Online retailers have a problem. Search is broken, and much of the available inventory is never found by consumers. In fact, 70 percent of the top 50 grossing US ecommerce sites still require “exact matching” to ensure a product appears in the results.
Today Qubit — the marketing personalization company — has announced at MobileBeat (MB 2017) in San Francisco an exclusive beta program for Aura, an AI-powered solution that is changing how consumers discover the product catalog on mobile devices.
Here’s the problem.
Most mcommerce sites attempt to solve product discovery through search. The intention here is smart: emulate Amazon, which currently owns more than 50 percent of first product searches online. But many consumers don’t know what they are looking for, and inadequate search systems don’t make the problem any easier to solve.
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Instead, Qubit Aura is designed to create an app-like experience that changes the way visitors discover and browse mobile websites. Qubit is demonstrating the product at MB 2017. Felipe Araujo, director of ecommerce at fashion brand Diane von Furstenberg, and Graham Cooke, CEO at Qubit, will be on stage to talk about the challenges and opportunities of product discovery in mobile commerce.
“People are spending more time than ever before discovering products on social networks, but they’re mostly browsing, and not buying,” Cooke said. “Conversely, people go to a mobile store to find a specific product, but they only discover a fraction of the catalog due to the limitations of the screen, site navigation, and search.”
Aura has been designed with a mobile-first approach. AI assists the consumer by presenting predicted category preferences, discovery-led feeds, context messaging on each product, and the capability to surface goods and categories that adapt as the customer engages further.
Aura also pays attention to social messaging and understands the importance of emotional triggers such as urgency. Qubit recently released the results of analyzing two billion user stories, and the results showed clearly that emotional triggers far outperform user interface changes when optimizing the retail experience.
“We have over 30,000 products on our site. Therefore discoverability is a challenge we’re constantly working to improve,” Alex Crawley, chief technology officer at Wolf & Badger, said. “With this mobile personalization solution, Qubit directly addresses the problem, by giving users a personalized selection of products and categories from across our entire product catalog, tailored exactly to the user. We’re already seeing that increases in engagement can impact revenue.”
Qubit Aura will be widely available in the fall of 2017. MB 2017 visitors can see it in action at the event, and access to register interest in the exclusive beta is now open. During the beta period, Qubit will focus on recruiting forward-thinking retail brands.
