Category: Product Discovery

Given today’s vast amounts of data and user queries, making e-commerce search engines more efficient is an extremely challenging problem. In part 1 of this blog, I wrote about why e-commerce businesses must explore entity extraction as a way to increase the relevance of their search results. This follow-up blog goes into how e-commerce companies can put entity extraction and machine learning (ML) into practice, and some advancements that Unbxd brought to this area in the last year. What is entity extraction? Here’s a primer: consider the sentence, “Cindy bought two Levi’s…

Online Shopping and Global ecommerce In 2017, US ecommerce revenue was $447B , or 36% of total retail revenue. That means that Americans buy at least one in every three items online. And the most common way most shoppers try to find what they’re looking for, not surprisingly, is search. Are ecommerce search engines doing the best that they can? However, even the top 50 grossing US ecommerce websites don’t do a great job supporting some common types of search queries, resulting in irrelevant products or zero results. For example, when…

Online merchandising tools can help make life easier for merchandisers and marketers. They simplify boost and bury campaigns creation, enable pinning and slotting, and display product ranking for search queries and pages. However, the data behind why products rank the way they do hasn’t been readily available — until now. We’re excited to announce the availability of this data in Ranking Insights. What is Ranking Insights? Ranking Insights is an enhancement to the merchandising functionality of Unbxd Search and Unbxd Browse. Ranking Insights provides data behind the product ranking for…

Toys ’R’ Us announced earlier this month that they were closing their doors after 70 years in business, ending an era of timely Christmas bargains and birthday toy-store visit traditions. Amidst last minute scrambles for discounts, nostalgic videos of how it all began, and discussions over what’s left to salvage, the story remains the same — online beat retail yet again. We’ve heard the diatribe about innovation disrupting normalcy and changing how things are done in a hundred different contexts before. The industrial revolution made mass manufactured goods accessible and…

AI is touted as the next big thing in almost every industry. From agriculture to transport, there’s barely any industry that is yet to explore at least an aspect of artificial intelligence and how it can enhance it in some way. In the context of eCommerce specifically, the applications of AI go from bots and virtual assistants to its most widespread application — assisted product discovery. But what is product discovery and what role does AI play in simplifying it? Simply put, product discovery is the experience of easily finding…

One of the best ways to find the latest fashion trends is to walk into a store at the start of a new season. Almost every brand follows a similar layout — you have your discount racks at the back, the staple essentials in their usual places, and front and centre you have the latest styles and colours of the season. The ones that make it so much harder to walk by without adding them to your cart. It’s easier to resist if you’re closer to the end of the…

The story of how it all began at Unbxd, in Pavan’s words.  I’ve taken a decision to begin writing at an exciting time at Unbxd. We are growing really fast and have a great opportunity to solve some of the hardest problems software can solve. And, to solve them well. Today, Unbxd has grown its product portfolio to solve product discovery — every onsite interaction that visitors engage in to find products. We power all of them — search, browse, recommend on multiple devices. Our engine determines the most relevant set of products to…

Machine learning, AI, Deep Learning are trending buzzwords now. Especially with Site Search and Online Commerce. But, how do you tell that you need machine learning? How do you know that a particular solution has machine learning? Though the terms automation and machine learning are used interchangeably, the biggest difference between the two is that automation does not require any learning. Automation is all about using machines to automate what humans would otherwise do manually. For instance in E-commerce Site-Search, a good automation based solution will use past purchase information to…

61% of the 2.4 billion smartphone users on the planet reach for their mobile phones within five minutes of waking up.  Our latest report on mobile product discovery — based on 2 billion eCommerce interactions on our platform — revealed some interesting insights on how technology has impacted shopper purchasing behaviour on mobile. Here’s our take on what the data showed us. Fashion Already Winning on Mobile In early 2016, uber-luxury brand Burberry announced that more than half their eCommerce purchases happened on mobile. In fact, over the last five…