Boost Your Shopify Sales: How To Use AI For More Conversions — Nikolay Gushchin | Why Personalization Boosts Online Sales, How AI Lifts Conversions On Shopify,

Boost Your Shopify Sales: How To Use AI For More Conversions — Nikolay Gushchin | Why Personalization Boosts Online Sales, How AI Lifts Conversions On Shopify, Speaker 2: This episode is sponsored by Ahrefs, the all-in-one marketing intelligence platform trusted by SEO professionals, content creators, and digital marketers around the world. Whether you're doing keyword research, checking backlinks, or analyzing competitors, Ahrefs gives you the tools to make smarter marketing decisions. Explore what Ahrefs can do at Ahrefs.com. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to find out how you can use AI to increase your conversions. Now AI is on everyone's list right now and obviously there is a lot of ways to increase your conversions and we want to dive a little bit deeper into this. Joining me on the show today is Niko. He's a software engineer and founder of an AI-powered Shopify extension. He has more than eight years in tech, and he's built solutions for major brands like M&S and Colgate. Nikolay specializes in personalization technology that helps online stores increase sales. So we want to find out more about this, and I'd like to welcome him to the show. Hi, Niko. How are you today? Speaker 1: Hello, Claus. I'm doing great. And how about you? Speaker 2: I'm very well, and I'm excited to dive right into it. Now, first question, and a lot of people might know or might think they know what personalized shopping is, but I want to hear it from you. What do you understand as personalized shopping when we talk about eCommerce? Speaker 1: Yeah, personalized shopping, from my experience, and again, I'm talking more from an engineer kind of way, is the way how a store adapts to you, so how it predicts your essentially next move and to what you're planning essentially to buy or to go through and predicts your behavior and analyzes you. Speaker 2: Now, if we talk about online stores, personalization matters. Tell me what you see in the market, what actually doesn't work well. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's quite a lot of things that are going on in the market that does not work well. And primarily, I would say that some of them are how people do recommendations because people are just constantly just going through Amazon list-like recommendations, like similar or bought like that and stuff like that. And it is just, you know, I see them everywhere and they're just not a tailored list, just stuff that pretty much is the top of the list inside of our chain of sales. Speaker 2: Now, AI app store owners, We're recommending products and I think that's a very big topic where AI can really work and that's something you were busy with developing something to solve this problem and to make it better. So tell me how you came on the idea and what is the outcome at the end of the day? Speaker 1: Yes, so I come to this idea from, again, my experience being a software engineer with, like, again, as you said, more than eight years of experience. And I've been working with quite big companies, and I've seen how the process of actually, like, implementing new things works. And my idea was to come into it was not only about AI, but also about making the workflow for the store owners. So essentially, like Shopify from large to small scale better. And how it does is that essentially it would be a plug and play for you. You go into it, you go to recommendations, you create them, and then it's where the AI takes part. It tailors it based on the orders you already have. It checks what items work best for each other and not just, you know, as a set of the list. And so that's basically it. Speaker 2: Talk me through the user journey. So if somebody said you work with huge brands, obviously, there's a huge development process. And in Shopify, there's a lot of out-of-the-box solutions out there. So talk me about the user experience from A to Z on using or basically experience AI with recommendations. Speaker 1: Yes. So, experience from using AI from data-setting recommendations is essentially you go to an application, you install it, and so it just goes to creating recommendations. You add the pages to the page and to the homepage, and at that point, our AI takes part and creates a list of recommended products for each one. You can then go and manually tailor if you do not want to see that product with another specific one and stuff like that. You can customize how they would look and feel. And, as I said, it should work pretty much out of the box because, as I mentioned, I was working with major stakeholders and I know from experience that small bumps can majorly impact actual decision-making process and actually getting things done. So, I focus quite a lot on making the journey as smooth as possible and as fast as possible. Speaker 2: Talk to me about these bumps. What can it be? What can basically break the user experience? Speaker 1: Yeah, so very cool. There was a point where I was again working with a big company. I would not tell names because, you know, and this and stuff. But so there was a process where we have been trying to do an A-B test on the first page of the store. And while we have pretty much already done with creating, you know, the code, the huge widget that would bring millions of dollars, pounds, whatever in revenue. We had one major problem that it was below the fold, and because of it, people were not seeing it as much. And it is like such a small change to move it up, but such a major political debate on actually getting there. And again, it took us probably months and months to actually resolve it. Speaker 2: That's an interesting insight. I mean, it's below the fold, sort of best practice to have it above the fold. The bigger the company is, the more complicated it becomes, this kind of decision-making process. Speaker 1: Yeah, because there are so many teams working on different types of products. You know, all the content they're trying to show, their vision from designer teams, they have their workflows, and just getting it all together is, yeah, is a complicated part. And that's why I, like myself, like more to work with small-scale businesses, because they operate quite a lot faster. They do not need to take, like, make those huge decisions, and they, like, are not operating, like, billions of numbers, you know. Speaker 2: Tell me about the experience working with smaller brands. That's something I think we never have really spoken on the show so far. What's your approach there? What's the communication like? What's the feeling working with smaller brands that might not be as experienced in working with a software developer? Speaker 1: Yes, I guess there can be an issue for me working as a software developer because when I'm trying to communicate with people and usually it does not come to it because we already have the system that goes through the whole process and if I need it, probably we did something wrong. But if it comes to that, I'm trying to make an experience from the engineering side of things like how it works and how you may integrate it, how it may help you. Speaker 2: I want to go back to the AI recommendation. A lot of people might have a bit of concern that the AI is taking over completely. Is there a balance between having still manual input into a system and sort of balance it out? Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. There should be always a balance because AI cannot be like a magic wand that solves your problems just out of the go. It can get you a baseline of what you can do. It can get you a baseline of the list. So if we're talking, again, recommendations, You can get probably like a hundred product examples with recommendations for them, but there would be ones that just do not work and we need a manual input at that point. We need a manual know-how of a person who like operated the store, who knows their stock and who knows what goes with what just from their experience as well because, as I said, AI cannot be a magic wand. But there is also a major point that people do tend to make mistakes as well. Again, from my engineering experience, we have been doing a project for like 31% on the store. And there was a case where we introduced a tool that allowed people to essentially blacklist or whitelist. Like, you know, products based on anything. And there was a case where people whitelisted one brand for a brand launch and it was a major campaign. But in that same time, they blacklisted everything else and the site was not working for a day or two because of it. Properly, there was no, like, no buys just for that brand. Speaker 2: Let's take a moment to thank Ahrefs for their free web analytics tool, a free privacy-first analytics platform. It gives you a clear picture of your website activity, doesn't use cookies, and won't weight down your pages. It's incredible fast, easy to set up, and built by the same team behind one of the most trusted SEO tools in the world. Best of all, it's completely free and included in Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools Plan. Head over to ahrefs.com to sign up. You will find the link also in the show notes. Tell me about the process. How does the AI or your software know what to recommend? Speaker 1: Yes, so it is a process of us getting a model and looking through orders, essentially, and user experience throughout the site. So what they go over, like how much time they spend on product pages, and how much time they spend on going from one to another, and how many times items are bundled together in an order, essentially. So if usually it happens that users buy one item and a couple of them like another items, Usually, we try to recommend those items together or if they buy and then they turn for something else, we are also trying to mount it up. So as I said, it is a model that tries to take quite a lot of things into account. Speaker 2: What kind of tools do you have to basically motivate the potential buyer? Is there a discount there or is there any other kind of actions in there to motivate them? Speaker 1: Yes, obviously, it is discounts, it is UI, and I guess I can also do a small sneak peek into a major feature we are also working on, which would be a shop-to-look, which would be mostly through the UI of how it's presented to the user, where we would allow store owners to, again, go through recommendations and look which products go best with which products, and to recommend quite good Closing options is, again, using AI, but they can still use their manual know-how to go through it. And so using, again, new AI tools to create photorealistic images for the main image. Speaker 2: Very interesting. Shop the Look, I think that's something that might really, really work well on that. Are there specific shops or niche industries where this works very well? I mean, Shop the Look sounds for me like a parallel fashion industry might be something. Are there other experiences that you have or other examples? Speaker 1: I would say that right now we are working mainly on that because I have seen it as a major kind of missing spot on the Shopify market right now. So if you go to Shopify app store and you will try to search for Shopify. Applications are not so many of them focusing on that specific one. And definitely there won't be anyone that is creating images. So like if you give them some kind of shorts or whatever, it would definitely not create an image that is showing both of them together. You will need to hire a model, you will need to get the products, and you will need to do an actual photo set to get the main image. And what we are trying to do right now is to automate that process for you as a store owner so that it would be as seamless and as good-looking at the end as possible. Speaker 2: Who's your perfect customer? What kind of brand would work with you? Speaker 1: I would say that it is not such a big issue for us because we can work with any customers. I'm aiming to work with Shopify stores from small to big because, again, in my experience, personalization is such a major topic and such a major driver of revenue that no matter the scale, you should have a seamless experience of getting your store seen to people and getting people attention on your store because, again, there was a Forbes article that showed that 80% of people would recommend or would choose to buy on stores that have personalized experience. So I would say that we definitely are not discriminating based on the store size and would work with any customer from small to big. Speaker 2: You touched already a little bit on it, but I want to dive a little bit deeper into what's a typical onboarding process, what steps are involved, and how long does it take to get up and running? Speaker 1: Usually, it should not take more than a couple of hours. I would say a couple of hours is the worst-case scenario because it should be You are installing it, you are going through a process of adding this to your team and tailoring it to your, like, you know, styles, and then you go through the process of actually creating lists, and it automatically should create lists based on your path. Then you can tailor it, and again, use your know-how and your experience as a store owner to see if those are also good and if they go together well. Speaker 2: Is there any kind of homework that a merchant needs to do before they can get started? Speaker 1: No, I would say probably no. Speaker 2: Okay. How does your pricing structure work? Speaker 1: Yes, so we definitely have a pricing structure for right now. We are working basically on a subscription model and it is, I believe, 10 USD per month. We have a 14-day free trial and we are selling it only at, you know, I own the App Store Epidemium, so we will say it's now free-based subscription. Speaker 2: That sounds good. I want to dive a little bit deeper because you're so close to what's happening in the AI. What's your outlook for the next 12 months? How much will AI impact Shopify, the Shopify apps system, the user experience? Speaker 1: It is a very interesting topic and the answer to it is that everything will change and nothing will change because essentially new tools are being introduced pretty much on a daily basis. As you can see, new tools for developers, new tools for store owners. But at the same time, the core of eCommerce is not really going to change because of it. Because at the end of the day, it's still a process of people opening the store, people seeing the personalized experience, and so people buying items they need. Speaker 2: I want to touch a little bit of internationalization. So, is your app only available in English or do you support other languages? Speaker 1: Right now, we also support Spanish and we are planning to introduce other languages as well. Speaker 2: Okay, cool. Perfect. Cool. Niko, before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't touched on? Speaker 1: I would say probably no from my side. Is there anything that you're interested in? Speaker 2: No, I think you gave a really good overview of what AI recommendation can do and how it can help in getting more conversions there. And where can people go and find out more about you guys? Speaker 1: There is a Shopify store listed and I would say that this probably is the best place right now. Speaker 2: Okay. I will put the link in the show notes and you just want to click away. Nikolay, thanks so much for your time today to give us an overview about your app. A lot of people hopefully will go to your website, to the app store and try it out. I think it's a good app to really enforce AI and take the best out of AI and to increase your conversions. Thanks so much for your time today. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me here. Speaker 2: Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will also make it easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like, comment, and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just 5 minutes. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you to stay on top of your eCommerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends twice a week in your inbox, 100% free. Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. That's newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.