When retailers don’t have to worry about stocking shelves and clearing room in the back for more inventory, how many items should they put up for sale? Before the age of eCommerce, this is was nonsensical question, but now consumers can browse through hundreds of millions of products in Amazon’s near-limitless digital catalog.
However, what good is it to retailers to list items ad infinitum? For that matter, what good is it to consumers?
PJ Worsfold, chief innovation officer at Shoes.com, told The Wall Street Journal that the retailer understands the eCommerce experience can seem overwhelming for consumers at times. And while limiting the number of product choices by scrapping inventory is an extreme solution to the problem, Worsfold explained how Shoes.com has partnered with Sentient Technologies Holdings, a tech firm specializing in artificial intelligence systems, to make the process of finding the perfect flats more user-friendly.
As of Tuesday (Nov. 17), Shoes.com has been using a “visual filter” system provided by Sentient Technologies that helps refine the retailer’s expansive product catalog based on interests the algorithm predicts based on past choices. Instead of existing filters that let shoppers search based on discrete product parameters – the height of a heel or the width of an instep, for example – the visual filter takes a more intuitive approach. After selecting one of several shoes from an introductory array, Shoes.com customers are then presented with similar types of shoes based on the brand, pattern, color, fit and design of the originally selected item.
“Sentient Aware™ for eCommerce offers retailers a revolutionary new shopping experience, one that provides customers a simpler, more efficient and fun way of discovering products,” Antoine Blondeau, CEO of Sentient Technologies, said in a statement. “Our technology can adapt to many different types of industries, from shoes and apparel to furniture, housewares and automobiles. We’re excited to have Shoes.com as the first retailer to adopt our visual intelligence technology and look forward to expanding it to other types of retail inventory.”
While Worsfold, Shoes.com and Sentient Technologies will have to wait for more data to determine the success of their predictive experiment, the attempt is a necessary one to solve an age-old dilemma in sales: the paradox of choice.
As explained by the Harvard Business Review, how customers ultimately choose their purchases and how satisfied they are with them are two distinct attributes. As a result, a larger selection of items almost undoubtedly means that the average shopper will be able to find something that he or she was initially looking for: the “objective outcome.” However, the larger selection means that some customers feel as if there was a better item out there that they didn’t have the chance to see and didn’t end up buying, and their opinions about their purchase suffer accordingly: the “subjective outcome.”
Smart search filters like the one employed by Sentient Technologies may be able to sidestep this issue. By presenting customers with a semi-curated list of items they’re more likely to be interested in, retailers avoid letting their shoppers float adrift in a sea of infinite choices. Just like in-store employees in multi-story department stores often offer idling shoppers assistance, a predictive and adaptive search feature can be shoppers’ little digital guides through retailers’ often exhaustive catalogs.
Adaptability might be the critical component of artificially intelligent search functions, though – Worsfold told The WSJ that Shoes.com’s algorithm becomes more refined the more users interact with it, which opens up a world of possibilities in personalization, especially if retailers start pooling data on consumer behaviors for cross-brand information access. Then, AI-enabled searches might function more as personal shopping assistants, able to pick out the perfect dress or shoes based on past purchases and completely sidestepping the issue of choice paralysis once and for all.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More