Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) discuss product details pages and how they can dymanically change based on customer selection.

Part 4 of a 5-part series (Return to Part 3)

RON: Chris, I want you to talk about a little bit about the attributes, how they can be dependent and non-dependent, and dynamic content. Because dynamic content is something we obviously specialize in and that can be customer-specific. It can be buyer group-specific, membership specific. It could be what day of the week it is. There's a hundred things it can be. I mean, that's kind of the definition of dynamic. 

But I'd love you to go into the technicality of what dynamic content provides and some of the capabilities you can have. 

CHRIS: Absolutely. Thanks, Ron. This one's really interesting because many buying groups offer different product lines and different categories within their niche offerings. And a lot of buying groups are either an industry or a niche, or multiple niche focus areas, but there tends to be some specialization that drives that buying group.  

This can be a logistical challenge within the technical implementation of the site, depending on what kind of platform you're using. Let's just take an example to make it more concrete: A group that sells kitchen supplies and kitchen equipment for franchises. They all need certain kitchen equipment and kitchen supplies. Well, the product detail page for a basic set of, let's say, mixing bowls is probably not going to be as sophisticated as the product details page for a very nice commercial-grade oven that is going to be purchased.

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CHRIS: There may be specific measurements that need to be input into each of the product details for the ovens that will be purchased. And there may be certain variances of add-ons that can be purchased with the kitchen equipment, the oven, for example. Whereas the mixing bowl may just be a simple add to cart, like, do you want this or not? And you know, one of the things that we see a lot of is, we will create a really nice dynamically generated grid that shows some of the variance and allows the user to compare the measurements and maybe some of the performance attributes. This can load dynamically based on it being a certain type of product. So the end-user can literally see a really nice kind of table view of the key data points of ovens and some of their variance. 

Another example that we see a lot of is the idea, that, whenever someone selects a certain item, they may also need to purchase another associated item or we can recommend one. These are some details that are really important for purchaing group, because if you think about it, you're going to have buyers who are making substantial purchases. A lot of them are very sophisticated, but we want to provide a lot of value to them. 

So when someone chooses certain product types, we want to show them the right information, keep it very simple where possible, but provide them with the full depth of detail, a really nice table, maybe some of the variance, maybe details around each of those variations, etc. 

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CHRIS: For any product, if they purchase something that has an associated item, or they're looking to add an item to their cart that has an associated item, we probably want to go ahead and show the nuances of that so that the user gets that recommendation from us as a buying group. We want to have an opinionated presentation on that product detail page, and that's probably where a lot of people are going to wrap up their research and turn it into a purchase. We want to make sure that they have it at their fingertips that these are commonly associated purchases with this item. 

And again, if they choose a variation—they're trying to pick which oven and they choose a variation of an oven type—we probably want to show them details about, “Make sure you make these measurements.” We could present dynamically on that. “These are the measurements that you need to make sure are available. This spot needs to be available within the kitchen and make sure you leave these tolerances and make sure you read this guide that talks about the electrical requirements. It's a 220 line instead of a 110,” for example.  

Those are some of the situations where the dynamic data on a group buying platform can be really powerful. We can adapt the page, adapt the presentation, and pull in data dynamically based on what the users look at. 

RON: One that we've done recently that I demo from quite often has all of the different government regulations that apply to them. They'll be going in looking for things, and go, “This has to be both FDA compliant and NIST compliant.” So they'll have to go in, and the equipment or the software has to be compliant or whatever. So, compliance is certainly one, temperature requirements is certainly one, chemical resistance and stuff is one that we've dealt a lot with. We do a lot of chemical companies and deal with hazmat and shipping across state lines.  

There's definitely a lot of dynamic things as you go and add things to your buyers group cart. And again, like I said, we'll talk about hard and soft stops in another chapter, but specific hard and soft stops or potentially specific HAZMAT requirements. “It's okay if you buy this, but as soon as you put the shipping across state lines, that automatically triggers something.” And it would be nice not to have that as this price during checkout, right? That's easy to do during checkout. 

Is there any way to know when I'm looking at the details of this chemical, are there any shipping restrictions? It would be nice to be able to research that while I'm on the product details page, rather than be surprised when I go through the whole thing, finish my shopping, go to check out, and then find out that I can't do it right. So I love that about the dynamic content.  

Continue to Part 5 to discover the role permissions play with product detail pages.