Pavan Sondur, Co-Founder & CEO The year was 2011—a time of customer acquisition and supply chain challenges in the e-commerce industry— when it dawned upon Pavan Sondur and his colleague Prashant Kumar, that when it came to online product search it was easier for shoppers to find products on Google than on the websites selling them. The idea came in a jiffy to develop a platform similar to Google’s search engine, capable of assisting marketers and merchandisers to connect shoppers with the suitable products—and so, Unbxd was born. In a world where Google holds sway over the search engine market, the team behind Unbxd hopes to reach similar stellar heights by streamlining the deluge of information in retail. “At Unbxd, we have focused our product development efforts towards finding a fine balance between being machine-driven and leveraging merchandisers’ unique insights,” begins Sondur, Co-founder and CEO, Unbxd.
It’s not an easy feat to enhance product discovery and win over today’s customers, who are fussy about user experience. This is where relevancy runs the show. Unbxd ensures that the online shoppers never have bad shopping experiences. The firm uses the power of data sciences by digging into reams of shopping data to create an intelligent, self-learning, and user-centric product discovery technology.
The firm’s engineers and data scientists have built an ‘e-commerce context-aware’ data platform—Unbxd Site Search—that offers a highly relevant and personalized end-to-end search experience. “Unbxd helps retailers convert shoppers into buyers, by leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms to understand shopper intent, and deliver relevant, optimized, and personalized results to shoppers,” explains Sondur. In addition, Unbxd’s Merchandising Workbench accelerates data-driven merchandising with multiple user-friendly product promotion tools that enhance the visibility of products.
Unbxd helps retailers convert
shoppers into buyers, by
leveraging advanced machine
learning algorithms to
understand shopper intent
As merchandisers are increasingly subscribing to the game-changing aspect of personalization, Unbxd offers them extensive support with its Product Recommendations solution. This fully ‘widgetized’ solution offers personalized recommendations by analyzing shoppers’ viewing and purchase history, wisdom of the crowd, or relevance of the product being viewed. “Unbxd’s Merchandising Workbench also allows merchandisers to target recommendations to specific segments of shoppers,” adds Sondur.
Unfazed by the competition, Unbxd has grown organically by organizing heaps of data and making it accessible to merchandisers—much in a Google way. “Handling of typos, synonyms, and stemmed words all happens out of the box. Merchandisers also have control over the search experience, whether it is for brand tie-ups, seasonal promotions, highlighting new arrivals, promoting high margin products, or inventory clearance,” explains Sondur.
The company’s innovative platform today powers over 1.5 billion interactions every month, across leading retailers like Ashley Furniture, Express, rue21, ibSupply, and Burkes Outlet. “ibSupply grew Site Search revenue by 40 percent with Unbxd’s SaaS platform. We’re meeting our customers’ needs better and faster. This partnership helps us focus on our core businesses,” says Harley Thomas, Sr. Director of Corporate and Digital Marketing at ibSupply, one of the U.S.’ largest B2B Office and Industrial Supplies retailers.
As the chasm between customer experience and data driven personalization becomes narrower, Sondur stresses, “The bar for customer experience is very high. If the customer experience is poor, shoppers will abandon you in no time.” Towards its goal of delivering a smooth-sailing customer journey, Unbxd is currently piloting a novel platform that powers relevancy, personalization, and merchandising for category pages. “Shoppers are not all the same, so why should they see the same category pages? We are very excited about the potential impact of this product on the industry,” says Sondur.
