ShopperAI is bringing the digital footprint into physical retail stores
ShopperAI is bringing the digital footprint into physical retail stores
Online marketplaces track our every move - it’s time stores in the offline world have access to the same data
As more of us shop via the internet, retailers and online marketplaces have become experts in monitoring our behaviors and engaging with us in behavioral economics and strategic online marketing campaigns to convert their sales.
It is a benefit that is severely lacking in physical retail stores that still rely on old-fashioned promotions and only have cashier data to track their success or failures.
ShopperAI has developed a patented technology to integrate within a shop’s existing CCTV infrastructure to track the hand movements of physical shoppers - tracking their struggle rank and intent rank to help identify shopper habits and desires to best complete the entire sales cycle and improve the store’s success.
“Most of our metrics are based on time, shopper journey, the hand, and the touch,” said Lanor Daniel, who co-founded ShopperAI alongside Sivan Yosef. “With online, you need to monitor touches just like monitoring clicks - think how many things we can learn from clicks during a user journey online. We are learning the same thing from a user journey offline.”
ShopperAI tracks seven variables to monitor the physical journey of shoppers in stores. Primarily, it focuses on the actual hands of shoppers to identify their movements and intentions. Using qualifiers like jewelry, wrinkles, size, and movement patterns, the technology can spot the sex and gender of the person and best understand that shopper’s specific needs and desires. According to its site, it already has partners in the form of Mobileye Founder and CEO Amnon Shashua, BRM Group, and Eyal Ravid, CEO of Israeli supermarket chain Victory.
“If we take this equivalent to the online world, you have so many tools like Google Analytics and SimilarWeb that help you to optimize the website and personalize it. What do retailers and brands have?... Once they realize there is this data center they can use, they can be much more productive.”
The company is GDPR-compliant, does not track faces, and all the information is stored on the retailer’s local systems. ShopperAI doesn’t even get the raw data - receives an SQL (Structured Query Language) to help it with its diagnostics and to better understand shopper journeys and retail categories.
Daniel founded ShopperAI with Yosef after being diagnosed with Coeliac disease at 28. Her immune system started attacking her own body’s tissues whenever she ate gluten, so she immediately had to change to a gluten-free diet - and with it, her shopping habits entirely. Going to the store, it became overwhelming to try to find the specific items to suit her needs, and it was made only more heartbreaking to learn that gluten-free products cost significantly more than their alternatives. Unfortunately, the stores at the time did not have the knowledge of their own items to help her with her needs.
“If you were to tell me four or five years ago that I would talk as a CEO of ShopperAI, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she told CTech. ”I understood that there is a huge gap between what shoppers really need and want right now, and the knowledge that brands and retailers have. What I realized is that retailers want to be better - they really do.”
Typically, physical stores would rely on research conducted by firms like Nielsen to best understand the insights of their customers. This could rack up costs in the hundreds of thousands - but ShopperAI can help stores with a cost between $2,500 and $4,000 per month per category per store. It argues that this is more beneficial to stores than competitors like Trax or Trigo due to its patents that offer the tech at a lower cost via existing infrastructure. The service also offers a dashboard with organized information about ‘store clusters’ helping retailers understand their customers and their differing needs across different shopping categories and regions. According to Daniel, every single pilot that was tested eventually became a year-long contract.
The company is preparing for its Series A after already raising $2 million and $5 million in previous rounds as it gears up to penetrate the global market. It already has customers in Israel and although Daniel couldn’t disclose which manufacturing or retail companies exactly were using ShopperAI, she promised one in the future was “number two in the world” in prominence. “The first round was for technology, research, knowledge, and creating the algorithm. The second round is for product because once you have all this research you need to choose the features that are scalable,” Daniel explained.
More people shop online than ever before, but even Amazon’s foray into physical stores with its AmazonGO venture proves that physical stores are here to stay. The mission now is to help them compete against online tricks and trades that far exceed their abilities. “The brands and retailers we are talking with, we’re talking their language,” Daniel concluded. “I speak retail and I speak retail needs and I think to be humble is so important once you go into an industry that is not tech savvy like other industries. We are here to help.”
First published: 11:57, 28.09.23
