Customizing the Online Shopping Experience – Unbxd

Online shoppers don’t have to be tech-savvy to know what they want. If an ecommerce website doesn’t provide them with a compelling and intuitive shopping experience, they leave it without a second thought. That’s why it has become crucial for the ecommerce companies to entice them from the moment they first land on the homepage.

To be successful in the long-term, ecommerce marketers need to invest in creating customized experiences for consumers. Fortunately, e-commerce personalization softwares are there to do this for them. There are many such softwares present in the market, where one such solution, Unbxd is also finding its place.

Unbxd was incepted in the year 2011 when the ecommerce industry was growing rapidly in India. Realizing that search & navigation was a difficult problem for ecommerce companies, Pavan Sondur & Prashant Kumar started working on Unbxd ecommerce search. After understanding that a lot of ecommerce companies were not focusing on the experience that they provide to online shoppers, other products like Navigation, merchandising and insights were also introduced.

How it Works!

Unbxd understands the context of an ecommerce query and delivers the most relevant search results. The search is personalized for each user in terms of the brands, categories and the price range he/she prefers. This, in turn, has helped ecommerce companies in increasing conversions and improving overall shopping experience for their users.

The SmartEngage platform used by Unbxd is an on-site product discovery tool that helps connect customers to the right products. The various other products are:

Search

Relevant & personalized site-search helps users to find the products they’re looking for.  Along with high relevance and personalisation per user, Unbxd’s search has rich auto-complete, spell check and facets etc.

Navigation

Web dashboard gives the ability of dynamic navigation to create merchandising rules.

Merchandising

With Merchandising, ecommerce managers can easily create rules to promote certain products and brands in search results. They can also decide the placement of products in the search and navigation results.

Insights and Reporting

Unbxd’s Insights offers a comprehensive view of key data like top searches, top selling products, conversion funnel per query and much more.

Upcoming Products

Currently, Unbxd’s team is working on the beta launch of a new product i.e. product recommendations. Few companies are already using this product and more are expected to come on board in the next month for beta launch of the product. Product recommendation will allow any ecommerce company to start offering personalised product recommendation widgets quickly and easily. This will include widgets like ‘Recommended for you’, ‘Similar Products’, ‘People who bought this also bought’, etc.

The company is also working on fully automated version of merchandising dashboard through which ecommerce merchandisers will be able to control their merchandising efforts without any developer intervention.

With a focus to serve large markets, the founders also have plans to open an office and begin operations in the US in the next few months.

Raising Funds

Unbxd has raised money twice. The seed funding came from Indian Angel Network and Series A round from Inventus Capital and IDG Venture Partners in October 2013. The founders aim to build a team that can take Unbxd from a young disruptive startup in India to a global business to be reckoned with.

Marketing Initiatives

In coming months, the company will focus a large part of its Sales & Marketing efforts on the APAC and the US markets. It will be attending and sponsoring key events in these markets and plans to approach medium and large ecommerce companies to get them on board.

Clients & Competition

Unbxd is working with some medium and large ecommerce companies like Caratlane, Zansaar, Trendin, Redmart etc. It is in the process of integrating its solutions with other major ecommerce players as well that will be live in coming months.

Unbxd faces competition in the International market from Google Commerce Search, Endeca and Baynote. Certain large companies build their own search and personalisation systems.