Innovative Technologies

Revolutionize The Shopper Journey

BY GLENN TAYLOR

The retail industry is undergoing a revolution, with ground-breaking technologies guiding both the consumer and the merchant throughout the customer journey. Whether the shopper is at home using a PC, searching for a product on a mobile device, walking nearby a store, or browsing the aisles in the store, retailers have access to a number of new technologies to enhance the experience at every touch point.

In 2014, retailers are tapping a variety of new technologies covered in this report:

  • Personalization solutions;
  • Wearable technology;
  • Visual search; and
  • Augmented reality.

Some leading retailers implementing these technologies include: Macy's, Apple, Lacoste, American Apparel, Smartfurniture.com and Heels.com.

Personalize The Purchasing Process

Today's consumer desires a relevant shopping experience from the second they make a decision to shop. As many as 86% of consumers and 96% of retailers said personalization has at least some impact on the purchasing decision, according to a study from Infosys.

As many as 86% of consumers and 96% of retailers said personalization has at least some impact on the purchasing decision, according to a study from Infosys.

Retailers have plenty of bottom-line incentive to build personalized experiences, as 40% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalize across all channels, according to data from MyBuys and the e-tailing group. Retail personalization can be delivered in via a number of different vehicles, including: advertisements, emails, product recommendations, discounts and promotions.

Smart Furniture, for one, built a personalization module called SmartProfile.

"When somebody comes to your site, they'll land on any one of thousands of pages," said T.J. Gentle, CEO of Smart Furniture. "If they don't see an aesthetic, a style and a price point that hits home with them that is in an acceptable range, they bounce immediately. My biggest fear that was keeping me up at night was the idea that as we add all these products, we're going to scare off existing customers. What I needed was a way to show everyone who visited our site that the look, feel, style and pricing needed to be personalized to suit who that person was."

SmartProfile enables site viewers to build their own individual profile by taking a brief quiz that includes questions on style, feature, spacing and price preferences. The viewer's experience on the site is then geared toward the selections made during the quiz. The site will adapt to the browsing (and in some cases, purchasing) habits of the consumer to create an experience that encourages them to continue visiting the Smart Furniture brand.

"In just a few questions, you can really drill down into what someone's preferences are across many different variable sets," Gentle said.

Molding The Path To Purchase With Visual Search

Shoppers come across hundreds of objects throughout the path to purchase, so it's not much of a surprise when certain products are forgotten. Even if a customer remembers the product's appearance, there is a good possibility she may have a difficult time finding it in the future if she isn't aware of the brand name. Online retailer Heels.com looked to help shoppers keep tabs on their favorite products by launching Visual Search, a feature designed to match photos of shoes with the correct product online.

This visual search analyzes pixels in an image and then compares the color and pattern of those pixels to other images on the site. Customers can upload a photo of their own to the site or enter an image URL to receive similar images identifying the product title.

"[Visual search is] basically the same technology as facial recognition software," said Eric McCoy, CEO of Heels.com. "Facial recognition has always been around, it just hasn't been used in a retail application."

"[Visual search is] basically the same technology as facial recognition software," said Eric McCoy, CEO of Heels.com. "Facial recognition has always been around, it just hasn't been used in a retail application."

Describing the appearance of an item verbally can sometimes prove to be a difficult task, especially if there is no image to accompany the thought. As customer service reps became more inundated with questions from shoppers regarding specific products, the idea to move toward visual search technology was a no brainer. Iteration Studio, a solution provider that acts as an "innovation lab" for small- and medium-sized retailers, built the visual search technology and implemented it through a partnership with Heels.com.

The solution also is useful for shoppers who look to coordinate their appearance beyond footwear. Perhaps more importantly, it shows that the technology can be effective in a retail environment, particularly in clothing stores.

"People are uploading dresses and purses, and our visual search is actually matching shoes to that," McCoy said, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. "We don't sell dresses and purses, so it's not that type of match, but they are matching colors. If somebody uploads a purse that's red with metal details, our visual search is able to find a shoe that is close in red and also has metal details as well."

BLE: A Beacon Of Light For The In-Store Experience

By the time the shopper finally reaches the store, she has reached an environment that provides a drastically different retail environment than her grandparents or even parents would have experienced, particularly due to the introduction of mobile devices. Brick-and-mortar stores are now leveraging smartphones and tablets by implementing mobile sites and mobile apps, as well as newer technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and augmented reality.

Beacons are hardware sensors designed to wirelessly communicate and transmit data with mobile devices (and other beacons) within a specific proximity. The beacons can be placed strategically throughout a store to add value to products and personalize the in-store experience via targeted push notifications to individual shoppers.

"The online experience has trained consumers to expect to be recognized and have their history pulled up in front of them," noted Dave McMullen, Principal at marketing agency redpepper, the developer of beacon-compatible app Taonii. "They expect recommendations and offers about products that they might like, and to be checked out swiftly, simply and easily. All of those things that happen online make for an experience that's nice, and the brick-and mortar stores have to compete with that. Beacon technology allows that to happen."

Apple made major waves with beacon technology by introducing its own version of the tech — the iBeacon — in all of its stores in the U.S in December 2013. Other retailers have since equipped their stores with beacon technology, including Macy's, American Eagle Outfitters and Lord and Taylor. In each case, the BLE beacons are programmed to be compatible with the respective in-store apps.

The success of each retail beacon deployment weighs on the effectiveness of both the analytics engine and app's abilities to identify and engage customers. "Anybody can go out and purchase a thousand beacons and place them all around their stores," said Dave Heinzinger, Director of Communications at mobile marketing platform and iBeacon distributor inMarket. "If you don't have an audience of app users to talk to, it's like buying the brushes without the paint or putting up a billboard with nothing on it."

"Anybody can go out and purchase a thousand beacons and place them all around their stores," said Dave Heinzinger, Director of Communications at mobile marketing platform and iBeacon distributor inMarket. "If you don't have an audience of app users to talk to, it's like buying the brushes without the paint or putting up a billboard with nothing on it."

For InMarket customers, beacons have motivated shoppers to use their branded apps more frequently. Over a 30-day period in April and May 2014, in-store app usage was 16.5 times higher for users who received a beacon message, according to data from InMarket. Users who received a location-based message during the same period had a rate of interaction with advertised products that was 19 times higher than those who didn't receive the message. To date, InMarket has rolled out iBeacons in grocery stores including Safeway, Giant Eagle and Unified Grocers.

"Reaching a person at the perfect time when they're in the shopping mindset is so much more valuable than delivering a banner through Angry Birds or a shopping-related app while they're at home on the couch," Heinzinger said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints.

The beacon boom still appears to be in the early stages, but the cost-effectiveness of the technology has many believing it will continue on an upward trend. Beacon distributor Appflare is counting on the craze to get bigger, citing in a company blog post that it has made its BLE hardware installation services free for qualifying retailers through September 2014. The market for BLE beacon shipments is expected to break 60 million units by 2019, according to data from ABI Research.

Clothing, Beauty Retailers Experiment With Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) apps also are changing how the shopper (literally) visualizes the in-store experience. Many AR solutions implemented into retail stores are integrated with mobile apps and are designed to simulate a picture for the shopper.

A majority of these simulations feature clothing or cosmetics products, designed to show the shopper how they would look wearing the items without actually trying them on.

AR also is effective for other types of products. Lacoste recently released a mobile app that allows consumers to "try on" LCST trainers by placing their foot onto an in-store floor graphic. Once the foot is placed in the right spot, the shopper can then scan it with their smartphone to see what each shoe would look like before speaking to an associate. The app uses in-store POS systems to create a 3D model that showcases the entire LCST product range.

Beyond the item try-on, retailers are using AR to provide product information and review. The American Apparel Shopping Assistant app enables shoppers with a smartphone to scan in-store items in order to see customer product reviews and view clothing options in a wide spectrum of colors.

Mobile and AR are expected to flourish as a pairing. As many as 60 million shoppers will tap their smartphones, tablets and smart glasses in 2014 to use AP apps, according to Mobile Augmented Reality - The 8th Mass Medium from Juniper Research. "

Mobile and AR are expected to flourish as a pairing. As many as 60 million shoppers will tap their smartphones, tablets and smart glasses in 2014 to use AP apps, according to Mobile Augmented Reality - The 8th Mass Medium from Juniper Research. By 2018, the total number of unique users is expected to more than triple to 200 million.

While mobile may be the first choice for AR implementations, retailers also can use AR in different channels as well. For example, Sephora implemented a 3D AR mirror in its Milan, Italy location to give shoppers a real-time preview of what they would look like wearing different eye shadow colors. The mirror, programmed by virtual makeover technology provider ModiFace, is designed to eliminate the need for retailers to carry many tester products and makeup utensils.

Begin With Your Customers To Discover The Future Of Retail

By Lea Elaine Green, Mozu

The future of retail is here, and your customers created it with their desires and devices. Innovative retailers are already integrating various technologies and systems in order to achieve a unified customer experience and adapt to consumers' reinvention of retail response. The desire to shop anytime, anywhere impacts technology adoption and behaviors in both retail and word-of-mouth marketing environments, and also compels merchants to reinvent physical storefronts.

While businesses continue their struggle with silos, consumers regularly defy them. Customers intrinsically reject the notion of business-directed channels by demanding visibility and interactivity at all touchpoints during their retail engagements. Contemporary businesses must reflect the omni-channel experience so seamlessly that there are no distinguishable channels to consumers. Anytime, anywhere availability is no longer enough. The future of retail is about providing choice, consistency and customization to consumers, and increasing the level of interaction to provide anytime, anywhere relevance and meaning.

Below are just a few of the ways innovative companies will merge technology with consumer desires to bring new experiences to customers in the near future:

Low energy, Bluetooth transmitters, often known as iBeacon, and other micromarketing technology will pinpoint consumers within inches inside store environments. Companies will use more mobile in-app tools that reflect user environment. These apps will increase consumer engagement drastically, targeting and rewarding key behaviors with relevant content and promotions.

Consumers now expect to be identified when purchasing — regardless of device or environment — and demand real-time access to products, data and promotions. Targeting their most relevant choices will incent customers to return to stores for a new experience of personalization. This technology will also enable retailers to gather vast amounts of data once consumers are in store, including how long they spend in certain departments and audit customer pathing, allowing merchants to determine POS and the impact of specific offers, not to mention gaining access to in-depth customer demographics and psychographics.

Every flat surface will be an opportunity to interact. Fitting rooms will connect to social media so customers can engage and share, and energy-efficient, virtual 3D display billboards will soon cover every imaginable surface. Workforce management will further empower store associates with liberated handheld devices to serve and inform customers with detailed purchasing preferences. Physical stores will no longer stock inventory but evolve into showplaces — product-focused, brand-focused amusement parks for consumers to experience products: real, virtual and prototypes. The store as a showroom will enable physical environments to remain differentiated while staying competitive with online commerce.

By interconnecting uniquely identifiable computing devices using cloud technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises advanced connectivity of devices, systems and services and is expected automate technology in nearly all industries while simultaneously enabling superior applications. Supply Chain Management and Inventory/Warehouse Management processes are vast areas of potential evolution through IoT.

Currently, inventory and supply management is radically siloed from the flow of information. Integrating IoT technology will allow retailers to communicate efficiently between suppliers and logistics providers to develop a better understanding of raw materials, transportation and inventory management. Companies will transcend the human error of manual inventory processes and clunky RFID technology to move toward smarter, automated inventory practices that trigger automatic adjustments at the store level communicated seamlessly back into the supply chain. With a more detailed and accurate view of complete product and inventory systems, retailers will be able to re-engineer processes and reduce costs.

Until recently, content and commerce existed in separate worlds — with separate teams and tools — and created unreliable customer experiences and frustrated business users. As content and commerce converge, trust among corporate content creators will build as content increases in relevance in the lives' of the consumer — and user-generated content will be the battlefield. In their unending quest to be where the buyers are, social media channels are already beginning to create opportunities for social commerce by "reducing friction" for merchants. Detailed user demographics about consumers can be used to serve retail advertisers to target prospects directly in-stream, and consumer response can be used to further hone the experience of relevant, action-oriented retail content.

Another potential for the future of retail includes online HD panoramic imaging that bring 3D store and product experiences directly to consumers' personal devices. According to Nicolas Rossi of London start-up Avenue Imperial , "our website makes the online shopping experience more immersive than the flat, catalog-style eCommerce we have all got used to." With virtual reality tools, users can experience store environments and products using smartphones, tablets or laptops, zooming in to see minute product detail, virtually interacting with products or instantly connecting with staff that can provide additional information or arrange for payment and shipping.

Part Two

Looking Ahead In The Retail Technology Journey

With numerous touch points available to connect with consumers during their shopping journeys, retailers are clamoring to deliver a brand experience at every stop. Forward-thinking retailers are focusing on all points of the journey, before, during and after a purchase is completed.

Retailers Take Control Of The Path To Purchase With New Technologies

The shopper journey can vary from consumer to consumer depending on multiple factors, including the first point of retailer contact, initial purchasing desires and point-of-purchase. Since consumers have so many options at their disposal, retailers need to think outside of the box in order to motivate a purchase.

Retailers such as Cole Haan, La-Z-Boy, Fred Meyer, Nordstrom and The Container Store have sought out and successfully implemented new technologies designed to successfully reach and engage customers during every facet of the shopper journey.

Those technologies include:

  • Social media visualization;
  • SMS and voice messaging;
  • Wearable technology; and
  • Customer experience management systems designed to gather post-purchase feedback.

This report also provides a sneak peek into the future of retail and explains how merchants can leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and automated product descriptions.

Social Media Visualization Spurs Referrals, Brand Enthusiasm

Social media has given customers a vast outlet to speak their minds about brands and their shopping experiences. Now that retailers have been thrust into this public forum, they must work to initiate conversations and drive ongoing engagement throughout the shopper journey.

Cole Haan is one of many retailers leveraging the social media visualization platform Postano in its flagship stores to creatively spread the word about products. The Postano platform, developed by TigerLogic, is designed to allow retailers to aggregate customer-generated content and curate campaigns across social networks.

For example, Cole Haan is using Postano in conjunction with tablets to display real-time photos of customizable driver shoes posted on Instagram and Twitter. While browsing the store's aisles, shoppers can view photos of purchases other customers have made and gather ideas about how to mix and match items.

Social media referrals are important, since as many as 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a positive review, according to HubSpot.

Using the Postano platform, retailers can share fan photos and videos posted on social channels — with additional commentary — in the store, on their e-Commerce sites or at an event. While 78% of consumers say posts by companies they follow on social media impact their purchases, even more respondents (81%) are impacted by posts from their friends, according to research from customer intelligence solutions firm Market Force.

While 78% of consumers say posts by companies they follow on social media impact their purchases, even more respondents (81%) are impacted by posts from their friends, according to research from customer intelligence solutions firm Market Force.

"Everyone now is a good photographer and a good creative content producer, and they're out in the world incorporating all their favorite brands into this content to essentially show their friends what brands matter to them," said Justin Garrity, Sr. VP of Postano. "I think the opportunity is huge for brands to work with that brand love and capture that enthusiasm to excite other customers."

Postano can help hasten the purchase process for customers by offering a purchase button that can be added to fans' Instagram photos and tweets. When a customer clicks the purchase button, they will be taken to the checkout point of the corresponding product on the e-Commerce site.

"Fans and customers are used to seeing social content on their favorite brands' web sites," said Garrity in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. "It has a Pinterest effect, in that we create these galleries online that make it really easy to browse a lot of content quickly. If they really like that product, all they need to see is somebody that is more excited than they are that already posted online about it to be the final incentive to purchase that product."

Hype Up The Path To Purchase Via Voice, SMS Messaging

Although social media is certainly the trendiest way for retailers to go about interacting with potential customers throughout the shopper journey, more traditional methods continue to be effective.

To promote in-store events, the La-Z-Boy Furniture team replaced its direct mail program with a more personal and immediate service designed to drive shoppers into the store and motivate them to return for future purchases. The retailer partnered with SPLICE Software to implement a system that extends invitations to shoppers for La-Z-Boy events via a timed voice message.

Using the SPLICE VIP Event Notification program, La-Z-Boy store managers send personalized messages to VIP customers. All calls are localized so that the number of the closest La-Z-Boy location will be displayed, making it easier for recipients to call the store back if they miss the call.

More than 70% of recipients of the voice messages listen to at least 90% of the messages, according to Tara Kelly, President and CEO of SPLICE Software.

"The VIP event allows us to give that customer that extra 'wow factor,'" said Richard Williams, Operations and Marketing Manager at La-Z-Boy Furniture. "It allows us to solidify our relationship. From the time the customer receives the [initial] phone call to the time the customer walks through door, it's all creating that comfort level with the customer."

Because furniture purchases are not typically frequent, La-Z-Boy sought to continue the relationship between shopping trips. "When they walk out of the store, they may not have purchased anything that day because they weren't in the market for furniture at that time," Williams said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. "We're quite confident that when they are back in the market, they're going to remember this experience that they just went through and they're going to put us at the top of the shopping list."

La-Z-Boy has timed the VIP personalized messaging events to take place during the retailer's "quietest shopping weekends" in June and December to boost in store traffic. The program has seen significant success. On average, in-store traffic has doubled during these events. In fact, a Scranton, PA store reported a 300% increase in traffic and a 200% average increase in sales over the duration of one VIP weekend, according to SPLICE.

More than 70% of recipients of the voice messages listen to at least 90% of the messages, according to Tara Kelly, President and CEO of SPLICE Software.

In addition to voice messaging, retailers can utilize SMS messaging in order to share promotional materials with consumers. For example, grocery supermarket chain Fred Meyer looked to drive shoppers to a digital Holiday Daily Deal campaigns with SMS messaging from HelloWorld. In the 20 days leading up to Christmas, the retailer sent SMS messages containing coupon offers to shoppers who had opted into the program. As part of the SMS campaign, shoppers could enter for a chance to win a $25 gift card each day of the campaign.

The SMS messaging urges consumers to interact with the retailer at a higher frequency while enabling them to purchase items at a discount, which ultimately can encourage consumers to visit a store. This daily interaction can significantly improve retailer-consumer relationships, since 44% of consumers are willing to provide personal information, such as their mobile phone number, in exchange for a reward, coupon or deal, according to research from HipCricket.

"Our customer base is really looking for an offer that's valuable to them," said Katie MacDonald, Digital Marketing Manager at Fred Meyer. "We can look across multiple segments and say that we know that we have a mom in the store that may be shopping for herself, her children or her husband, but what we learn from mobile is that shoppers are in it for themselves. Their mobile devices are very personal to them, and as such we've learned that more of a personal offer related to you is always what resonates with the customer."

To drive excitement around the promotion as well as holiday shopping season, HelloWorld supplemented the SMS messaging with a game called Snowflake Blitz, designed to encourage consumers to be active in the campaign through multiple channels, including the mobile site, a built-in microsite or Facebook.

Post-implementation, MacDonald said the Fred Meyer team learned a few lessons: "When you have a mobile offer you need to consider how responsive your design is for that device. In addition, make sure the text is simple enough to be readable."

Finalizing The Shopper Journey With Post-Purchase Feedback

Once shoppers complete a purchase online or in a store, retailers have one more task at hand: Bring the customer back to the brand. Securing the first purchase is a short-term victory because there is no guarantee that a customer will return to buy again.

Retailers such as Nordstrom and Tommy Bahama are tapping into post-purchase feedback with the help of a solution from Medallia. The real-time customer experience management software enables customers to provide feedback via surveys that can be accessed through the retail app, email or the web site.

"Being able to organically capture feedback across all of those interactions helps the business understand where to invest next," said Michelle de Haaff, VP of Marketing at Medallia. "It's expensive to invest in new products and new merchandise, and we often have worked with retail customers using our software to test whether the ideas are good or not."

On average, Nordstrom gathers 4,500 customer feedback surveys per month using Medallia. Associates can receive feedback scores for their particular store in order to pinpoint behaviors that need to be modified. Store managers and associates also can use the scores to set daily goals and continuously improve the shopping experience.

Three specific factors separate retailers that collect and respond to feedback, according to de Haaff:

  • Company culture;
  • Employee empowerment; and
  • Transparency.

Company culture must be customer-centric, not product- or design-centric, if retailers want to succeed, de Haaff said. "Transparent companies give the hole business a very clear access to what experience means and what customers think of that experience. Those businesses that do that end up having a customer-centric culture and have empowered employees without trying, because they know what impact their behavior has."

Arming Associates With Wearable Technology

Despite the fast-moving growth of e-Commerce and m-Commerce, 90% of retail transactions occur in brick-and-mortar stores, according to industry experts including A.T. Kearney. In fact, brick-and-mortar stores are projected to account for 85% of purchases as far in the future as 2025, according to data from Forrester and McKinsey.

With that in mind, retailers need to seize the opportunity to improve the working environment for store associates in order to deliver a better overall customer experience. To date, many shoppers believe they are better informed than the store associates they come in contact with.

To help store associates, some retailers are considering wearable technology, which can increase workplace productivity by as much as 8.5%, according to research from Rackspace and Goldsmiths.

The Container Store, for one, is utilizing enterprise wearable technology from Theatro to allow store associates and managers to optimize internal communication throughout the store, between stores and with the corporate office, all while fostering "heads up" interactions with customers.

Mobile and AR are expected to flourish as a pairing. As many as 60 million shoppers will tap their smartphones, tablets and smart glasses in 2014 to use AP apps, according to Mobile Augmented Reality - The 8th Mass Medium from Juniper Research.

"The idea of employees constantly staring down at a screen is not appealing for customers," said John Thrailkill, VP of Store Systems and Business Development at the Container Store, in an episode of TouchPoints TV. "It doesn't look like that person wants to engage with them."

Unlike walkie-talkies or other common floor technology, the voice-activated Theatro Wearable enables an employee to speak to everyone in the store at once, or communicate with an individual employee 1-to-1. The wearable devices reduced floor chatter in the retailer's pilot location by more than 60%, according to Thrailkill.

"There's a ton of communication happening on our sales floor every day, [whether it's] looking for help with registers as we get a line up there, looking for help with customer carry outs to their car, looking for a product in the back room," Thrailkill explained. "Most of [the conversation] we found was something that needed to be between one or two people. The wearable has enabled those employees to get more done in their day because they're only hearing the things meant for them."

The Future Of The Shopper Journey

While today's technologies are putting the retailer in an advantageous position to optimize the shopper journey, it could be argued that the best path-to-purchase is yet to come. For example, retail industry experts are predicting big things for the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential for improving the in-store experience. Loosely defined, the IoT is: "A computing concept that describes a future where every day physical objects will be connected to the Internet and be able to identify themselves to other devices," according to techopedia.com.

Retailers can implement the IoT in brick-and-mortar stores in one way by adding wireless sensors, such as beacon technology, that transmit data within the store network. Every inanimate object has a "voice" that can connect to an online network, according to Gary Schwartz, President and CEO of Impact Mobile. Data such as shopper buying preferences, frequency of visits and in-store foot traffic, can be used to further personalize customer experiences once they reach the store.

"What the Internet of Things does is make your store more interactive," Schwartz said. "It allows you to improve clienteling and help facilitate targeted and intelligent navigation without having a customer feel like shopping is a science project."

One aspect of the IoT can't be ignored: its rapid expansion. The IoT is expected to grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020, which would represent an almost 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009, according to data from Gartner

If applied correctly, the IoT can enable shoppers to "opt in" to the store network via a MAC address on a smartphone or tablet without needing to download a mobile app. If a consumer opts in to the store, their device becomes connected with every other device in the store network.

"For too long, retailers have seen their mobile strategy tied to a thick-client mobile app," Schwartz added. "While this is good for Apple or Samsung, it may have been a digital distraction for the retail community. While retailers should be focusing on selling things in their store, in recent years, many have been focusing on selling their store app download."

One aspect of the IoT can't be ignored: its rapid expansion. The IoT is expected to grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020, which would represent an almost 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009, according to data from Gartner. It is important to note that the Gartner statistics do not include widely used technologies today such as PCs, tablets and smartphones, so there will likely be plenty of devices embedded in retail stores that most consumers haven't interacted with yet.

Automating The Creation Of Product Descriptions

The IoT is not the only technology movement that could drastically change how retailers do business in the long term. Linguastat has released the Marquee solution, which enables retailers to create automated product descriptions for every item in their online product catalog.

Based on Natural Language Generation technologies, Marquee uses an algorithm to dynamically generate product descriptions optimized for SEO and SEM capabilities. Retailers can simply implement the product features and specifications into the system, which will automatically create product descriptions designed to convey a different message each time. The solution eliminates the cost and time taken for an employee to manually write product descriptions that might not even properly explain a product's effectiveness.

Retailers can't often write very much of their own content so they use what the manufacturer gave them, if the manufacturer gave them anything at all," said John Pierre, Cofounder and CEO of Linguastat. "Sometimes the manufacturer can write good content, but the problem is that it's not unique and everybody is using that same manufactured description."

"Retailers can't often write very much of their own content so they use what the manufacturer gave them, if the manufacturer gave them anything at all," said John Pierre, Cofounder and CEO of Linguastat. "Sometimes the manufacturer can write good content, but the problem is that it's not unique and everybody is using that same manufactured description. From a Google perspective, they don't like to rank large paragraphs of duplicate content, so they'll give that ranking to the manufacturer."

Customers searching for a product online may notice that lots of product descriptions are the same, preventing any specific retailer from standing out. Retailers can guide the user to a purchasing decision more effectively by creating a conversational, story-based approach when comparing products, according to Pierre.

"If you read through the comparison engine that's really where our machine understanding shines, Pierre said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. "We're able to understand what features are important, how much they're important by and why it makes a difference in the consumers life at the end of the day."

Leave No Stone Unturned

The future of retail certainly looks bright as more next-gen technologies enter the scene, but it is still up to retailers to seek out and implement them properly in order to reap the benefits. With a growing number of channels and distractions along their purchase journey, shoppers can be diverted from one brand to another at a moment's notice. Retailers that win this battle will recognize the importance of engaging with shoppers along all points of the process. Retailers that embrace each point of the shopping journey and implement new and relevant technologies will have a golden opportunity to stay ahead of the competition.

About Mozu


Brought to you by Volusion, Inc., Mozu is the commerce platform for today's omni-channel marketplace. With Mozu, retailers can manage their commerce, content and customer experience across every channel, on any platform, around the world. Designed with an API-first architecture and built to meet the demands of the modern consumer, Mozu provides truly limitless commerce to an ever-changing business landscape. To learn more, visit mozu.com and @MozuCommerce.