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AI and the curated buying experience, with Alan Gormley of Shopbox
43 Plays2 years ago
Successful e-commerce stores stay relevant to their customers by providing an experience, not just a transaction. UX (user experience) is established as a way of removing friction points during the buying process, but can AI provide a much deeper and meaningful experience for your customers?
In this episode of the untitled SEO podcast we are joined by Alan Gormley, founder of Shopbox. Shopbox claim to be re-defining the online shopping experience, and during this episode Alan explains the technology (and evidence) that backs up that claim.
Alan has developed AI in the context of retailer data intelligence for over twenty years and shares insight into how companies like Netflix have radicalised customer experiences without most of us even noticing. He also explains the technologies that can help drastically reduce CPA and customer retention costs.
We also discuss the maturation of AI and what is holding back the development of similar emerging technologies.
Find out more about Shopbox at https://shopbox.ai
Find Alan on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangormley/
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the SEO, the Untitled SEO Podcast. We are not just about SEO because SEO in isolation doesn't make the world turn, I don't think, anyway. SEO always works its best when it's a collaborative effort and especially when it works with other technologies. And to that end, I have a guest with me today. Honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:00:26
Speaker
I would indeed, and it's nice to be honored. My name is Alan Gormley. I'm the CEO of a company called Shopbox AI. Ah, right. So regular listeners, I can't really say regular listeners, we're only at episode six at the moment, but anyone who's listened to any of the other episodes know that AI is something that just keeps on popping up.
00:00:44
Speaker
So I'm going to say to anybody who's listening now that we're not going to talk about AI in the context of SEO, because, well, at the moment, frankly, I'm sick of hearing about it. There's kind of better, more exciting uses for AI, and this is why I've got Alan along here.
Alan Gormley's AI Experience and Insights
00:01:00
Speaker
So before we get into exactly what Shopbox is, could you just tell me a little bit about your past? I mean, you don't have to go back as far as short trails, but if you think it'll be entertaining, then feel free to.
00:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, so where I come from is a bit about...
00:01:18
Speaker
25 years in the AI industry so most people would say it only kind of popped into existence about five or ten years ago it's been around a long time and even the techniques have been around a long time but I was working for an insurance company actually in Croydon and I had a choice of doing Y2K project or a data project so I said Y2K sounds like a lot of hard work so in I went to data and I haven't come out since really really enjoyed it and then
00:01:48
Speaker
I then went from working on the front line to reworking with Avengers, so the largest AI software company globally, a company called SAS out of, not SAP as everybody thought it was, out of North Carolina, a very, very large company, about three and a half billion in AI software every year.
00:02:08
Speaker
and worked for them for quite a few years, building up practices around areas that were really starting to take off. So things like customer experience, retail was a big, big push for us. But I was also working across financial services and telco. And then I kind of went on a journey where one of the big problems I always had with AI was at the time it was only used by very large companies. And I just felt that there was no trickle down effect happening.
00:02:36
Speaker
And I got very interested in the idea of taking AI, which was big and complex back in those days and trying to make it as easy as possible. And that's kind of led me to where I am
Demystifying AI: Algorithms vs. Systematic Approaches
00:02:45
Speaker
here. So it's taken me about five years to kind of get to this point from there, but it's been a bit of a journey along the way. Yeah. It's kind of funny to think of AI as something that did exist 20 or years ago, but I think in various forms,
00:02:58
Speaker
There's always been an element of it. I think that without getting too deep into it, I think that how people define AI is still really fuzzy. And I see some people kind of talking about AI functions, what they call AI functions that aren't, they're just database lookups. There's no sort of added intelligence on it. So do you have a handy sort of elevator pitch for what you see AI as being?
00:03:23
Speaker
Oh, that's a really tough one. Maybe not elevator. Let me go slightly deeper than elevator then. Escalator. So when somebody says to me, we have an algorithm, I kind of go, that's nice. You know, it's kind of at that level. AI is really a very systematic approach. So it's using a lot of different algorithms generally,
00:03:51
Speaker
all of them are good at different things, and trying to blend those together to try and get a view of the whole. So when we're interested in understanding a customer, we need to understand what they're currently interested in. We need to understand what they've vaguely shown interest in in the past, because they're not just today. The customer is about more than today, and they wear different hats. And even if we look at something like price sensitivity,
00:04:17
Speaker
I tend not to agree with pretty much anything i hear my industry say because i feel it's too high level so people say these customers price sensitive go. There's no such thing as a price sensitive customer somebody who was prepared to pay a lot of money for particular things.
00:04:33
Speaker
and not prepared to pay a lot of money for other things. So all of us tend to spend way too much money on our hobbies. And then we walk into a supermarket and decide we're not paying more than 59 pence for a can of beans. So price sensitivity to me depends on the context. So AI is trying to get under the covers of all of that at the same time. And the thing that I think a lot of people miss on AI is
00:04:55
Speaker
It's not deterministic. It's not saying, this is this person. It's saying, this is the shape of this person. It's a bit vaguer than the absolutes.
Understanding Personalized Customer Experience
00:05:06
Speaker
So I always say, my job is never to find what a customer is looking for. My job is to help them go on a journey. And the more you understand them, the more you can allow them to stumble across interesting things rather than trying to take them straight to a conclusion. And what you find is, especially with what we do because we're in retail,
00:05:26
Speaker
My job is not to find that perfect product. My job is to say, there's loads of possibilities here, but I know vaguely that these are the things that you're going to be interested in. And as we go through that journey, it gets better and better, but it's really up to the customer what they want. So there's a very long window way saying AI is quite vague, but it's trying to understand many, many different aspects of the subject. It's looking at any one time rather than just predict something.
00:05:49
Speaker
I think for context, I think this should be a good time for you to explain what Shopbox.ai is, because otherwise we're going to keep coming back. So let's just get it out there so that we can get some context on this. So to give people a visual, if you think about the Amazon homepage or the Netflix homepage, I actually tend to look more at Netflix than Amazon and TikTok rather than Amazon, but Amazon is in our industry, so it's a good context to have.
00:06:17
Speaker
If you think about that versus another store, any other store is pretty much generic. You land on a homepage, you see a banner ad, you go into product listing pages, they're always the same. They always have way too many products that aren't for me and yada, yada. If you go into Amazon, that homepage actually gives complete context to the customer.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it's quite clever. Some people say to me, well, it's not 100% accurate. Think about what they're doing. They're taking tens of millions of products across hundreds of millions of customers in real time and saying, here's 30 things that are interesting for you.
00:06:50
Speaker
That's a hugely complex problem to solve. And that's effectively what we're trying to do. So if I give you a couple of examples of things we do in Shopbox that are very different to what everybody else does, one thing is when people land on a site for the very first time, they're presented with too many products. They tend to land on product listing pages. And we don't know why they're there. We don't know what to put in front of them. So we all spend many, many hours in meeting rooms trying to figure out how to lay it out. We said, actually, there is no way of knowing.
00:07:18
Speaker
What you do is you give what we have as an AI shop assistant, which allows somebody when they see a product to shop by examples and say, well, I like that. And it shows it pops up and says, here's some other stuff that you might be interested in. So we're trying to do stuff in flow when the customer is working rather than take them off to different parts of the website and second guess them. So we always have the feeling that we're like a shop assistant in the store.
00:07:41
Speaker
But the latest thing we've just launched, which I'm really, really proud of, this makes me very happy because when I think about what we were, what we originally thought about around Shopbox, the whole concept was
00:07:54
Speaker
What if every customer owned part of your store? Wouldn't that be a beautiful thing? Can you imagine if every customer, you had a million customers and everyone landed and felt, this is my store. They have other stuff, but this is my store. It's a big fight on any website. The reason I'm fascinated by this is from an SEO perspective where we tend to fall into the trap of trying to drive people towards a page that can answer their problems.
00:08:21
Speaker
outside of the e-commerce context, you can be leading people into a dead end by doing that. Sorry to interrupt you, but I'm not really trying to keep it on SEO. I'm just sort of trying to think of it in my language.
00:08:38
Speaker
So you're talking about whoever lands on the site, within not very much time, they have that kind of light bulb head, that light bulb ping that says, I'm in the right place. These people can solve my needs, as it were. And Andrew, I see these two things work really well together. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to say, we're about the customer. So within one product view, sometimes the customer wanted to be two or three. It depends a lot on the sector.
00:09:08
Speaker
We pull together loads of stuff suddenly from the catalog and say, this is all stuff you'd be interested in. So we have this personal shopping page, which works for every customer, anonymous or known. It makes no difference to us. Where we can say, here's some stuff that's on sale that fits you and is relevant for you. Okay. Because most sale pages, you can't find anything relevant that fits you. Okay. It's a terrible experience. Here's stuff that we just put on the catalog. So it's bright and shiny and new, and it has higher margin and it's for you.
00:09:36
Speaker
Okay, so everything is about the customer. And I see it kind of like a Venn diagram where half the site should be about the customer and the other half of the site should be the rest of the store. So if there's something that is relevant to me, I should be able to see it, but I should be able to wander anywhere I want in the store. And the beauty of that is on one side,
00:09:57
Speaker
you're showing people everything you can do for them. And on the other side, you're trying to be really specific. So you try and get both sides of the customer. Sometimes they're doing stuff in context for themselves. Sometimes they're buying a present for somebody and it's nothing to do
Shopbox AI's Retail Focus and Strategy
00:10:12
Speaker
with them. So you're kind of capturing them both sides. That's why I see SEO and what we do working perfectly together because they're two sides of the things people are trying to do in a store.
00:10:25
Speaker
You're absolutely right and I'm sort of interested in whether this kind of system would work outside of e-com. Just because it's such a big thing in SEO to understand what it is people want, not only is it marketing 101, make people feel that they're in the right place to get what they want,
00:10:49
Speaker
But we do that with a lot of keyword research. But the issue sometimes for keyword research or the challenge, I should say, is having to learn what it is people actually want. There's a lot of assumptions, even if keyword research is really, really, really, really good. The starting point is based on a lot of assumptions. And then the learning process from that point onwards can be
00:11:11
Speaker
quite slow. So, you know, anyone who's looking at the video for this, I just keep holding my head and it's making my brain hurt a bit because I don't understand. You don't have to tell me exactly how it works, but I don't understand how within a very short period of time, and you've demonstrated this to me, so listeners, I have seen this in action, how within a very short period of time you
00:11:37
Speaker
adapt the UX, the user experience to make people feel that they're in the right place. I mean, where does the information come from? So we won't go into the secret sauce because most of the secret sauce. But the reality is, let me just wind back to something you said at the very start there around the application outside of e-commerce. So
00:12:02
Speaker
I come from many different industries. I've been in everything from travel to retail to financial services and yada yada. When I was looking at Shopbox and what I really wanted to achieve with it, I made a very early decision I would only work in one industry because I wanted and I didn't want to be a generic technology. I wanted to be something where the brain itself at the center of the thing actually knew about the industry.
00:12:27
Speaker
And so it would be really easy for us to take this and transplant it into travel. That would be trivial, to be honest. But I don't want to do that. Because if we do that, we'll end up with a generic technology that kind of works most of the time, but actually misses all the nuances that are really interesting for customers.
00:12:43
Speaker
I genuinely think that's one of the biggest challenges in AI being sold to business owners or anybody involved in marketing is that a lot of AI is sold as here's this really broad thing. What do you ask of it? And it's a bit like anything like Google Analytics. Well, it's going to tell you some things, but the real skill is knowing
00:13:02
Speaker
knowing your industry and knowing what it does. I've not really identified that you've chosen a kind of a vertical there with e-commerce. Okay, I'll let you carry on.
Challenges and Strategies for AI in Retail
00:13:14
Speaker
Well, actually, so you bring me on to something there that's really important.
00:13:20
Speaker
What Gartner used to always have this statistic, which was 82% of AI projects all fail. And by the way, it never changed from 82%. So I don't know how the world can progress and the percentage is saying the same. I suspect Gartner aren't doing a huge amount of research. I think they're just reusing the same thing. But anyway, my opinion about Gartner is not going to make anyone happy.
00:13:42
Speaker
But here's the thing, I didn't agree with any word they said. What I would say is 82% deliver mediocrity. To deliver something that's not bad, but it could be so much better. Because what you were saying there were often what's happening is the technology industry is trying to deliver generic technology to everyone. It's up then to the customer to figure out how to make it work.
00:14:05
Speaker
Well, there aren't enough data scientists in the world to go around. And by the way, very few of them know anything about retail. And if you don't know your industry and how it works, and what your merchandisers and your buyers are trying to accomplish, your AI is actually going to work against your business. Okay, so a great example I always use is
00:14:24
Speaker
Retail, for most retailers, not for everyone, but for most retailers, the most important product they have is the ones they're launching. Because they're the ones that are still high margin. If they can get them moving, they don't become long tail. If they can't get them moving, they become long tail and they're discounting. Okay, so getting those products moving very quickly is really, really important to retailers. Here's the problem with AI.
00:14:48
Speaker
it needs historical data. So they're always too late to the party. It's always, your data scientists are nearly working against you as a business all the time because, well, you know, it says that your customers want your best sellers. And of course they do. That's all they're seeing because you haven't put the right products in front of them. So we've really had to twist the whole thing around and say, this is about retail. What's important in retail are these things. Therefore,
00:15:13
Speaker
whether AI is the right approach or psychology is the right approach or a combination of both is the right approach and what we use in AI, all that has to change to make sure that it works for the retailer. So we kind of threw out the rule book, which was quite scary, but it turns out it's quite a lot of fun and it does much better for a retailer. You do strike me as the kind of person who's, if somebody, when you're at school said you were being disruptive, you'd probably say, thank you.
00:15:42
Speaker
I was very, very good schoolboy and thank you very much, I'm sure. It makes total sense that you stick.
00:15:51
Speaker
you stick with with with a specific area for any kind of successful AI because it's the aggrandizement or the enrichment of the data and the decisions that is where the real magic is as I understand it. I mean, I'm trying to say things I know might not be entirely right so you can you can kind of know what I did. But you're right. I give you a couple of examples. We have
00:16:19
Speaker
If we look at something like luxury, so the first time we did, it was a really interesting project. Our stuff is just switched on. There's no real projects. But the first time we did a retailer that did luxury goods, it was secondhand luxury goods. Now, I heard secondhand when I talked to them. By the way, secondhand is a £30,000
00:16:41
Speaker
Handbag okay so i think it's more specialist rather than
The Genesis of Shopbox AI and Its Mission
00:16:46
Speaker
second hand you know it's like people by the chanel handbag that's so-and-so in the movie wrote and brought to the Oscars in nineteen fifty six it's that second time okay but it's really interesting problem when i got one of every skill.
00:17:01
Speaker
is that's the first problem. There is nothing to learn. You sell it once, it's gone. The second really interesting thing for me was when the guys who run the company said, look, there's no such thing as brand here. There's combinations of brands that work differently than most people think out there. So Aguchi and Prada are much closer together than they are to a Chanel or Hermes.
00:17:26
Speaker
So you've got to try and figure out how you keep people in a group of products rather than in a brand. And that became a really interesting problem for us. We solved that problem. Once we solved that problem, we could then transplant that anywhere in retail. So the next one that came along was actually a pet food store.
00:17:45
Speaker
It was the same problem, but the difference is I want to sell very expensive pet foods that's full 100% meat versus own brand versus all that stuff in the middle between. So it was exactly the same thing. There's an elasticity for how much people will move away from their brand. Figured out in luxury, we used to sell dog food.
00:18:01
Speaker
And I know our industry likes the phrase dogfooding, so that's the ultimate in dogfooding where you actually have dogfood. I've not heard that. What does the phrase dogfooding mean? Dogfooding is where you use your own products. Okay. You should probably do it.
00:18:21
Speaker
Dogfooding, I'm making a note of that. This is how I learn. Right, so I'm seeing this. I'm seeing what I guess is never a complete product. I mean, never a finished product. You're not putting something, you're not building a box and then giving somebody a box.
00:18:36
Speaker
That makes sense, but I'm really interested in how far you've come in an industry that is still kind of the Wild West. I mean, SEO is the same. We're in industries that aren't, they're not even a quarter of a century old yet. So at what point in your journey did you kind of decide, and hang on, I need to make something here. You mentioned that you saw people doing it wrong, but at what point did you think, that's it, I'm doing it?
00:19:06
Speaker
That's really interesting. This has been coming up a lot in the last month because we're at a very interesting inflection point in the business.
00:19:15
Speaker
I went out to work for a startup where we took it from a travel company into, and I went in as a chief analytics officer, and over a couple of years, we turned it into an AI company more than a travel company. But I didn't feel we were gonna get where I wanted to get, so I started looking for more, for somebody where I thought they were gonna do something really cool with AI, and not just one very simple thing, but actually take a very broad view of we can help companies in many, many different ways.
00:19:43
Speaker
So I went out looking and I wasn't finding anything, but I pulled my CV together and then I went to talk to a friend of mine who has been head of sales for quite a few startups, kind of usually takes them from the one million to 10 million. That kind of range is where he tends to have a lot of fun. And after half an hour of talking, he said, Alan, if you can't find a company that does what you want to do, it's time to set one up. Burn your CV, put together a business plan and come back to me in a month.
00:20:12
Speaker
So which is what I did. And I think it was probably there in the back of my head, but I just needed somebody to tell me. And I meet him for drinks every so often and curse him.
00:20:29
Speaker
Thanks for that. Yeah, I didn't think I'd be working 16 hour days. So this is I'm surprised a lot of this is kind of me a lot of these questions are me being challenged by brain being challenged by what you're doing because it's not a world I know very well, but it's one that I think we all need to become aware of because if we
00:20:51
Speaker
I'm using the whole universe as we here. If we are ignorant of AI or reject it or think it's a flash in the pan or don't take it seriously, I think we're in danger or businesses are in danger of getting left behind, but by quite a long way and a lot quicker than they think. So, I mean, what's your opinion on the adoption
00:21:15
Speaker
So you've just thrown a hobby horse my direction. So I'll just sit back and let you talk. I'll sit back and sit back. Might get a coffee or something. So one of the fundamentals for me was Shopbox has got to take away all barriers. And I mean all barriers. So when I looked at retailers back in the day, I said there's such a huge disparity between somebody like Amazon and nearly everybody else that
00:21:45
Speaker
It requires very sophisticated skills. Often they're not trained in retail, so they don't quite know what they're doing. They sound like they've got big brains, but they don't know retail. And you have to know retail to be better at retail, full stop. The cost of getting started is ridiculous. The risk involved is ridiculous.
00:22:05
Speaker
And these guys can pull your systems apart, put them all back together again and break half them along the way. You know, they cause a lot of disruption often because they need, they're so data consumption focused. Okay. So we threw all that in the bin and we said, we're going to start and we have to get something where anybody can use it. They don't need to understand it. They just need to understand
00:22:26
Speaker
What the consumer does, which is, Oh, I get it. That makes sense to me. That makes it easier for me to shop. I can see why I'm getting it. It's the classic features versus benefits thing. Yeah. Yeah. So like when I show, when I show it to customers or to prospects, we just show them a few customers. So here's a few stores that it runs on.
00:22:46
Speaker
There is a back end, but it's like two minutes work for somebody to do the stuff on the back end. We don't want people to be micromanaging the AI. We want to switch it on and let it do its job and give uplift. And then they can get on with their day job, which is making sure they have the right products on shelves that are photographed well, that are described well, that are priced well. That's what they should be doing. And we just sit on top of that. So taking away those barriers is massive for me.
Enhancing Customer Journeys and Experiences
00:23:11
Speaker
You know, when I think the first site we did, it took us three weeks to get it up and running. We then did one in two, in three days. And Tarek, my co-founder said, no, no, there's three hours. We, we signed somebody on Tuesday and they were running yesterday. So that's, that's two days, two days. Yeah.
00:23:29
Speaker
So yeah, it's a snap in. I mean, the challenge I can see for you is that the best technology in this area that I've ever seen looks incredibly simple, even to put into place. So I'm guessing the AI is the huge muscle.
00:23:48
Speaker
Yeah it is but I think we've also spent, like you've seen what we do, we spent a lot of time thinking about how people shop. So for me AI is this thing under the covers that enables other stuff but what we're actually trying to do is help people through friction points or help people at points where they've come quite shallowly into, they've just dipped their toe into the store and they're in danger of leaving.
00:24:13
Speaker
You can't let them leave. You just paid seven, eight, nine dollars or pounds or euros to get them in. Don't let them out. You got to get them deeper. So for us, it's all about those points along the shopping journey. And how do we make sure that they work better? And we're very focused on service. So what service for our own customers? But really, we want our customers to have a better service in their stores. So people don't feel they're being salted. They feel like, oh, I didn't think of that. Oh, what about this?
00:24:38
Speaker
That's a nice feeling. That's a feeling that you come back to and you stay with that retailer. Whereas we all know the retailers where they pop up at you and at some point you just say, I've had enough of this and leave forever. I think it's one of the most damaging things for the way the internet and the web are perceived by mankind at the moment. I always think stand-up comedians are an interesting litmus on how the world feels about the internet and other things.
00:25:07
Speaker
And there's two things that stand up comedians complain about is adverts that mean nothing to them. Well, they complain about adverts on websites. And when you drill down into it, they're not offended that the adverts exist. They're offended that they're not relevant to them. So, you know, it's the classic.
00:25:22
Speaker
Why am I seeing divorce lawyers when I'm looking at banger racing websites or that kind of thing? Although you might have to have a difficult conversation in your household if that's the case. But on the other end of the scale, people are also offended sometimes if they see adverts that are hyper relevant to them, really relevant. I mean, my parents are doing this at the moment. There's a garage, they live in a village and there's a
00:25:48
Speaker
a garage, it's the only garage for miles that sells cars and they're like, well, we were talking about our car the other day and now we're seeing adverts for this car garage. And I said, no, you're seeing those not because your television is listening to you, you're seeing those because you are
00:26:04
Speaker
age 70 to 85, you have expendable income, you've bought from them in the past, you live in this specific area and the list of targeting things gets really, really long. So where do you see kind of Shopbox sitting in between the uncanny valley of
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, like I think I've always had this thing in the end. I don't really say it out loud to retailers, but I used to a lot at the start where say, I want your customers to know you're listening, not watching. What a right. I'm writing that one down. But I don't I.
00:26:42
Speaker
There's next to nobody out there who gets upset by being well targeted. And I'll come back to Netflix. One thing I always think about Netflix, Netflix is a really interesting company in many different ways, but the thing that I think is most interesting about them is there's two major behaviors that they've changed and nobody even knows they've changed them. So number one is, and when all your listeners think about this, how often do you go onto Netflix and go up to the top right-hand side of the browser straight away to type something in?
00:27:13
Speaker
Almost never. Exactly. How much do you do that in stores all the time? So Netflix have made the entire experience curated. They've said curation first and choice second. That's really interesting. To the extent that we all spend, we're all probably going to spend Friday night flicking around for two hours going, what am I going to watch? But they've made curation important. Now for me, that's not our ultimate goal, but the more we're curating
00:27:41
Speaker
the more we're helping customers. So for me, that becomes really important. Yes, they should search when they know what they want, and for some other reasons, but in general, they should come back and say, that's interesting, that's interesting. Okay, because shopping is an experience, it's not a transaction. Okay, vast majority of stuff we have in our homes, we don't need. Okay, so it is not a transaction, it is an experience in most cases. The other thing that Netflix have done, and this we spend all day, every day thinking about is,
00:28:12
Speaker
And this is different for Amazon. Amazon were around before Google commercialized. Netflix were not. So when Netflix decided that they were going to go 100% streaming, Google already owned the customer. They already control the vast majority of the traffic on the internet. So when you were looking for something, you went to Google, you typed it in, you went to the site, and then you left the site and went to a competitor site.
00:28:37
Speaker
Netflix looked at that and went, we have a choice. We can be a content company or we can be an experience company. So as a content company, you go to Google and you type, I want to see this movie and Netflix gives you a link for the movie, but you never spend any time on Netflix. That is what most retailers have on Google. Netflix went, no way. There is no way that we are going to pay Google for that traffic over and over and over again. There is no way we're going to allow ourselves to be in a competitive environment at that level.
00:29:04
Speaker
So they said, no, we're going to do it. So you type Netflix, but you don't type the name of the movie. You just type Netflix. You come to us and then the experience is you for two hours inside Netflix, not you for two hours in Google and five minutes in Netflix. And I think that's very clever. Nobody really thinks about Netflix that way. And it didn't happen because they had the brand. It happened because they worked very, very hard to make it
Building Customer Loyalty and Reducing External Dependence
00:29:27
Speaker
happen.
00:29:27
Speaker
And it's a lot of what we're trying to bring to our retailers is once we get them in the store, keep them in there, make it a nicer place to be than Google. The penny has completely dropped now. I've been sort of dancing around it playing the podcast host thing, but you've summarized it entirely. So you're improving the experience so that you don't have to continually be reliable on
00:29:54
Speaker
We always say search engines, but Google. It gives you more freedom. So if you give your online store users an experience rather than a transaction, then they are far more likely to start their next shopping journey by going directly to your website rather than searching and clicking on a Google ad that costs anything.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah. And there's a few words that I think as an industry we've really rendered meaningless because they mean different things to everyone because we talk about them so much. And one of them is experience. And experience for me is really important because to me, experience is about how are you helping me to a large degree.
00:30:43
Speaker
Whereas there's loads of people out there that say, well, the customer experience on our site is excellent. And it probably is because most sites really are excellent these days. But if you're a fashion retailer, have a look at your five closest competitors. I can guarantee you all of them are black on white. All of them are very large images. They might be smaller images, by the way, in two years time. And once one moves, all of you will move. And that's the problem is we've got to look like a fashion site. So how do we differentiate? We only differentiate through how we sell and how we service.
00:31:14
Speaker
That's where we come in. So experience for me is it's not the look and feel necessarily. That's a very important part of it. But the problem is it's nearly impossible to compete there. It's how do you service somebody when they're inside your store?
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah. Ask not what your e-commerce visitors can do for you. Ask what you can do for them. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a wonderful summary and it's all right with you. I'm going to leave it there. But I was going to give you the opportunity. I always like to try and give guests the opportunity to have a few minutes just to say exactly what they want to say. But you've been a very erudite and explained a lot of quite complex
00:31:55
Speaker
topics and themes in a very clear way. So I really appreciate your time for that. But is there anything else you'd like to add? No, I really think it's, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk. And I think there's so much to accomplish now in e-commerce. E-commerce has been squeezed an awful lot. And I think we're starting to see a bit of an inflection point where the ones that have
00:32:24
Speaker
kind of the tourists who turned up and said, you know what, I got an offline store, I'll just throw everything up online. They're kind of disappearing again now. But the real opportunity now is to start to focus on how do we grow customers. And what's really interesting for me is this year, because of third party cookies, people have got much more focused on how do I grow my own customer base by myself instead of paying Google all the time to bring them back.
00:32:48
Speaker
I think that's a really important behavior change in retailers. That helps us, by the way. It's good for us. And also, we can help people do that. But for me, people have to really get on top of the fact that the customer walked through the door.
Closing Thoughts on E-commerce and AI's Future
00:33:04
Speaker
You now have to take ownership of that forever. And if you grow those customers, you will do very well. If you just turn through them and try and attract more all the time and just do that, you won't. You've got to balance those two things really well.
00:33:18
Speaker
So they go AI as a way of reducing cost per acquisition. Fantastic. Absolutely. So I'm going to make a note of that.
00:33:27
Speaker
Yeah, you still need to keep spending the money, but let's spend it on attracting new customers and dormant customers rather than ones that were already engaged. We keep them engaged. You make sure they get there in the first place. It's a customer experience. Put it in other languages, customer experience. Not that one, customer relationship, customer service.
00:33:51
Speaker
It's like the AI equivalent of the old-fashioned shops we walked in and someone said, hello Jim, you're usual. That's kind of basically where we want to be. It's very true. I spend more of my time thinking about physical stores and how we behave there and trying to bring that online than I do looking at e-commerce stores because to be honest, the physical stores are where we learned how to retail and they're still ahead in the way they treat customers.
00:34:17
Speaker
Right, brilliant. Okay, listeners, if you've got an e-com store, I very much recommend you have a look at Shopbox AI. The link will be in the show notes. So Alan, it only remains for me to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye? Goodbye, Andrew, and thank you very much for having me on.