.”
In other words, you control the visibility of your categories and products based on four criteria. Let’s look at what each one means for your store.
By user
Say you have a key account, a specific customer you’ve agreed to offer a dedicated selection to. Targeting by user lets you make certain categories or products visible to that individual customer.
By user group
Now picture a store that serves both consumers and businesses. Instead of handling customers one by one, you can group them and decide which categories and products each group sees. Your professional buyers get the catalog that’s relevant to them, and your retail customers get theirs.
By country
Imagine that one of your categories only makes sense in a particular market. Targeting by country lets you show it where it belongs and keep it out of view elsewhere. Customers in each country see a catalog that reflects what you actually offer there.
By area
Sometimes the country level isn’t precise enough. Targeting by area gives you a way to tailor what’s visible for a specific area, so your catalog can follow the shape of your real business, not just national borders.
Why it makes the shopping experience better
When customers only see the categories and products meant for them, the whole store feels more relevant. There’s less noise to wade through, and what’s on the screen is what they can actually consider buying.
For your team, it also means you don’t need separate catalogs for every audience. You keep one catalog and decide how it’s displayed for each user, group, country or area.
Putting it into practice
Before you start configuring product targeting, it’s worth mapping out your audiences:
- Who are your customer groups? Retail, wholesale, partners, VIP customers… list the ones that really need a different view of your catalog.
- Which markets do you serve? Note any categories or products that only apply to certain countries or areas.
- Are there individual exceptions? Some specific customers may need their own selection.
With that map in hand, deciding what each audience should see becomes much more straightforward.
Part of a bigger picture
Product targeting is one of MagicFront’s content management features, alongside tools like page management, banner management and email templates. They all share the same goal: helping you present your store in the way that best fits each customer, without multiplying the work behind the scenes.
Because a catalog that speaks to everyone in the same way often ends up speaking to no one in particular. With product targeting, each customer gets the products that are right for them.