August 5, 2025 • 33 mins
Shopping online can feel like navigating endless aisles of irrelevant products, leaving customers frustrated and retailers losing sales. In this insightful episode of The Retail Podcast, host Alex speaks with Warren Cowan, CEO of Foundit, about how retailers can transform customer frustration into powerful intent-driven experiences.
Explore why traditional e-commerce fails to inspire, and discover practical strategies for surfacing relevant products at precisely the right moments. Warren shares real-world insights on how retailers can avoid overwhelming shoppers with excessive choices, reduce decision fatigue, and unlock hidden sales opportunities buried in their “dark aisles.”
You’ll learn:
The biggest frustrations online shoppers face—and how to address them.
Why a “catalog-first” mindset is holding back your e-commerce growth.
How retailers like Aldi and Lidl succeed by simplifying customer decisions.
Practical tips to shift toward customer intent-led experiences.
The role AI and automation play in future-proofing your e-commerce site.
Why traditional personalization often falls short, and what to do instead.
Join Warren Cowan and Alex as they discuss real-world successes from Foundit’s clients, including increased conversions, reduced bounce rates, and significant merchandising efficiencies. It’s time to trade frustration for inspiration and transform browsing into buying.
Featuring Warren Cowan, CEO of Foundit.
Key topics: E-commerce, customer intent, merchandising automation, retail tech, personalization, digital transformation, AI in retail, customer experience, decision fatigue, online shopping trends.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
It's got to be relevant. Relevant to you individually
specifically right now, or relevant generally enough so you
can work with this and explore it in a way that's meaningful of
patches how you want to shop now.
Can I make that better if I havea bit more personalised
information? Sometimes no, sometimes yes.
(00:28):
Hello and welcome to the Retail Podcast.
Now I remember giving a talk on this subject.
We were expressing our frustrations in the e-commerce
world between how difficult can it be to get this right?
And when I came across who we'regoing to meet in a minute.
Found it I thought would be super interesting to at least
(00:48):
let's let's listen to someone who is solving this problem and
look at, you know, have we got it wrong?
Is there things that we should be doing that we're not doing?
And Warren, before we get into what the problem is, obviously
your CEO found maybe the the thegiveaway is in the title.
I don't. Say founder sometimes because
(01:09):
you founder founder, you know it's too much alliteration for
people to handle sometimes. Yeah, luckily I I should be able
to go over. So CEO and founder of found it.
So what? Why don't you tell us how you
got to found it before we dive into what the problem is and how
you guys solve it? Yeah, because what do you know?
It was funny. You said how difficult things
are. Why are they still so difficult?
(01:30):
There's problems that I've been seeing for 15 years that
everyone's been expecting to just disappear and see them
every day. Yeah.
If I, if I just sort of give youmaybe a potted history, I, I
spent 20 years running an agency, a digital marketing
agency. Halfway through that journey, we
decided I think sites would be alot better if we built them the
(01:50):
way we tended to use them ratherthan just standing them up
out-of-the-box. So we ended up becoming systems
integrated and started building e-commerce sites on hybrids and
Salesforce demand as it was backthen and different platforms.
So we started to get much more into into depth with trading
operations and what it was like to actually run, manage and
actually sell online, you know, and, and help the business
(02:12):
actually trade. And then into sort of the
background of that, we were developing a lot of technology
to try and automate things, you know, try to understand what it
was customers were looking for, you know, how that might feel
into inside analytics. We were working with, actually
working with a company called Maplin.
I'm sure some of your some of your viewers will remember them
fondly. Absolutely.
(02:32):
Yeah. This is the earlier generation.
Maplin disappeared from High Street and resurfaced under a
new prat. So this is pretty that sort of,
you know, same thing that might relate to the current team and
its business. But let's see, see you at the
time. He, he, he was very close to
customers and he would get theiremails.
He would read customer emails, customers e-mail him directly to
how they got his e-mail. But but people would have always
(02:54):
listened to that and he'd read the exit survey data and the
thing you would always hear the most other than it's too
expensive or stop asking me feedback information was always,
I can't find what I'm looking for on the site.
And that seems to be like the biggest frustration point.
And that's kind of was a also like an epiphany.
I spent a lot of time trying to help people get their websites
found on Google. So when people were searching on
(03:15):
Google, they could or whatever it was they were using would
find the website. And this is a problem on the
site as well. And it was kind of a sort of a
milestone, if you like it, growing of awareness that it is
hard, it is kind of clunky. And and we've been doing this
for ages. You think you think e-commerce
would have moved on since the interface of e-commerce?
It's kind of been the same way since about 2006.
(03:38):
And you know, we've got the search bar, the grid, it's the
fastest. It's kind of that, that
structure, you know, it's a goodstructure, everyone understands
it, it's logical, but it's quitedifficult to to navigate and
search and browse. And as customers get, as retails
get bigger and bigger admin products, it, the site's just
become harder to navigate, harder to perhaps it becomes
(03:58):
harder to find what you want. Think somewhere you said that
shopping has become boring and uninspiring.
In your experience, what do you think the one reason for that
is? And what's the trap that
retailers fall into, maybe? I'll frame it in, in some
feedback I actually got from an e-commerce director.
And, and this was their ironically, this was their
(04:20):
experience of them shopping on their website.
And, and she said, I spent an hour on the site, came away
empty handed, only wanted a pot paint.
And that's if she was talking about her own website.
And you think, wow, yeah. And there is this common theme
thread where I think we all knowit's hard.
We all know it's difficult. We all know it's and people seem
just powerless to do anything about it.
And I think if you look at what what's happened in terms of the
(04:42):
evolution of the customer and the evolution of, of, of, of
e-commerce, they've moved at very different paces and speeds
in, in different ways. So if you look at the customer
nowadays, customers want everything to work like Netflix,
right? You know, I sit down, my telly
can sort of understand what I want, work out how to, you know,
give me the things that I want. Facebook, Amazon, these, these
everyday platforms have almost dictated the way the, you know,
(05:06):
today shoppers expect to, to, tohave their experience today.
So they've become the time, the time pool.
They're impatient. They're more likely to be on
Insta or Google looking for a product and then discover a
retailer than they are to be on a retailer and then discover a
product. So all these changes are
happening. If you look at retail websites
and what have we been doing in e-commerce for the last 10-15
(05:28):
years and it's really what we'vebeen, what we've been doing is
focusing on acquisition and traffic supremacy and increasing
range size, you know, range expansion, let's go marketplace,
let's have more products, let's add new categories, let's make
it bigger and bigger and bigger under the hood.
But fundamentally, that experience isn't really
changing. And so you have customers now
(05:51):
coming into into into retail websites.
They've landed on Google, they land on the product page and
they're going kind of interesting.
And it's like, I kind of want something like that, but I don't
think I want to try and work outdecode your site at the moment,
work out how it works. I'll go back to Google and it's
easier to do that. So the the path of this
resistance for customers being able to find and discover on
(06:12):
platforms that aren't retailers is is actually far exceeded.
They're going to do it on retailwebsites.
So when they're on sites, it's it's kind of transactional.
You know, there's the mega, there's your category.
We've got 2000 sandals. Do you want black ones?
Do you want gold ones? Do you want strap your own?
I'm going on holiday and I want something nice to step out.
(06:35):
Can you help me? And, and that that's not really
how websites work or unless the,you know, you have merchandisers
and they kind of perceive these things and they create edits,
but that that band, it's always really, really limited.
So consequently, sites just feela bit sort of transactional,
bland, functional and overwhelming.
(06:55):
You know, 1000, a thousand, 1000pairs of sandals.
Or sometimes you go onto a website and you're just trying
to buy a headphone stand or a mic and there's 300 of them.
There's mic over here. I can't deal with 300 mics to
choose breakdown and I'm not an expert shop, but maybe in this
particular category, you've got to help me as well as you want
(07:18):
to do this. I'm like, I, I don't know, it's
not an excite, it's not an enjoyable experience.
So you have these customers thatare coming into websites and
this is like, I it's easier to go somewhere else.
And, and that's where, and that's where we are now with
e-commerce and, and, and what retailers are saying is that,
you know, they've grown their range, but all they've done
really is just create an overwhelming experience that the
(07:41):
customers are increasingly bewildered by.
And it's harder for them to, to navigate.
Doesn't really differentiate because if you're on selling the
same stuff everyone's doing nextday delivery or whatever, and
the customers, the customer doesn't really have the, the
patience to wade through, you know, endless aisles.
Yeah, I'll call it endless aislebeing battered around a lot in,
(08:02):
in East guys, endless aisle. It can go on forever and you
know, it's great. You know, it's a really good
thing. It's endless aisle.
Customers can spend ages browsing product, but that's
really, really bad because it's an endless aisle and customers
can spend ages browsing product.You know, the, the, the weakness
is in is, is in the strength, ironically.
So customers are saying that, OK, maybe they're selling more.
Retailers are saying now they'reselling more, but they're
(08:24):
actually converting fewer and fewer customers because
customers are less willing to muddle through, less willing to
deep dive and try to work out and decipher the search.
What do I type into the search engine to make it work?
Where did you put that, Phil? What do you call it?
What should I call it? How should I try and find these
things? And it's just not my experience.
(08:45):
And that's what customers are feeding back.
And that's why this conversion is falling off.
Yeah, I can imagine that so manybusinesses have invested so much
in building categories and more products.
But what that leads to is havingthousands of dark aisles within
your e-commerce site with invisible products that
(09:07):
basically get buried in search, right.
And I can imagine that never getseen say again.
Never get seen. Yeah.
Never get seen, which has an impact in the middle of Dark
Isles, Yeah. How so?
Do you have any examples where retailers have sort of converted
that into an opportunity? Yes, the challenge with Dark
Isles is is that they're dark because there's typically too
(09:30):
much to consume. Yeah, so I guess this sort of
falls off page one of search. Right, yes, yeah, exactly.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
Working with the retailer at themoment, they sell 14,000
Wallpapers, right? On the one hand, that's
brilliant, that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
But also that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
Where, where do you start? You know, you've got to, you
can't, you can't consume that amount of information, you know,
(09:53):
and you certainly don't want to be browsing, you know, endlessly
through things you've got to be able to get down.
And I think this is really where, you know, focusing on
customer intent, which is reallywhat found it's about, you know,
it comes to comes to the fore because you don't need to let
your customer muddle through andwork out how they're going to
find what they want because you can understand those needs of
(10:17):
customers. You can bring that to the front
and then go, well, let me createthe exploration or experience
that I think you want to help you navigate and browse, explore
this category. You know, get, as you know, one
of our customers would say, get down to the right, find the
right product in the noise of 10,000.
You know, that's really, that's really the job.
(10:39):
That really, that really is the job.
How do you find that one thing when you literally you're
standing at the you're at the tip of the iceberg and, and it's
under there somewhere, but you, what are you going to do?
You're going to hunt for the right philtre, paginate through
to page 11 and you still won't have even scratched the surface.
You'll go to search. You won't quite know what words
to put. You'll type something like
(11:01):
cottage core. You think that kind of feels
like the trend that I think I'm after.
I got no results. What do I, what do I type now?
What do I need to call it? And this is cognitive energy,
right? And this is what is exhausting
the customer and they go, screw it.
I'll go to Pinterest and we'll look at room designs or I'll go
to Google and I'll type it something and Google will
(11:22):
explore it for me. So that, you know, when you
think about dark Isles, the people that are turning those
into an opportunity are the people that are working out.
How do I get a customer from thetop of the tree where it's
overwhelming and unconsumable, down to a really well honed,
curated collection of products that engaged and interest them
(11:43):
without them having to make? Yeah, In physical retail, that's
one of the major successes behind ALDI and Little, that
they take decision fatigue out of the equation.
Where you go to any of the othermajor supermarkets, you know,
you're just struck with 15 variants of tomato ketchup and
you only want tomato ketchup, soyou only need two or three
(12:06):
things. So decision fatigue is a real
thing. And retailers like ALDI and
Little use it to global expansion and winning.
So it's definitely something that that wins.
And I think there'll be a generation of people who go what
used to have catalogues. And so, you know, in the early
days, I remember, you know, anyone Argos.
Catalogue, the Argos catalogue. So you know what?
(12:28):
My, my, my, I'd always love going because we have the Argos
catalogue at home. You know, it's just be it would
be like a book, yes, like a it was a magazine, really.
I think that was the. Service a book.
It was a it was a great magazineand I used to love going over to
my auntie in Romford because my auntie, they had a Argos
Superstore out there way. And so she had the Argos
(12:51):
Superstore catalogue, which was like Argos catalogue on
steroids. And that was like, I'm just
going to find the couch and and just go and digest.
We're going to be. Really nerdy, I used to love
looking at the hifi equipment. I was just when I was young.
Looking at the tape recorders. Yeah, yeah, oh, the boom box has
got 2 graphic equaliser. I'm alienating my audience.
(13:13):
It was just but. For me, for me, I used to fish
so I would always remember looking straight to find the
fishing tackle, which was sort of the golf clubs and just
before some other sports equipment.
I said yeah, that was my memory of I've got that section at the
Argos catalogue memorised. I mean, going going back to this
talk that I gave so one one of the things that I did on Amazon,
(13:34):
I looked for a Canon camera and then I put to this talk the
backdrop. I don't know if you've ever seen
Interstellar, the movie where they where they land on the
planet and it's a beautiful piece of music that actually
sort of encompasses the planet'sproblem, which I'm probably I'll
get the maths wrong, but something like every 7 seconds
(13:57):
on that planet was equivalent toone day on planet Earth or
something like that, right. So this planet was, you know,
you spend 7 minutes and maybe 7 minutes equate to 1.
And what I was telling the e-commerce leaders at that .6
years ago is people's attention spans is like this.
The more they are fatigued on your website, the more time that
(14:19):
they feel. So 7 minutes for them on your
website is 14 minutes of their real time.
And you need to sort of think about it in that way.
And unfortunately if it's. 7 minutes of being engrossed in Oh
yeah oh this is it. I can spend all day, but that's.
Inspiration, right? Yeah.
Or. Is it 7 minutes of no, that
didn't work? Yeah.
Oh my God, one more. No wrong philtre.
(14:40):
Where do I find that? The Philtre.
Is let you philtre, philtre, Philtre and you know, you've
still got these massive retailers with that catalogue
mentality. They've just taken this wedge of
product and put it online. That's it.
That's all they've done. So how do you get customers?
And I know AI is going to changethis because they're going to be
(15:01):
so petrified at being left out, right?
And just being, you know, well anyway, how do you get retailers
to embrace customer intent LED e-commerce?
Well, that's I think they're gradually realising it.
I think for a long time, you know, the way that you would
deal with the fact that you've got this diminishing return of
(15:22):
attention and it's impacting your bottom line was if you'd
sweat the funnel like that was always how how how it would work
more, buy more traffic, do more promos.
Maybe we'd discount if we're really off forecast or something
like that. But you're getting to the point
now where there's no more traffic to buy.
Can't buy another profitable click if I wanted to.
And well, I think we're a bit promo now, now, but if we
(15:43):
discount anymore, we're giving the stuff away.
So it's like, what else is there?
And so retailers are now coming round to the idea of we need to
fix the experience. The experience is going to be
our differentiator. And so they're looking for ways
that how, how do we make the experience easier for the
customer? How do we get more customers to
the right products sooner in thejourney with less effort and
(16:06):
fewer clicks. That's more and more of the
customers are coming round to that, yeah.
But where I think a lot of them may be still struggling is that
their businesses aren't organised around customers.
They're organised around catalogues.
Everything's organised around catalogues.
Like you were just saying, you stand up.
The catalogue templates generatethe thing out-of-the-box.
(16:26):
The product database feeds the information.
It's cookie cuts templated. This person manages that
category. This person manages that part of
the catalogue. This person manages this part of
the tech stack that goes into catalogue.
And I think the, what we're seeing and this is what the
retailers that are really winning out and driving forward
in this kind of domain, they're realising it's got to be about
(16:50):
the customer. And you've got to try and adjust
or steal thread that idea of what the customer's trying to
do, that mission, what they're trying to achieve and try and
steal thread that through all the different processes,
operations, tech stacks, teams, templates to try and look it up.
You know, it's got to be about the, about the customer.
(17:12):
And so some people are still stuck in that.
You know, I've got a team that manages PLP, someone manages
database, someone's on PDP, he says she drives trafficking,
they merge that, they organise this.
And no one's sitting there going, what does a customer come
in and want to do? What are they trying to achieve?
And actually that mission there.So that's going to take them all
(17:33):
across all these different type of points in lots of different
directions. And so we actually need to be
threading all that together around what a customer wants,
not what we want to push, promote, organise.
And that's the, that's the, that's the shift in the
mentality. The people that are winning are
doing that, doing that very welland are quite far ahead.
So, so where, where, where do you see intent LED e-commerce
(17:55):
over the next five years? Because obviously we've got to
mention AI and, you know, AI is going to take a part in this.
AI is going to play a part. I mean, on the one hand, I mean,
you saw Google, Google launched their AI mode when they went all
in on their AI mode a couple of months ago.
And you know, they kind of forecast a world, you know, you
(18:16):
take it to its extreme. It was like this idea of shops
that's going, you're going to you're going to work with AI
agents and they're going to put it in the basket.
It's almost going to be like, I have take it to some dystopian
extreme. It's going to end up like dark
kitchens. You know, it's just going to be
Uber driver, Uber reach driver showing up to pick up the
delivery orders at the checkout.Just just bring them back and
(18:39):
this whole merchandised categorised browsing experience,
that's all gone. Yeah, I don't, I don't think
that's going to happen. I think AI will help, a lot of
it. AI will help educate customers
so they don't have to get frustrated trying to work out
how to use retail sites. But I think the sites that are
going to win out are going to bethe ones that bring AI in to
(19:02):
help automate, orchestrate and enrich all of this information
in in their business. Every I mean, we went to shop
talk, everyone's talking about AI, the number of people that
just slapped AI in front of things or just going we need to
use more AI. And I think a lot of the time,
yeah, take AI, call it machine that it was that before, you
know, go back a few years, it was big data.
(19:23):
Go back a few years, it was analytic it what it's always
something that's going to come in and and change everything.
The thing that was always missing a digital
transformation, that's what was,it was always what are you
trying to do? What's the operation, what's the
process, what's the goal that we're trying to achieve?
How do you bring AI in to do that?
And I don't think a lot of the retailers that we've looked at
(19:47):
know exactly what that process is that they are trying to
augment with AI. Yeah, you've got to try and work
out what what your, what's the perfect experience?
You've got to work, you've almost got to work it backwards.
What's the ideal experience we're trying to put to the
customer? Have we got the assets and the
infrastructure, the operations to deliver it?
Can AI, can AI help us put any of those in place?
(20:11):
And a lot of people haven't worked that back to what they
want AI to do for them or for their customers.
And that's. Really where you know, intent
again comes into the 4th becauseand where AI has helped us is
because AI helps you distil and orchestrate things at scale a
lot better than you could do before.
(20:33):
If you're a retailer with a manual merchandising team, you
do swivel chain typing this overhere, typing this into that
system, moving data, enriching it.
Yeah, they say details, detail. And at this, it absolutely still
is. So you've got to do dozens of
things across a million points to to make it work for all the
(20:56):
customers. And it's that AI angle that
really helps a good operation done intelligently done for the
customer scale. Yeah, I we, we've not got into
training data and, and how much of your data do you want, you
know, somebody else to have? Because companies like
Perplexity are definitely, I think trying to circumvent
retailers and just provide, you know, they'll be happy with the
(21:17):
product catalogue and let peopledo sort of search based
discovery as opposed to product based discovery.
But that which leads you into personalisation.
And you know, personalisation isoften cited as sort of being the
key and the future of e-commerce.
I'm just wondering how which what sort of leads to the
(21:39):
customer loyalty. I'm just wondering what's found
its approach to personalisation to to improve the customer
loyalty. So I I've got a slightly
heretical view on personalisation which which
which I'll share, but I think I don't.
I don't like to dive into personalisation as much and I
use one of my customers references for the exhaust about
(22:01):
what are you doing to personalise the scientists?
I don't look at it as personalization, I look at it as
relevance. So I'm parroting it slightly.
It's got to be relevant, relevant to you individually
specifically right now, all relevant generally enough so you
can you can work with this and explore it in a way that's
meaningful and matches how you want to shop.
(22:21):
Now. Can I make that better if I have
a bit more personalised information?
Sometimes no, sometimes yes. And so personalization kind of
is one of these things that sortof sits underneath this for me,
this ambition of trying to create a relevant experience
customer. And, and this is where I guess
my heretical view comes in is that I don't think you need
(22:42):
personalised information to understand the customer intent
that's moving through a particular category.
You don't need to get a lot of the time because personalization
works incredibly well when you've got repeat, committed,
engaged customers that I had bought, bought from you before.
(23:02):
They're back for their third, fourth visit.
Now they're looking at this, They spent 15 minutes on site.
You've got a wealth of data. The problem is that actually
that's less than 5% of, of all the people that are on your
site. You know, 80% of people showing
up on your site, you've seen forthe first time from any given
day they've been on your page for they've been on your site
(23:23):
for 30 seconds. It looks at 3 pages.
What do you know, right? You've got this, you have this
cold start with, you know, 2% ofthe customers buy it, but 98%
don't. And you've got no good
information to go on on, on any of them.
And so the necessity for for retails is to be able to deliver
this almost prescient. We thought we knew what you we
(23:44):
knew you were coming. And this is kind of, we
understood what you wanted and we laid the place out for you
kind of experience without having personalised information.
That's really what we want retailers to to be able to do.
Now, if you get useful information that says, well,
they've looked at these 10 things that now if you've got
some additional information, then you can start to create a
more colourful experience on topof that once you've got it.
(24:07):
But the real challenge you've got is the 98% of people that
are not providing a good websitethat you know you can't create a
perfect predictive experience for.
And you need to show them that you understand what it is that
they're looking for, how they want to shop, and you've
structured the website for that particular purpose, almost like
(24:28):
a magician. So is that the card you're
thinking of? What was that?
They're over here. And when you do that, the user
feels empowered and you don't have to help the person.
You don't have to predict the perfect product that they want.
You just have to help them find the right product, get there and
let them make their own choice. And when you do that, they've
become much more loyal, much more empowered to engage
(24:49):
customer. So I guess, you know, when you
think about intent versus personalisation, they're not,
it's not an if or at all. They're just serving different
ends of, of, of the spectrum of trying to create a more relevant
experience. So for example, you know, we'll
do a lot of product enrichment, for example, and we'll look at a
dress, for example, and you know, they called it a long
(25:10):
dress, OK, but it's also full length.
But that's not going to tell youthat in the data.
And no customer data is going totell you that.
Some people call that full length, some people call that
floor length, some people call that a long dress.
You don't pick up the aggregate or the accumulation of the rich
(25:32):
customer intent, the way customers relate to products,
what they call things, until youactually step back and aggregate
all information from from all users about what what something
is, how it might be used, what they're trying to do, what
probably solves for them. You don't get that from personal
data. You get that from looking at
(25:53):
sorts the wisdom of the crowd, almost looking at how, how does
everyone come through here? Call, call it something, go
somewhere else. It's those sorts of patterns
that really start to tell you what it is that people are
trying. To do what would you, what would
you think is one of the first outcomes your customers get when
they sort of start working with you?
What's the one thing that you see them, obviously you expect
(26:17):
better? What's an outcome?
What would an outcome be for them?
I suppose if I look at the impact, I think is that where
you're leading into the impact? I'm just curious over the years,
when you've been working with your key customers, you know,
you go back and say, how you andobviously thank you for your
business, thanks for taking it. How are you finding it?
(26:39):
And then they'll say, oh, you know what this curious what
that, what that, this is, right?What if you were going to sort
of peel back the layers? What, what is that outcome that,
that they're getting? And it could be as simple as it
was chaos. And now we we've got a a bit of
a handle on something that we had no handle on.
Yeah. So typically, you know,
(27:00):
customers are tracking a lot of stuff.
So, you know, they'll, they'll, they see it in the metrics they
go, you know, people are adding product to basket a lot more
often now actually. OK.
It's taking a lot less time to do this.
So we were working with a large US retailer, true Retail and
even markers and they actually were doing this sort of visual
navigation at the top of their pages, which is one of the the
(27:23):
products that that found it incorporated to our customer
sites. But they were building it all
manually. So they would have their
merchandising team, they look atdata, they sit down, they crunch
Excel and they speak to the design team.
They get some images that creates an array of options they
can put into a content management system.
So they get this nice kind of hero visual navigational thing
(27:44):
at the top that should, you know, help the customers
navigate to what it is, what's popular more easily on what's
trending. And but it was it was it was
killing them. It was taking away all of the
time that they had for anything strategic, anything customer
focused. And they were almost like 40% of
their week was going on on keeping up this manual
(28:04):
navigation and it was only on their top 400 pages.
So they were really excited about the prospects of can
something just do this? You know, if you boil it down,
all I'm talking about really is good merchandising, listening to
the customer, pre empting the customer, getting ahead of them,
doing the right thing for them, making it easy, laying it out
the way they expect. But this is all happening in
(28:24):
organisations. So one of the biggest impacts
that they saw, it's just it justI can sleeve this, go back and
do something and this works. This will be taken care of when
a new range comes in or a new trend goes off or, or something.
This is very important or we've got a it will just keep getting
yeah. And that that that is a it's
(28:45):
like, wow, we've just got we've just got a week back, guys.
And that's that's like, you know, that that's that gets felt
internally very, very quickly. Beyond that, it's metric based.
So actually there's a lot more customers now adding to car.
You know, before we had a reallylow add to car rate and we saw a
lot of struggle. There was a high bounce rate.
People left the category after acertain amount of time.
(29:06):
There's an exit rate that we could tell, although seem to be
going in different directions. More people running to basket.
We're seeing the bounce rate come down.
We're seeing time spent in the category go up.
We're seeing more of that numberof items viewed, people seeing
more things, more products actually getting seen.
Coming back to the Dark Isle point that you were talking
(29:26):
about before, one of the metricsone of our customers was
tracking was how much more of our product category is being
seen and exposed than than it was before.
Actually, suddenly we had, we grew our range and it was no one
was seeing it, but now they're seeing it.
And so actually they're getting some security from diversifying
their audience across more of their range, selling more
(29:49):
things. And that means that when it
comes to, you know, as they advance their trading period,
they're not suddenly finding that loads of stuff didn't sell
and they've still got loads of of, of stock from things that
because they never got seen, right.
So, so there's some of the discounting pressure is coming
off of them as well. So you can tell that the
customers are getting a better experience.
(30:11):
You can tell that the, the merchandising team is, is
finding that, you know, they've got more time on their hands
and, and more ability to do other things.
Or if their job is automated and, and some of that worry or
pressure that they might have felt a discount is kind of
diminished a little bit because more things are getting sold in
more facets of the category. So there's, there's benefits
all, all, all across the spectrum really from doing this.
(30:33):
But what sometimes it's interesting is where you hear
different applications of of what of what you didn't intend
to have. So for, for example, we would
create these visual navigations across PLP categories that you
go into locks, for example. This is a DIY company, sort of a
homewares company. And they've had their locks page
and you know, we broke them. They, they had the way they
(30:55):
broke down locks, but we had theway that customers broke down
locks and we turned that into quite a mundane category.
But, but you know, if you, if you need to buy a lock and
you're not quite sure, you need to have it broken down in the
way that you want to try and explore the category.
And so we've created all these navigational arrays and we've
optimised product data. We enriched everything.
Of course, the customers were getting better.
(31:15):
But then what they said was thattheir call centre execs, the new
call centre execs, when customers called in and they
wanted guidance or explanation through a particular category,
the call centre execs were usingthe intent based navigation that
was being essentially fed by customer demands and trends.
And they were able to sound likeproduct experts all of a sudden,
(31:39):
even though, you know, they didn't understand, you know,
I've become, I've been doing this for years.
I've become such a product expert in so many categories
that I would know what I can tell you about embellished
sandals, you know, or, or, or locks or, or perfuse of
fragrances just by understandinghow customers try to relate to
this stuff. So, so they're, they're call
centre execs for getting savvierquicker, helping customers off
(32:01):
the phone better because they were using the prompts from the
navigation to basically talk to the customer about do you want
something like this? Do you want something like that?
This breaks down like this. Do you want a silver one?
Do you want a 11? And it was almost guiding
customer service people as well.So we see the benefits across
the whole org and sometimes in some really novel areas too.
(32:24):
That's fantastic. Look, Warren, it's been an
absolute pleasure. Time has flown by.
So thank you so much for giving up some time to be with us today
and I look forward to you. You were at shop Talk, you said,
right? We were at Shop Talk.
Are you talking about AI? Yeah, are.
You doing any other conferences for the rest of the year?
So we're hoping to make an appearance at Shop Talk in
(32:45):
Chicago for the Ottoman and yeah, full.
And I'm going to try. Don't need many introduces to go
to Paris. Yeah.
So we might want to go to NRFT. So yeah.
All right. Well, that's going to be a tough
one, I think, because they're both at the same time, right?
One day apart. We're definitely going to be tag
teaming, I think you know. Yeah, 16th to the 18th in in
(33:06):
Paris and shop talk, 17th to the19th in Chicago.
Well, well, I may see you at oneof them.
We'll circle back and share. Perfect.
Thanks a lot, Warren. Thanks, Alex.
Take care. Bye.
Bye.
It's got to be relevant. Relevant to you individually
specifically right now, or relevant generally enough so you
can work with this and explore it in a way that's meaningful of
patches how you want to shop now.
Can I make that better if I havea bit more personalised
information? Sometimes no, sometimes yes.
(00:28):
Hello and welcome to the Retail Podcast.
Now I remember giving a talk on this subject.
We were expressing our frustrations in the e-commerce
world between how difficult can it be to get this right?
And when I came across who we'regoing to meet in a minute.
Found it I thought would be super interesting to at least
(00:48):
let's let's listen to someone who is solving this problem and
look at, you know, have we got it wrong?
Is there things that we should be doing that we're not doing?
And Warren, before we get into what the problem is, obviously
your CEO found maybe the the thegiveaway is in the title.
I don't. Say founder sometimes because
(01:09):
you founder founder, you know it's too much alliteration for
people to handle sometimes. Yeah, luckily I I should be able
to go over. So CEO and founder of found it.
So what? Why don't you tell us how you
got to found it before we dive into what the problem is and how
you guys solve it? Yeah, because what do you know?
It was funny. You said how difficult things
are. Why are they still so difficult?
(01:30):
There's problems that I've been seeing for 15 years that
everyone's been expecting to just disappear and see them
every day. Yeah.
If I, if I just sort of give youmaybe a potted history, I, I
spent 20 years running an agency, a digital marketing
agency. Halfway through that journey, we
decided I think sites would be alot better if we built them the
(01:50):
way we tended to use them ratherthan just standing them up
out-of-the-box. So we ended up becoming systems
integrated and started building e-commerce sites on hybrids and
Salesforce demand as it was backthen and different platforms.
So we started to get much more into into depth with trading
operations and what it was like to actually run, manage and
actually sell online, you know, and, and help the business
(02:12):
actually trade. And then into sort of the
background of that, we were developing a lot of technology
to try and automate things, you know, try to understand what it
was customers were looking for, you know, how that might feel
into inside analytics. We were working with, actually
working with a company called Maplin.
I'm sure some of your some of your viewers will remember them
fondly. Absolutely.
(02:32):
Yeah. This is the earlier generation.
Maplin disappeared from High Street and resurfaced under a
new prat. So this is pretty that sort of,
you know, same thing that might relate to the current team and
its business. But let's see, see you at the
time. He, he, he was very close to
customers and he would get theiremails.
He would read customer emails, customers e-mail him directly to
how they got his e-mail. But but people would have always
(02:54):
listened to that and he'd read the exit survey data and the
thing you would always hear the most other than it's too
expensive or stop asking me feedback information was always,
I can't find what I'm looking for on the site.
And that seems to be like the biggest frustration point.
And that's kind of was a also like an epiphany.
I spent a lot of time trying to help people get their websites
found on Google. So when people were searching on
(03:15):
Google, they could or whatever it was they were using would
find the website. And this is a problem on the
site as well. And it was kind of a sort of a
milestone, if you like it, growing of awareness that it is
hard, it is kind of clunky. And and we've been doing this
for ages. You think you think e-commerce
would have moved on since the interface of e-commerce?
It's kind of been the same way since about 2006.
(03:38):
And you know, we've got the search bar, the grid, it's the
fastest. It's kind of that, that
structure, you know, it's a goodstructure, everyone understands
it, it's logical, but it's quitedifficult to to navigate and
search and browse. And as customers get, as retails
get bigger and bigger admin products, it, the site's just
become harder to navigate, harder to perhaps it becomes
(03:58):
harder to find what you want. Think somewhere you said that
shopping has become boring and uninspiring.
In your experience, what do you think the one reason for that
is? And what's the trap that
retailers fall into, maybe? I'll frame it in, in some
feedback I actually got from an e-commerce director.
And, and this was their ironically, this was their
(04:20):
experience of them shopping on their website.
And, and she said, I spent an hour on the site, came away
empty handed, only wanted a pot paint.
And that's if she was talking about her own website.
And you think, wow, yeah. And there is this common theme
thread where I think we all knowit's hard.
We all know it's difficult. We all know it's and people seem
just powerless to do anything about it.
And I think if you look at what what's happened in terms of the
(04:42):
evolution of the customer and the evolution of, of, of, of
e-commerce, they've moved at very different paces and speeds
in, in different ways. So if you look at the customer
nowadays, customers want everything to work like Netflix,
right? You know, I sit down, my telly
can sort of understand what I want, work out how to, you know,
give me the things that I want. Facebook, Amazon, these, these
everyday platforms have almost dictated the way the, you know,
(05:06):
today shoppers expect to, to, tohave their experience today.
So they've become the time, the time pool.
They're impatient. They're more likely to be on
Insta or Google looking for a product and then discover a
retailer than they are to be on a retailer and then discover a
product. So all these changes are
happening. If you look at retail websites
and what have we been doing in e-commerce for the last 10-15
(05:28):
years and it's really what we'vebeen, what we've been doing is
focusing on acquisition and traffic supremacy and increasing
range size, you know, range expansion, let's go marketplace,
let's have more products, let's add new categories, let's make
it bigger and bigger and bigger under the hood.
But fundamentally, that experience isn't really
changing. And so you have customers now
(05:51):
coming into into into retail websites.
They've landed on Google, they land on the product page and
they're going kind of interesting.
And it's like, I kind of want something like that, but I don't
think I want to try and work outdecode your site at the moment,
work out how it works. I'll go back to Google and it's
easier to do that. So the the path of this
resistance for customers being able to find and discover on
(06:12):
platforms that aren't retailers is is actually far exceeded.
They're going to do it on retailwebsites.
So when they're on sites, it's it's kind of transactional.
You know, there's the mega, there's your category.
We've got 2000 sandals. Do you want black ones?
Do you want gold ones? Do you want strap your own?
I'm going on holiday and I want something nice to step out.
(06:35):
Can you help me? And, and that that's not really
how websites work or unless the,you know, you have merchandisers
and they kind of perceive these things and they create edits,
but that that band, it's always really, really limited.
So consequently, sites just feela bit sort of transactional,
bland, functional and overwhelming.
(06:55):
You know, 1000, a thousand, 1000pairs of sandals.
Or sometimes you go onto a website and you're just trying
to buy a headphone stand or a mic and there's 300 of them.
There's mic over here. I can't deal with 300 mics to
choose breakdown and I'm not an expert shop, but maybe in this
particular category, you've got to help me as well as you want
(07:18):
to do this. I'm like, I, I don't know, it's
not an excite, it's not an enjoyable experience.
So you have these customers thatare coming into websites and
this is like, I it's easier to go somewhere else.
And, and that's where, and that's where we are now with
e-commerce and, and, and what retailers are saying is that,
you know, they've grown their range, but all they've done
really is just create an overwhelming experience that the
(07:41):
customers are increasingly bewildered by.
And it's harder for them to, to navigate.
Doesn't really differentiate because if you're on selling the
same stuff everyone's doing nextday delivery or whatever, and
the customers, the customer doesn't really have the, the
patience to wade through, you know, endless aisles.
Yeah, I'll call it endless aislebeing battered around a lot in,
(08:02):
in East guys, endless aisle. It can go on forever and you
know, it's great. You know, it's a really good
thing. It's endless aisle.
Customers can spend ages browsing product, but that's
really, really bad because it's an endless aisle and customers
can spend ages browsing product.You know, the, the, the weakness
is in is, is in the strength, ironically.
So customers are saying that, OK, maybe they're selling more.
Retailers are saying now they'reselling more, but they're
(08:24):
actually converting fewer and fewer customers because
customers are less willing to muddle through, less willing to
deep dive and try to work out and decipher the search.
What do I type into the search engine to make it work?
Where did you put that, Phil? What do you call it?
What should I call it? How should I try and find these
things? And it's just not my experience.
(08:45):
And that's what customers are feeding back.
And that's why this conversion is falling off.
Yeah, I can imagine that so manybusinesses have invested so much
in building categories and more products.
But what that leads to is havingthousands of dark aisles within
your e-commerce site with invisible products that
(09:07):
basically get buried in search, right.
And I can imagine that never getseen say again.
Never get seen. Yeah.
Never get seen, which has an impact in the middle of Dark
Isles, Yeah. How so?
Do you have any examples where retailers have sort of converted
that into an opportunity? Yes, the challenge with Dark
Isles is is that they're dark because there's typically too
(09:30):
much to consume. Yeah, so I guess this sort of
falls off page one of search. Right, yes, yeah, exactly.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
Working with the retailer at themoment, they sell 14,000
Wallpapers, right? On the one hand, that's
brilliant, that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
But also that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
Where, where do you start? You know, you've got to, you
can't, you can't consume that amount of information, you know,
(09:53):
and you certainly don't want to be browsing, you know, endlessly
through things you've got to be able to get down.
And I think this is really where, you know, focusing on
customer intent, which is reallywhat found it's about, you know,
it comes to comes to the fore because you don't need to let
your customer muddle through andwork out how they're going to
find what they want because you can understand those needs of
(10:17):
customers. You can bring that to the front
and then go, well, let me createthe exploration or experience
that I think you want to help you navigate and browse, explore
this category. You know, get, as you know, one
of our customers would say, get down to the right, find the
right product in the noise of 10,000.
You know, that's really, that's really the job.
(10:39):
That really, that really is the job.
How do you find that one thing when you literally you're
standing at the you're at the tip of the iceberg and, and it's
under there somewhere, but you, what are you going to do?
You're going to hunt for the right philtre, paginate through
to page 11 and you still won't have even scratched the surface.
You'll go to search. You won't quite know what words
to put. You'll type something like
(11:01):
cottage core. You think that kind of feels
like the trend that I think I'm after.
I got no results. What do I, what do I type now?
What do I need to call it? And this is cognitive energy,
right? And this is what is exhausting
the customer and they go, screw it.
I'll go to Pinterest and we'll look at room designs or I'll go
to Google and I'll type it something and Google will
(11:22):
explore it for me. So that, you know, when you
think about dark Isles, the people that are turning those
into an opportunity are the people that are working out.
How do I get a customer from thetop of the tree where it's
overwhelming and unconsumable, down to a really well honed,
curated collection of products that engaged and interest them
(11:43):
without them having to make? Yeah, In physical retail, that's
one of the major successes behind ALDI and Little, that
they take decision fatigue out of the equation.
Where you go to any of the othermajor supermarkets, you know,
you're just struck with 15 variants of tomato ketchup and
you only want tomato ketchup, soyou only need two or three
(12:06):
things. So decision fatigue is a real
thing. And retailers like ALDI and
Little use it to global expansion and winning.
So it's definitely something that that wins.
And I think there'll be a generation of people who go what
used to have catalogues. And so, you know, in the early
days, I remember, you know, anyone Argos.
Catalogue, the Argos catalogue. So you know what?
(12:28):
My, my, my, I'd always love going because we have the Argos
catalogue at home. You know, it's just be it would
be like a book, yes, like a it was a magazine, really.
I think that was the. Service a book.
It was a it was a great magazineand I used to love going over to
my auntie in Romford because my auntie, they had a Argos
Superstore out there way. And so she had the Argos
(12:51):
Superstore catalogue, which was like Argos catalogue on
steroids. And that was like, I'm just
going to find the couch and and just go and digest.
We're going to be. Really nerdy, I used to love
looking at the hifi equipment. I was just when I was young.
Looking at the tape recorders. Yeah, yeah, oh, the boom box has
got 2 graphic equaliser. I'm alienating my audience.
(13:13):
It was just but. For me, for me, I used to fish
so I would always remember looking straight to find the
fishing tackle, which was sort of the golf clubs and just
before some other sports equipment.
I said yeah, that was my memory of I've got that section at the
Argos catalogue memorised. I mean, going going back to this
talk that I gave so one one of the things that I did on Amazon,
(13:34):
I looked for a Canon camera and then I put to this talk the
backdrop. I don't know if you've ever seen
Interstellar, the movie where they where they land on the
planet and it's a beautiful piece of music that actually
sort of encompasses the planet'sproblem, which I'm probably I'll
get the maths wrong, but something like every 7 seconds
(13:57):
on that planet was equivalent toone day on planet Earth or
something like that, right. So this planet was, you know,
you spend 7 minutes and maybe 7 minutes equate to 1.
And what I was telling the e-commerce leaders at that .6
years ago is people's attention spans is like this.
The more they are fatigued on your website, the more time that
(14:19):
they feel. So 7 minutes for them on your
website is 14 minutes of their real time.
And you need to sort of think about it in that way.
And unfortunately if it's. 7 minutes of being engrossed in Oh
yeah oh this is it. I can spend all day, but that's.
Inspiration, right? Yeah.
Or. Is it 7 minutes of no, that
didn't work? Yeah.
Oh my God, one more. No wrong philtre.
(14:40):
Where do I find that? The Philtre.
Is let you philtre, philtre, Philtre and you know, you've
still got these massive retailers with that catalogue
mentality. They've just taken this wedge of
product and put it online. That's it.
That's all they've done. So how do you get customers?
And I know AI is going to changethis because they're going to be
(15:01):
so petrified at being left out, right?
And just being, you know, well anyway, how do you get retailers
to embrace customer intent LED e-commerce?
Well, that's I think they're gradually realising it.
I think for a long time, you know, the way that you would
deal with the fact that you've got this diminishing return of
(15:22):
attention and it's impacting your bottom line was if you'd
sweat the funnel like that was always how how how it would work
more, buy more traffic, do more promos.
Maybe we'd discount if we're really off forecast or something
like that. But you're getting to the point
now where there's no more traffic to buy.
Can't buy another profitable click if I wanted to.
And well, I think we're a bit promo now, now, but if we
(15:43):
discount anymore, we're giving the stuff away.
So it's like, what else is there?
And so retailers are now coming round to the idea of we need to
fix the experience. The experience is going to be
our differentiator. And so they're looking for ways
that how, how do we make the experience easier for the
customer? How do we get more customers to
the right products sooner in thejourney with less effort and
(16:06):
fewer clicks. That's more and more of the
customers are coming round to that, yeah.
But where I think a lot of them may be still struggling is that
their businesses aren't organised around customers.
They're organised around catalogues.
Everything's organised around catalogues.
Like you were just saying, you stand up.
The catalogue templates generatethe thing out-of-the-box.
(16:26):
The product database feeds the information.
It's cookie cuts templated. This person manages that
category. This person manages that part of
the catalogue. This person manages this part of
the tech stack that goes into catalogue.
And I think the, what we're seeing and this is what the
retailers that are really winning out and driving forward
in this kind of domain, they're realising it's got to be about
(16:50):
the customer. And you've got to try and adjust
or steal thread that idea of what the customer's trying to
do, that mission, what they're trying to achieve and try and
steal thread that through all the different processes,
operations, tech stacks, teams, templates to try and look it up.
You know, it's got to be about the, about the customer.
(17:12):
And so some people are still stuck in that.
You know, I've got a team that manages PLP, someone manages
database, someone's on PDP, he says she drives trafficking,
they merge that, they organise this.
And no one's sitting there going, what does a customer come
in and want to do? What are they trying to achieve?
And actually that mission there.So that's going to take them all
(17:33):
across all these different type of points in lots of different
directions. And so we actually need to be
threading all that together around what a customer wants,
not what we want to push, promote, organise.
And that's the, that's the, that's the shift in the
mentality. The people that are winning are
doing that, doing that very welland are quite far ahead.
So, so where, where, where do you see intent LED e-commerce
(17:55):
over the next five years? Because obviously we've got to
mention AI and, you know, AI is going to take a part in this.
AI is going to play a part. I mean, on the one hand, I mean,
you saw Google, Google launched their AI mode when they went all
in on their AI mode a couple of months ago.
And you know, they kind of forecast a world, you know, you
(18:16):
take it to its extreme. It was like this idea of shops
that's going, you're going to you're going to work with AI
agents and they're going to put it in the basket.
It's almost going to be like, I have take it to some dystopian
extreme. It's going to end up like dark
kitchens. You know, it's just going to be
Uber driver, Uber reach driver showing up to pick up the
delivery orders at the checkout.Just just bring them back and
(18:39):
this whole merchandised categorised browsing experience,
that's all gone. Yeah, I don't, I don't think
that's going to happen. I think AI will help, a lot of
it. AI will help educate customers
so they don't have to get frustrated trying to work out
how to use retail sites. But I think the sites that are
going to win out are going to bethe ones that bring AI in to
(19:02):
help automate, orchestrate and enrich all of this information
in in their business. Every I mean, we went to shop
talk, everyone's talking about AI, the number of people that
just slapped AI in front of things or just going we need to
use more AI. And I think a lot of the time,
yeah, take AI, call it machine that it was that before, you
know, go back a few years, it was big data.
(19:23):
Go back a few years, it was analytic it what it's always
something that's going to come in and and change everything.
The thing that was always missing a digital
transformation, that's what was,it was always what are you
trying to do? What's the operation, what's the
process, what's the goal that we're trying to achieve?
How do you bring AI in to do that?
And I don't think a lot of the retailers that we've looked at
(19:47):
know exactly what that process is that they are trying to
augment with AI. Yeah, you've got to try and work
out what what your, what's the perfect experience?
You've got to work, you've almost got to work it backwards.
What's the ideal experience we're trying to put to the
customer? Have we got the assets and the
infrastructure, the operations to deliver it?
Can AI, can AI help us put any of those in place?
(20:11):
And a lot of people haven't worked that back to what they
want AI to do for them or for their customers.
And that's. Really where you know, intent
again comes into the 4th becauseand where AI has helped us is
because AI helps you distil and orchestrate things at scale a
lot better than you could do before.
(20:33):
If you're a retailer with a manual merchandising team, you
do swivel chain typing this overhere, typing this into that
system, moving data, enriching it.
Yeah, they say details, detail. And at this, it absolutely still
is. So you've got to do dozens of
things across a million points to to make it work for all the
(20:56):
customers. And it's that AI angle that
really helps a good operation done intelligently done for the
customer scale. Yeah, I we, we've not got into
training data and, and how much of your data do you want, you
know, somebody else to have? Because companies like
Perplexity are definitely, I think trying to circumvent
retailers and just provide, you know, they'll be happy with the
(21:17):
product catalogue and let peopledo sort of search based
discovery as opposed to product based discovery.
But that which leads you into personalisation.
And you know, personalisation isoften cited as sort of being the
key and the future of e-commerce.
I'm just wondering how which what sort of leads to the
(21:39):
customer loyalty. I'm just wondering what's found
its approach to personalisation to to improve the customer
loyalty. So I I've got a slightly
heretical view on personalisation which which
which I'll share, but I think I don't.
I don't like to dive into personalisation as much and I
use one of my customers references for the exhaust about
(22:01):
what are you doing to personalise the scientists?
I don't look at it as personalization, I look at it as
relevance. So I'm parroting it slightly.
It's got to be relevant, relevant to you individually
specifically right now, all relevant generally enough so you
can you can work with this and explore it in a way that's
meaningful and matches how you want to shop.
(22:21):
Now. Can I make that better if I have
a bit more personalised information?
Sometimes no, sometimes yes. And so personalization kind of
is one of these things that sortof sits underneath this for me,
this ambition of trying to create a relevant experience
customer. And, and this is where I guess
my heretical view comes in is that I don't think you need
(22:42):
personalised information to understand the customer intent
that's moving through a particular category.
You don't need to get a lot of the time because personalization
works incredibly well when you've got repeat, committed,
engaged customers that I had bought, bought from you before.
(23:02):
They're back for their third, fourth visit.
Now they're looking at this, They spent 15 minutes on site.
You've got a wealth of data. The problem is that actually
that's less than 5% of, of all the people that are on your
site. You know, 80% of people showing
up on your site, you've seen forthe first time from any given
day they've been on your page for they've been on your site
(23:23):
for 30 seconds. It looks at 3 pages.
What do you know, right? You've got this, you have this
cold start with, you know, 2% ofthe customers buy it, but 98%
don't. And you've got no good
information to go on on, on any of them.
And so the necessity for for retails is to be able to deliver
this almost prescient. We thought we knew what you we
(23:44):
knew you were coming. And this is kind of, we
understood what you wanted and we laid the place out for you
kind of experience without having personalised information.
That's really what we want retailers to to be able to do.
Now, if you get useful information that says, well,
they've looked at these 10 things that now if you've got
some additional information, then you can start to create a
more colourful experience on topof that once you've got it.
(24:07):
But the real challenge you've got is the 98% of people that
are not providing a good websitethat you know you can't create a
perfect predictive experience for.
And you need to show them that you understand what it is that
they're looking for, how they want to shop, and you've
structured the website for that particular purpose, almost like
(24:28):
a magician. So is that the card you're
thinking of? What was that?
They're over here. And when you do that, the user
feels empowered and you don't have to help the person.
You don't have to predict the perfect product that they want.
You just have to help them find the right product, get there and
let them make their own choice. And when you do that, they've
become much more loyal, much more empowered to engage
(24:49):
customer. So I guess, you know, when you
think about intent versus personalisation, they're not,
it's not an if or at all. They're just serving different
ends of, of, of the spectrum of trying to create a more relevant
experience. So for example, you know, we'll
do a lot of product enrichment, for example, and we'll look at a
dress, for example, and you know, they called it a long
(25:10):
dress, OK, but it's also full length.
But that's not going to tell youthat in the data.
And no customer data is going totell you that.
Some people call that full length, some people call that
floor length, some people call that a long dress.
You don't pick up the aggregate or the accumulation of the rich
(25:32):
customer intent, the way customers relate to products,
what they call things, until youactually step back and aggregate
all information from from all users about what what something
is, how it might be used, what they're trying to do, what
probably solves for them. You don't get that from personal
data. You get that from looking at
(25:53):
sorts the wisdom of the crowd, almost looking at how, how does
everyone come through here? Call, call it something, go
somewhere else. It's those sorts of patterns
that really start to tell you what it is that people are
trying. To do what would you, what would
you think is one of the first outcomes your customers get when
they sort of start working with you?
What's the one thing that you see them, obviously you expect
(26:17):
better? What's an outcome?
What would an outcome be for them?
I suppose if I look at the impact, I think is that where
you're leading into the impact? I'm just curious over the years,
when you've been working with your key customers, you know,
you go back and say, how you andobviously thank you for your
business, thanks for taking it. How are you finding it?
(26:39):
And then they'll say, oh, you know what this curious what
that, what that, this is, right?What if you were going to sort
of peel back the layers? What, what is that outcome that,
that they're getting? And it could be as simple as it
was chaos. And now we we've got a a bit of
a handle on something that we had no handle on.
Yeah. So typically, you know,
(27:00):
customers are tracking a lot of stuff.
So, you know, they'll, they'll, they see it in the metrics they
go, you know, people are adding product to basket a lot more
often now actually. OK.
It's taking a lot less time to do this.
So we were working with a large US retailer, true Retail and
even markers and they actually were doing this sort of visual
navigation at the top of their pages, which is one of the the
(27:23):
products that that found it incorporated to our customer
sites. But they were building it all
manually. So they would have their
merchandising team, they look atdata, they sit down, they crunch
Excel and they speak to the design team.
They get some images that creates an array of options they
can put into a content management system.
So they get this nice kind of hero visual navigational thing
(27:44):
at the top that should, you know, help the customers
navigate to what it is, what's popular more easily on what's
trending. And but it was it was it was
killing them. It was taking away all of the
time that they had for anything strategic, anything customer
focused. And they were almost like 40% of
their week was going on on keeping up this manual
(28:04):
navigation and it was only on their top 400 pages.
So they were really excited about the prospects of can
something just do this? You know, if you boil it down,
all I'm talking about really is good merchandising, listening to
the customer, pre empting the customer, getting ahead of them,
doing the right thing for them, making it easy, laying it out
the way they expect. But this is all happening in
(28:24):
organisations. So one of the biggest impacts
that they saw, it's just it justI can sleeve this, go back and
do something and this works. This will be taken care of when
a new range comes in or a new trend goes off or, or something.
This is very important or we've got a it will just keep getting
yeah. And that that that is a it's
(28:45):
like, wow, we've just got we've just got a week back, guys.
And that's that's like, you know, that that's that gets felt
internally very, very quickly. Beyond that, it's metric based.
So actually there's a lot more customers now adding to car.
You know, before we had a reallylow add to car rate and we saw a
lot of struggle. There was a high bounce rate.
People left the category after acertain amount of time.
(29:06):
There's an exit rate that we could tell, although seem to be
going in different directions. More people running to basket.
We're seeing the bounce rate come down.
We're seeing time spent in the category go up.
We're seeing more of that numberof items viewed, people seeing
more things, more products actually getting seen.
Coming back to the Dark Isle point that you were talking
(29:26):
about before, one of the metricsone of our customers was
tracking was how much more of our product category is being
seen and exposed than than it was before.
Actually, suddenly we had, we grew our range and it was no one
was seeing it, but now they're seeing it.
And so actually they're getting some security from diversifying
their audience across more of their range, selling more
(29:49):
things. And that means that when it
comes to, you know, as they advance their trading period,
they're not suddenly finding that loads of stuff didn't sell
and they've still got loads of of, of stock from things that
because they never got seen, right.
So, so there's some of the discounting pressure is coming
off of them as well. So you can tell that the
customers are getting a better experience.
(30:11):
You can tell that the, the merchandising team is, is
finding that, you know, they've got more time on their hands
and, and more ability to do other things.
Or if their job is automated and, and some of that worry or
pressure that they might have felt a discount is kind of
diminished a little bit because more things are getting sold in
more facets of the category. So there's, there's benefits
all, all, all across the spectrum really from doing this.
(30:33):
But what sometimes it's interesting is where you hear
different applications of of what of what you didn't intend
to have. So for, for example, we would
create these visual navigations across PLP categories that you
go into locks, for example. This is a DIY company, sort of a
homewares company. And they've had their locks page
and you know, we broke them. They, they had the way they
(30:55):
broke down locks, but we had theway that customers broke down
locks and we turned that into quite a mundane category.
But, but you know, if you, if you need to buy a lock and
you're not quite sure, you need to have it broken down in the
way that you want to try and explore the category.
And so we've created all these navigational arrays and we've
optimised product data. We enriched everything.
Of course, the customers were getting better.
(31:15):
But then what they said was thattheir call centre execs, the new
call centre execs, when customers called in and they
wanted guidance or explanation through a particular category,
the call centre execs were usingthe intent based navigation that
was being essentially fed by customer demands and trends.
And they were able to sound likeproduct experts all of a sudden,
(31:39):
even though, you know, they didn't understand, you know,
I've become, I've been doing this for years.
I've become such a product expert in so many categories
that I would know what I can tell you about embellished
sandals, you know, or, or, or locks or, or perfuse of
fragrances just by understandinghow customers try to relate to
this stuff. So, so they're, they're call
centre execs for getting savvierquicker, helping customers off
(32:01):
the phone better because they were using the prompts from the
navigation to basically talk to the customer about do you want
something like this? Do you want something like that?
This breaks down like this. Do you want a silver one?
Do you want a 11? And it was almost guiding
customer service people as well.So we see the benefits across
the whole org and sometimes in some really novel areas too.
(32:24):
That's fantastic. Look, Warren, it's been an
absolute pleasure. Time has flown by.
So thank you so much for giving up some time to be with us today
and I look forward to you. You were at shop Talk, you said,
right? We were at Shop Talk.
Are you talking about AI? Yeah, are.
You doing any other conferences for the rest of the year?
So we're hoping to make an appearance at Shop Talk in
(32:45):
Chicago for the Ottoman and yeah, full.
And I'm going to try. Don't need many introduces to go
to Paris. Yeah.
So we might want to go to NRFT. So yeah.
All right. Well, that's going to be a tough
one, I think, because they're both at the same time, right?
One day apart. We're definitely going to be tag
teaming, I think you know. Yeah, 16th to the 18th in in
(33:06):
Paris and shop talk, 17th to the19th in Chicago.
Well, well, I may see you at oneof them.
We'll circle back and share. Perfect.
Thanks a lot, Warren. Thanks, Alex.
Take care. Bye.
Bye.
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