In this ecommerce podcast, hosts James & Paul interview Andrew Brown, ex CEO of Attraqt and founder of fast growing ecommerce search and merchandising specialist Advanced Commerce.
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There are a lot of search and merchandising tools in the market, each with a different set of features and user admin controls. Some businesses still face the challenges of using multiple systems to achieve the desired functionality, whereas many have already consolidated their systems architecture to integrate a best-in-class vendor that covers both capabilities.
For many retail ecommerce websites, especially larger product catalogues, search is the primary user journey for product discovery and selection, typically converting up to 3 times better than browse journeys. Getting the most relevant products and content returned for each query is a top priority, the same need being reflected in merchandising on product list pages. There is frustration around black box merchandising tools that don’t enable business controls to be applied, or the reverse where trading teams spend too long building ranking cocktails and merchandising campaigns without having an AI/ML engine to automate parts of the site. Advanced Commerce is a relatively new player in the market and brings an intuitive user interface with advanced rule-based merchandising on top of a smart AI/ML engine to blend business logic with personalisation.
In this ecommerce podcast, hosts James & Paul interview the founder and CEO, Andre Brown to find out how it differs to other leading vendors, how ecommerce teams can use it to execute their trading plans and what lies ahead for product development.
Tl;dr – what we cover:
- What Advanced Commerce is and their positioning in the market
- Benefits that advanced merchandising can add to a business
- The benefits of combining search, merchandising and recommendations in one platform
- How Advanced Commerce is going to market
Key Discussion Points
- You initially went out to market as an ecommerce platform; what led to the pivot back to the search and merchandising side?
- Can you talk us through the strategy, where you intend to sit in the market and how your approach differs to when you were running Attraqt
- Can you now run us through the product; the key differentiator is the advanced merchandising side, can you talk us through where this is currently and the types of things your clients are doing
- What are some things you see merchants not do around VM, or what are some of the biggest opportunities on this side for the average brand?
- Do you have any examples of wins you’ve seen from brands using more advanced business logic e.g. negating items with broken stock?
- You’re primarily working with Magento and Shopify; do you intend on broadening this?
- Is there a relationship between recommendations, merchandising and search, do you apply personalisation and ML across all three areas?
- Lots of search and merchandising solutions suggest that brands need to allow their intelligence to have large inputs into the ordering of product: what’s your view on this?
- Can you talk us through how your smart templates work and how this add value to the business?
- What’s in the roadmap?
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