The FoundIt! origin story and why we believe every eCommerce retailer will become intent-led
For the last 20 years, this has been the eCommerce playbook…
Get your catalogue online, be the best at paid acquisition to drive traffic, and add ever more range to grow topline revenue.
This model worked incredibly well. We saw eCommerce grow from virtually nothing to become an indispensable retail channel. Chris (my co-founder) and I built a world-class SEO agency, Greenlight, helping retailers achieve acquisition supremacy and further driving the success of this model.
The way our customers shop has changed
But we’re not living in the same world today. It’s a hackneyed, but true cliche that customers expect every experience to be like Netflix and are intolerant of poor sites. They shop for products, not brands, and quickly bounce out of our sites if they don’t immediately find what they are looking for. And while retail has always been tough, we now face competition from every direction for the fewer customers that are in the market.
Retailers that are still running the same playbook too often have to resort to discounting to hit their trading forecast. And as we all know when discounting becomes our main strategy we are effectively buying revenue, which is a fool’s game – but we have to do it anyway as we can’t see an alternative.
Chris and I saw the writing on the wall as far back as 2018.
We thought there had to be a better way of building an eCommerce business that didn’t rely on acquisition and making customers fight through confusing site experiences.
Our insight was startlingly simple.
Instead of focusing on traffic volume and product range, what if we could actually understand what our customers were trying to achieve?
If we knew our customers’ intent it would change everything.
We could build site experiences centred on the way our customers shop, not how our catalogues are organised.
Our first job was to truly understand customer intent
This would be the bedrock of the new playbook. We needed to take the deluge of data that exists inside and outside large retailers and convert it into usable customer intent signals. So we got to work and built a first-of-its-kind retail customer intent engine.
The second job was to understand how these intent signals could be applied to a ‘standard’ eCommerce site to start to reshape it to match how customers wanted to discover, find, and buy products. We saw that the answer was to ensure that every product in a catalogue was ‘findable’. So we built our first product enrichment application that sat on top of the intent engine which attributes every product in a range with intent-led data, and which keeps that data current no matter how seasons, trends, or range changes.
The other applications necessary to build an intent-led site experience naturally followed
Curated navigation centred on customer intent, site search that bridges the gap between customer language and catalogue speak, product pages that inspire related discovery, and site architecture that automatically applies intent to every organic search term.
The result is a comprehensive intent-led commerce platform that completely changes the game for large retailers.
Instead of winning through acquisition supremacy and choice, they can now win by leveraging the depth of their data to deliver contextual customer experiences that almost magically cater for what the customer is trying to achieve.
The results go far beyond higher conversion and increased revenue per customer
By providing stronger, more relevant experiences we foster higher loyalty and lifetime value. And we create a world where we have valuable relationships with our customers that don’t rely on transactional discounting.
Today, our platform is used by market-leading retailers like M&S, B&Q, and Neiman Marcus to help them deliver intent-led site experiences that better match how their customers want to shop.
We have a big vision for the future
We see that every large retailer will adopt an intent-led commerce operating model to play and win in the new retail marketplace. Our goal is to play a key role in making this a reality.
So if you’re interested in learning more about how to become intent-led in your business give me or Chris a shout.
Here’s to a brighter, intent-led future for retail.