On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Arv Natarajan. Arj is the director of product at GroupBy, an eCommerce Search and Product Discovery SaaS technology provider that powers some of the largest B2B and B2C brands. We talk about driving revenue with better product discovery, adapting to modern, conversational search queries, building shopper trust through respectful customization, and so much more!
Arv is the Director of Product at GroupBy. He is a passionate entrepreneur currently responsible for product management. Arv has over eight years of experience in the oil and gas industry, including five years with WorleyParsons.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Arv Natarajan
“How quickly can this product come to me? Am I able to buy this online and pick it up in a store?” All of those fulfillment types are critical for the shoppers to understand how they can get that product.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show, the director of product at GroupBy, an Ecommerce search and product discovery SaaS. They are a technology provider that powers some of the largest B2B and B2C brands.
Arv, welcome to the show.
Arv Natarajan
Hi, Chase. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. First, I always like to shout out where we met and encourage people to go to conferences and meet people and network. So we met at ShopTalk in Vegas. And now we're here doing the podcast.
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, that was a good show, I think. And hopefully, we'll have another one next year. It's just as good.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. It's the power of networking, people. Get out there and do things.
So let's dive in.
So for those that are unaware… I obviously give the byline but what does GroupBy do? What's the product solve?
Arv Natarajan
Yeah. Our core mission is to help retailers make more money online. That's as simple as I can make it. So the way that we do that is by improving what we call the product discovery experience.
If you're not familiar with that, it's how your users, your shoppers find the products that you sell online. So it's through the search experience, they might browse to a certain landing page that you might have built through product recommendations. There are many ways that your shoppers might find your products.
We make that experience better for retailers. We maximize revenue and we make it easy to control that experience.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. And now obviously, one of the biggest players in the game these days is Shopify. So do you guys integrate with that platform?
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, that's right. At the end of the year last year, 2023, we released a Shopify app that uses our technology. So now this allows the smaller merchants, the mid-market merchants who are on Shopify or Shopify Plus to use GroupBy technology to power their search experience.
If you're familiar with the default Shopify search experience, it may not be as good as the different opportunities, I think, to improve and make it more personalized, make it more robust. That's where Groupby comes in. It's a one-click install. You upload your product catalog, and then you're off to the races.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Can we talk about... You mentioned discoverability. To me, that seems like this is something that might lend itself more towards merchants with a larger skew count.
Arv Natarajan
Yes and no. I think there's definitely a threshold at which point it becomes more useful. If you sell a few hundred products online, you sell 200 t-shirts or candles or whatever the smaller shop you might have, this kind of engine is probably overkill. You're using a Ferrari to go down to the corner store to buy a bottle of milk. That's not really what this is built for.
This is built for larger catalogs over a thousand products for sure to make it more useful. It's a premium product, and so it's something that will help you more if you have more products. If it's a bit more of a complex catalog, you have a lot of traffic coming to your website. That's absolutely where this product shines.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Can you walk me through some of the use cases or specific problems that this product can solve for me?
Arv Natarajan
Yeah. The biggest way or the best way for me to explain it is through some examples of how search engines work and how Ecommerce search engines have evolved over the years.
I mean, Ecommerce has been around for a few decades, right? Like since the start of the internet, people have been selling products online. And the search engines at the time for those websites worked in a way that really focused on keyword search.
If you are looking at a certain query, that is jeans, t-shirts, whatever you sell online, it's very basic to try and find the products that match that keyword in your catalog. But over time, not only has the way that shoppers search online become more sophisticated, the engines and the technology that exists has also become more advanced. So now we're able to have technology that can understand the intent behind what the user is looking for and return more relevant products.
An example might be if you're interested in buying a present for your craft-loving 10-year-old niece, you might search for that online as ‘Show me products that would be suitable for my 10-year-old craft-loving niece.’ That's a query you would put into Google.com.
Whereas if you see that on a website that sells products online, it may not be as common a query. However, engines these days, especially the latest advances in generative AI, can understand the intent behind a query like that and then return very relevant products.
So just the way that search has evolved and where shopping and online shopping is going in the future, I think, is more towards the sophisticated kind of querying, more of a maybe there's a conversational aspect to it with something like that, or maybe there's a social media aspect to it and you're shopping using pictures and trying to find a product that you saw in a post on social media.
These are where the future of search is going and retailers need to make sure they're staying on top of the technology because their shoppers definitely are and are expecting better and better experiences. If you're using a legacy search engine that can't handle that kind of sophistication, you're going to be left behind.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I mean, that's such an interesting use case of obviously, gifting for a 10-year-old child. I can guarantee if you ask anything slightly related to that in a native Shopify store, unless they have a blog article that almost matches that, you're going to get no results. But you may have dozens of products that a 10-year-old would enjoy.
Arv Natarajan
Can match. Exactly.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Now, are there any other use cases that come to mind as you want to flex on the cool things that GroupBy can do?
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about search and product discovery. That's how your customers will find your products.
The other side of the fence, even before you get into a search engine, is the quality of your product catalog. Especially if you sell more than a few hundred, a few thousand products, as you can imagine, and I'm sure as your listeners have felt the pain, it's very difficult to have a good data governance strategy to manage the quality of that product catalog.
If you have your own product that you're selling online, then maybe you own that governance and you're able to control the quality of the data in that catalog. But if you're selling third-party products or someone else's products, then there is a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that product catalog is clean, it's up to date, it's not incorrect, it's not missing information.
And a lot of that can be quite manual and time consuming, especially if you are running quite a lean shop and you don't have a large team to do this for you. So that's where, again, a product like GroupBy can help you through AI, automate a lot of this work and make it very efficient at scale.
So we can go in there and take your product catalog in any industry or vertical if you sell apparel or electronics or whatever types of products you might sell, and then apply best practice data governance to that particular catalog to make sure that the quality of the catalog is clean and up to date and your customers can use their specific nuances that they would be interested in searching for online.
So let's take, for example, backpacks. If you sell backpacks, you might have right now capacity measured in liters or volume. That's a pretty common way that a lot of retailers measure backpack capacity.
However, it's not very useful for an end user, or for a shopper because I don't know if I need a 40 liter backpack or a 60 liter backpack. I'm going on a weekend camping trip. Tell me what I need. And so now the AI platform can help you identify that instead of having capacity measured by liters, we should measure capacity by trip duration. So we can tell you that it's a two-day backpack or it's a one-week backpack or something like that to help your shoppers find the right products that they're looking for.
And then where AI can even be even more sophisticated is if that backpack comes with a zipper that expands the capacity, we can now apply ranges to that particular duration at scale and automatically. So you don't have to go in there and curate it, but the AI will tell you this is a one to three-day backpack or a one-day to a five-day backpack. And that will let you now provide the right products to your shoppers that they're specifically looking for.
A very simple example on how AI can absolutely help automate data governance is another thing that retailers should be considering as well.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. This is just... I think it speaks to the power of AI because historically, computers are very dumb. They only do exactly what you tell them to do and nothing else. And they'll go or they'll break. But now AI gives this fuzzy logic to things where they can understand that this is basically what they mean.
Arv Natarajan
Right.
Chase Clymer
And to humans, conceptually, that's so easy and straightforward. And it's like, duh. You're just... Instead of saying blue, you're saying it's light blue.
Arv Natarajan
Right.
Chase Clymer
But to a specific... How computers read and write data, it's like that's not the specific thing. That's not the right answer.
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, exactly.
And it doesn't mean that you give up entirely all of the control to the machines, to the AI. It doesn't take humans out of the loop. There is very much a step in all of this process where we have to let humans come in and review what the output of the AI is, because it's not yet at a point where you can trust everything that the AI produces.
If your listeners are familiar with the term hallucinations, especially with generative AI, there is a high chance of hallucination in the wrong direction if you don't give the right inputs or the prompts to this kind of AI technology. So having a human in the loop process of quality assurance and reviewing the output is still critical.
So any platform that provides this kind of technology and functionality should have a way for humans to be in that loop and review the app before it goes to the end user.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now something that I know kind of goes part and partial with search and discoverability is kind of like sorting, filtering, and tags. Is that something that GroupBy helps with?
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, absolutely. So all of that is very basic or table stakes functionality that your website must have. If you have a pretty standard layout for your Shopify theme, then you already will have facets on the left-hand side. So that's where your product attribution comes in and allows your shoppers to filter on the specific types of products or attributes that they might be looking for.
So we talked about trip duration. I wanna see this kind of backpack, or maybe color is an attribute that you would have for apparel. So this is a blue dress or a black dress. So those are all very common things that the latest in product discovery technology should have.
For if you don't have that kind of navigation or user experience for your shoppers, you're definitely being left behind because that's what users have come to expect these days. They need to be able to find the products easily and if they don't have an easy way of filtering the products or sorting the products on by price or by relevance or some other, or maybe it's shipping duration and how long they can get it shipped to them. These are all very common ways that the large retailers present this information to their shoppers.
Smaller merchants should absolutely be looking to do the same.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it's a cheat sheet. Go into your product category on Amazon and see what they have under sorting filtering and why don't you? Every time we consult clients, this sorting and filtering, getting the customer to the product they want in as few clicks as possible, and improving the collection page is an easy win for a lot of merchants.
And it's one of those things where they're too close to it. They're like, “I know what the product is.” “Your customers don't though.” And you need to help them understand the nuances and the differences between them.
Something else that I was thinking about as you were talking, you mentioned color as a sorting option. Something that I know that is becoming very easy to do these days is I mentioned the different various shades of blue.
You can have them all show up under blue and set rules to do that, as opposed to a lot of manual work. That was the historical way to do it.
Arv Natarajan
Yeah. That's where when we talk about data governance, that's a great example. So color families, there are 50, 100 different colors or shades of blue. And then going in and manually tagging every one of those products the right way, it takes a lot of time, especially if you have thousands of products.
So having technology do that for you is a great way of automating it and making that experience better for your customers.
Chase Clymer
Especially merchants that use fancy names for their colors. Like, “Oh, this is Robin's egg.”
Arv Natarajan
Yeah. What color is that?
Chase Clymer
It's blue. All right. And I'm looking for a blue bag.
Arv Natarajan
Yeah. Color is one example.
The other example might even be dimensions. If you sell shoes or something like that. If you have shoe sizes in European dimensions or UK dimensions or American dimensions, that can get confusing for your shoppers depending on where they're from. So standardizing that is a lot easier. Inches versus centimeters and things like that. This is where AI or technology can help you make that all very standard.
Chase Clymer
What other top advice would you have for rising Ecommerce retailers? So we talked about data governance. That's important. We talked about the importance of a search engine. That's obviously there as well. That's quite critical.
The other thing to think about might be personalization. So again, technology is at a point where we're able to understand not only the intent of what the user is looking for, but also what they have an affinity for and what they might have preferences for.
This is not to say that we care that this person is James Smith or John Smith.
We don't need to know that personally identifiable information or PII, as you might've heard that that can be kept all anonymous. But what we do want to know is who that specific person is from a shopping perspective. What brands do they like? What sizes do they like?
So that way, if you sell jeans and that person searches for jeans, you're not going to show them men's jeans, if they're a woman or vice versa. You'll be showing them ladies jeans, if they search for jeans. And so, and maybe with the brands that they have at the top of the list.That is a personalized shopping experience that's not intrusive, that actually adds value to the end user. And it's very easy to accomplish with this kind of technology.
So something like personalized experiences is great there in that example.
Another example might be if they are on a pretty standard rotation for buying a type of product, maybe it's diapers, baby products, perhaps they are purchased on a relatively common schedule. Every month they have to buy new diapers or baby formula, whatever the product is.
Having that kind of logic built into your system where “Hey,” you are reminding them through an email campaign or through some kind of recommendations carousel. “Hey, you purchased this a month ago, you're coming up to your refill. Maybe you should consider adding this to your basket at checkout because you might be running out.”
Like that kind of logic is very possible, very easy to do with technology. And it's also very non-intrusive or it's not creepy. It's a way of doing it that adds value to the end user without knowing who they are personally, but you know what they like and what their habits are. And you help reinforce those habits and encourage them to find those products easily.
So those are two very good examples of personalization that I think add a lot of value for the end user that retailers should absolutely be thinking about.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I know something that we discussed with a merchant the other day, kind of in line with this was how you've got historical data from past purchases, and you can utilize that within the site experience.
I'm going to use jeans for an example. Like my fit. I'm not skinny anymore. But 32 slim, that's what I buy. And so you only show me in stock things that are in that style or in that size moving forward. That just elevates that experience and just avoids any sort of consumer frustration that might be having either from things being out of stock that aren't available that I'm being shown or frustrations behind...
I just lost my train of thought completely. But you know where I was going.
Arv Natarajan
Absolutely.
And so out of stock and availability is something that large retailers do really well that smaller merchants sometimes don't handle as well. So that's a key point, making sure that only products that can be fulfilled are shown to your shoppers. The worst thing in the world is I've searched for the jeans, I found the perfect pair, I go to the details page to click and purchase and now it's not in stock and I can't buy it.
At that point, and I'm sure you face this, I'm going to Amazon or I'm going somewhere else to buy it. I'm not looking for something else on your website. I'm like, I'm giving up. So the importance of that, and studies, there are data points that show how important that is because the bounce rate is very high. If that occurs, availability is something retailers should think about.
The other thing in line with what you said is fulfillment. So if showing or explaining to the user how easy that product is to be delivered to their house if you sell online or if you have products in your stores, or in stores that you might partner with, that's also very important and large retailers do it really well.
Right at the top of the page is a way to see, is this one-day shipping? Is it 3-day shipping? How quickly can this product come to me? Am I able to buy this online and pick it up in a store? All of those fulfillment types are critical for the shopper to understand how they can get that product. And so being able to show those kinds of filtering options or sorting options by fulfillment is also very important.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
And so we covered some of the challenges that our retailers are experiencing today. Is there anything else that comes to mind?
Chase Clymer
I mean, I think making sure that you're not… That you understand how your users are interacting with the site is key. Analytics is quite important. I know that in Shopify, there are some default analytics that are provided, but there are a lot of options to get more advanced analytics.
So understanding how your users interact with your website, what are they searching for? What products are they clicking on? What are they trying to buy, but they can't buy? Or what searches are resulting in no purchases? Understanding all those behavior points are very critical.
And you wanted this to be as easy as possible. Obviously, as a smaller merchant, you don't have a large team of data scientists to go through all of this data. You have maybe one or two people looking at this.
So we want to provide a tool that is very easy for people to understand how their users are behaving on their website and then take action based on those insights. So that's where I think maybe some retailers could consider spending a bit more time on analytics or finding the right tool to make it easy for them to understand how their site is performing and then so that they can take the right action if they need to.
if there's a trend on certain products, like there's a social media post that went viral and now a lot of people are looking for this kind of product. Knowing that that's happening on your website so that you can do something about it is important. If you don't know that that's happening, you won't be able to do anything and then you can't help your shoppers.
So analytics, I think, is also an underused part of Ecommerce, especially for the smaller merchants.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I went to... I forget what they are calling it these days. They keep changing the name. But I went to an event at Shopify's main event a few weeks back. And Toby on stage said something that I guess has been like a driving statement, but I hadn't recognized until he said...
He basically says Shopify wants to solve most problems for most merchants. And what that points out is why the app ecosystem exists and why if you want to have any sort of more robust anything: more robust analytics, more robust search, more robust x, y, or z. That's why the app ecosystem exists.
Shopify and especially as your brand will grow, you will outgrow some of the core basic features of Shopify and you'll need to select a best-in-class product to replace that part of your store. And that's what you made me think of.
Arv Natarajan
Yeah, absolutely right. And I mean, it doesn't have to break the bank. I mean, there's a lot of apps out there, including GroupBy, where you can try it and you have a free trial. You can see how it works for you. Is it actually adding value to you or to your customers? Try it out. And if you don't like it, then obviously you can move on to the next one.
And this is not time consuming or, or should not be a time consuming or effort requiring trial. This would be something that's easy to install, easy to try. And you should be able to see value very quickly, see your return on investment very quickly.
And then going from a trial to a paid experience should also be quite simple and frictionless. So there's a lot of apps out there that do it. I definitely encourage you, your listeners, like you said, to explore the marketplace and find the right products that work for them.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Arv Natarajan
I mean, I think we've kind of alluded to it a little bit in the conversation about where the future of eCommerce is going. That's just, I think, good for any merchant to be thinking about.
So not just what I need to do in the next 12 months, but what does the next few years look like and where are my shoppers going and what are the trends in the market look like? There are a bunch of articles and news out there that help you inform you with some of this information. So something that merchants should pay attention to, at least.
So I mentioned conversational commerce in one of my examples. Having people shop like this is not yet commonplace, like people are still searching for jeans or TVs or iPhones. It's very keyword based, but as users start realizing that they can search in this kind of way, if you don't have that kind of technology, then you won't be able to help your customers.
So paying attention to trends and where the future of shopping is going is critical as a merchant. And obviously there are partners out there that can help with that as well. So just something I would say is just be aware of where the future of e-commerce is going for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
You mentioned it earlier and I wanted to comment on it. It's just like how you are searching for products and discoverability. I would say I'm a technology smart guy, an early adopter is how they would tag me. But when I'm still searching for product recommendations, half the time I'm putting in ‘best bike under $1,000 Reddit’. I want to see what real people are saying.
And then along came generative AI and the big horse ChatGPT. I'm asking the same questions in chat GPT these days because it's just doing the same thing a little bit faster.
But these technologies and those things are going to evolve to where on your website, people are going to start asking those questions. But I think there's going to be a couple years where maybe you have to train them or show them that your website can do it.
And so often, you'll see stores with higher SKU counts, front and center... This is Walmart, Target, Amazon.com, front and center, search bar. But within that search bar, you're starting to slowly see the example text change from blue jeans for moms to best gifts for toddlers.
Arv Natarajan
Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Right? So it's that slowly training the customer to try things in a different way.
Arv Natarajan
That's exactly… I mean, it's such a good example. And that's exactly... What you mentioned there with those two or three brands is the other ones that have to lead the way because that's where a lot of people shop. Once Amazon starts doing it a certain way, everybody's going to follow suit. So paying attention very closely to how they do things. Yeah, pretty cool.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, don't get me started on Amazon driving trends. We'll have a whole different conversation.
Arv, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show.
Now, if I am interested in what GroupBy can do for me, where should I go? What should I do? Who should I talk to?
Arv Natarajan
If you're a Shopify merchant, have a look on the Shopify App Exchange or our marketplace. Search for GroupBy. G-R-O-U-P-B-Y. And you'll find our app on there and you'll be able to see what we do and how we can help you as a retailer maximize your revenue, help your shoppers.
We're on the marketplace. Otherwise, feel free to check out our website as well. I'm sure I'll be in the show notes. And yeah, we're happy to have a conversation and explain to you how we can help you.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Arv Natarajan
Thanks for having me, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!