The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about notable transformations in the retail industry. To stay ahead of the game and thrive, retailers must embrace these changes and incorporate inventive retail solutions. Integrating such solutions has become indispensable for retailers to stay competitive and successful in the present business scenario. These solutions can enhance the customer experience, boost efficiency, optimize data management, facilitate e-commerce integration, and reduce expenses.
Introducing GrapheneHC, a groundbreaking merchandising platform from Advanced Commerce that aims to empower retailers with comprehensive tools for enhancing their online store’s merchandising. This enterprise-grade platform offers numerous innovative features packaged in a user-friendly, intuitive interface. GrapheneHC is set to revolutionize the merchandising industry, surpassing several existing platforms in terms of speed, functionality, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, and establishing itself as the new standard for merchandising.
Unique Offering for Reatilers
Traditionally, most merchandising platforms use a simplistic “boost or bury” approach, which prioritizes popular items and pushes less popular items to the bottom of the page. However, this approach assumes that all customers have the same preferences, making it challenging for new items to gain popularity. Advanced Commerce’s platform, on the other hand, allows retailers to use a range of attributes, such as popularity, margin, availability, trending, and price, to determine product sequencing. This is computationally complex, and many technologies in the market rely on simple merchandising techniques. However, Advanced Commerce has overcome this complexity and can execute these complex algorithms quickly in real-time, resulting in page load speeds of less than 100ms on average.
About the Leader
André Brown is a highly experienced and knowledgeable professional in the online visual merchandising sector. He co-founded Attraqt and served as its CEO for 15 years, growing the company from a startup to the leading merchandising platform in Europe. In 2018, André left Attraqt to focus on his new venture, Advanced Commerce. Today, his company’s flagship product, GrapheneHC, represents the culmination of nearly 20 years of experience and four years of intensive work. André has leveraged his deep expertise in the merchandising industry to develop a unique, market-leading platform that outperforms the competition in terms of speed, breadth of functionality, and price. GrapheneHC is quickly establishing itself as the new gold standard for online merchandising, search, and personalization, all in one easy-to-use platform.
The Industry Overview
The paradox of choice states the more choice we have as consumers, the harder it is to make a decision. With the rise of the digital age, the removal of physical limitations such as floor space has led to an abundance of choices online. To increase revenue and provide excellent service, retailers have expanded their product range even further, exacerbating the challenge for consumers to make a choice. Online merchandising seeks to alleviate this paradox by controlling the product display sequence, presenting customers with items that they are more likely to prefer rather than showing every item in the catalog, which is impractical. As shoppers have short attention spans, retailers need to be strategic in determining which products to prioritize in each section of their online store.
Just as with online stores, brick and mortar stores also engage in careful merchandising to ensure the right mix of products based on factors such as price, stock level, and popularity are displayed throughout the store. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the need for such online merchandising strategies. With lockdowns and ongoing restrictions preventing physical store visits, there has been a massive shift towards online sales, leading to a 40% year-on-year increase in online orders, according to statistics cited by Andre. As retailers have come to rely more heavily on their online channels, they are recognizing the importance of effective online merchandising to manage the customer experience and prevent lost sales. Merchandising efforts in online stores have a cascading effect on metrics such as conversion rates, average order value, volume of orders, and even returns and cancellations.
Aligning the Idea with Innovation
GrapheneHC, Advanced Commerce’s merchandising platform, empowers retailers with the necessary tools to take control of their product display sequencing. Its user-friendly interface is designed to be operated by merchandisers themselves without the need for complex rules or technical team involvement. Merchandisers can set strategies for every part of their site, including search, product listing pages, and recommendations, and customize them for each user. This platform allows for instant changes, enabling merchandising teams to be responsive, proactive, and daring in their strategies. As a result, retailers can improve their conversion rates, average order value, and overall customer experience.
GrapheneHC stands out from other merchandising platforms because it does not rely on caching to achieve fast load times. Instead, it applies changes instantly and in real-time without the need to recache or reload anything, eliminating significant delays. This feature allows merchandisers to be super responsive to real-life events and adjust their strategies accordingly without any delay. As a result, retailers can keep up with changing market trends and customer preferences to improve their sales and overall business performance.
Focusing on Result Since Inception
Advanced Commerce has experienced significant growth since the launch of GrapheneHC, which can be attributed to the platform’s powerful functionality and broad range of features. During product demonstrations, potential customers often reach a turning point where they recognize the platform’s potential to transform their online store. The company’s goal was to create an easy-to-use platform that could apply merchandising strategies to any part of an ecommerce site, including search results. The team found that the standard search engines available on the market did not have the necessary functionality or capacity to meet their needs, so they built their own search engine from scratch.
Message for Budding Entrepreneurs
André has a lot of knowledge to offer to upcoming leaders, but the most significant advice he would like to give is to believe in yourself. He states, “Whatever it is you are doing, you will at some stage be asking others to believe in what you are doing so you have to believe in it yourself. My belief is we can be the industry standard to which other search, recommendation, personalisation and merchandising platforms are compared to.”
He also adds, “We can’t control the competition, all we can control is ourselves so we just focus on being the very best we can be.”
Future Aspirations
The partnership between Dressipi and Advanced Commerce marks a significant milestone in the realm of online merchandising for fashion retailers, which excites André greatly. The integration of Dressipi’s top-tier real-time personalization technology for fashion and apparel, and Advanced Commerce’s gold standard for search and merchandising, into GrapheneAI is anticipated to yield impressive outcomes. André has discussed the partnership on numerous occasions and noted that he foresees Advanced Commerce expanding and cementing GrapheneHC as the leading, go-to merchandising platform for retailers, tech partners, and agencies.
André sees Advanced Commerce continuing to grow and establishing GrapheneHC as the gold standard, go-to merchandising platform for retailers, agencies and tech partners alike. He asserts,
“We have a strong and growing network of tech partners and agencies that we will continue to grow and we have an extremely healthy pipeline of retailers that is consistently growing.”
