London, 12 May 2025: Top retailers looking for growth are broadening their viewpoints from focussing mostly on how to drive ‘more’ acquisition and range, to asking a new type of question.
What if we knew what customers wanted? What would we do differently?
It’s a view that draws into sharp focus, the struggle customers have with the online shopping experience and finding the right products in the noise of 000’s.
Something that’s widely known to be turning online shopping into an uninspiring chore, and driving shoppers to exit sites prematurely in frustration, and hurting retailers conversion rates.
B&Q, John Lewis and leading US luxury player Neiman Marcus, are the latest to tackle this challenge, by partnering with intent led commerce pioneer, FoundIt!. A platform that helps retailers make every product findable by creating contextual shopping journeys based on customer intent. Thus helping more of them to find and buy what they want.
An issue of scale
According to FoundIt! CEO Warren Cowan “Sites have seen massive growth in their ranges. Particularly those who have embraced marketplace. It’s making ranges almost impossible for shoppers to work with, and it’s only going to get tougher.”
It highlights the crucial weakness in the range growth strategy, which on the one hand maintains competitiveness and grows wallet share, but at the same time impacts the relative performance of the whole site, as more customers struggle to shop and fewer convert.
Being intent led is the solution
The key to conquering this shopping fatigue and growing conversion, lies in retailers understanding intent, and using that data to reshape the experience around the customer rather than catalogue. This helps shoppers to find & buy more easily despite the scale of the product range, and the difficulty of using online interfaces and screens where help is not so close to hand.
“That’s what made FoundIt! a the clear choice of partner as we moved towards optimising a large, complex marketplace,” says Sam Purdie. SEO Lead at the UK’s leading DIY retailer B&Q, who over the last 12 months have scaled their range to over 1.5 million products, via their evolution to marketplace.
Curating navigation at scale
And it’s not just the home and DIY space that’s taken this issue to task in such a way. Fashion and luxury are too.
Key to the initiative is use of FoundIt’s curated navigation product. A service that listens to customer intent signals, and curates visual prioritised navigation on every page, to better support the context and mission of the customer, and make the things they most want, easier to find and buy.
“With FoundIt we’ve flipped navigation on its head” explains Lindsey Cates, Group Director of Product, at US Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus.
“In-store, we curate selections, and guide customers personally. Online, we lose that human touch. Our challenge is to replicate that level of personalization digitally. FoundIt! keeps the experience focussed on the customers, not our catalogue.”
As retailers continue to scale their online propositions while navigating the unforgiving macro environment, more and more retailers are looking to their experience as a key differentiator from competitors, with John Lewis being the latest signing to the FoundIt! Banner.
As competition abounds, acquisition channels saturate, and when customers increasingly expect everything to work like netflix, ecommerce retail shifting towards intent led commerce is truly becoming a core fundamental in the way to do sell online.
