Servicing product discovery

The retail trade is already pretty well served with tools and services to help the selling and stock control process, but there is always room for another one, such as the new Product Discovery Platform, Sidekick, from Vendaria Media, Inc.

Thisis a cloud-based platform incorporating guided selling logic and a rapidly growing database of use-based product attributes across millions of SKUs in hundreds of retail categories, including Home Improvement, Consumer Electronics, Office Products, Sports, Outdoor, Club Stores, Toys, Performance Apparel, and others. For now, of course, most of these SKUs are targeting the US domestic market, but as many of these products have international markets as well, the service has obvious potential for expansion and localisation.

It is licensed as a turn-key solution to retailers, and is managed, hosted, and maintained by Vendaria. Designed to complement rather than replace current retailer technology infrastructure, it aims to create a uniform product discovery experience across all shopper touch points.

There are three versions of the service. Sidekick Pro is designed to exploit company-provided mobile devices or BYOD, with a view to making every retailer sales associate a product expert for all SKUs in every product category. It includes lead generation features that capture every customer conversation as well as other capabilities that increase sales conversion, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity.

The Sidekick Mobile version is designed to guide shoppers to the products they seek using their smartphones and tablets. It integrates into retailer’s existing transaction systems at the `add to cart’ stage. The third version is Sidekick Web, plays the same role to the Mobile version for desktop and laptop users computers.

“Mobile adoption by consumers has exacerbated the challenges associated with shoppers trying to research and educate themselves about the most relevant products based on their personal preferences. Solving the ‘product discovery’ problem across all customer touch points may be the single most important future battleground for retailers,” said Vendaria CEO Jennifer Hurshell. “We found that 95% of mobile shoppers prefer a product discovery experience that they equate to conversing with a product expert, one that filters individual preferences through natural language terms, and that enables them to confidently purchase the most relevant product for their specific needs. Until now, multichannel retailers had no mobile tools to provide such an experience for shoppers or to assist their sales associates.”

Sidekick is also able to capture the data generated by customer interaction with the system, which can then be fed into analytics tools that help improve retailer decision-making in merchandising, custom product development, assortment planning, pricing, and employee productivity.

The platform is also fully extensible and includes third party services such as ratings and reviews, manufacturer and retailer rebate and incentive processing, utility energy savings and rebates, competitive price comparison, loyalty plan integration, re-targeting and suggestive selling integration.