Ever notice how when shopping online, you are shown suggestions on what else to buy? Pretty hard to notice honestly, given the dent they put in the pocket. But all in all, the recommendations make the entire customer journey smoother. This is exactly what our Karachi-based startup is trying to further improve: personalise every user’s experience based on his/her tastes.
An e-commerce personalisation platform, Personide integrates with a store’s website and closely monitors the activity of every individual visitor, his/her demographics, the buying pattern, timings, preferences, categories etc. Along with that, it also factors in the similarity and dissimilarity between products ie which are sold together and which are not and how they are related to each other. All of that is plugged into the AI-based system which in turn predicts the items a given visitor is likely to purchase and highlights those recommendations accordingly.
Then there’s a dashboard with the entire website’s analytics in one place: from visitors engaged to customers converted and everything in between that allows the store to know the exact impact generated by Personide.
For a startup that talks of artificial intelligence and machine learning, is there even enough data in question to have refined models? After all, our e-commerce sector is still in the nascent stages with limited levels of traction. Daraz, by far the largest player, has some 9.175 million monthly visits on average, that too boosted by 11/11 and 12/12 sales. No other website in the e-commerce space comes even close to these numbers with most decent-sized ones hovering around the 500,000-mark — not a particularly healthy number.
“This is surely a challenge which increases the time for our model to learn. Say a store with 300,000 visits a month might take three or four months compared to a website attracting millions,” says CEO Salik Khan.
Even putting aside the data shortage and model refinement concerns, are there enough players in the market for Personide to sustain a business? I mean beyond the six to eight marketplaces, few have a respectable traction to even be pursued. How does the startup plan to go about it then?
“Absolutely, say if we tap on this handful of players then there would be no one left for like a year or so. But we’d like to move on to the online presence of the brick-and-mortar stores, such as the clothing brands since apparel is a hot area,” says the CEO, adding that “In any case, e-commerce is a booming space [last annual figures put the growth at 93 per cent] so the number of potential clients is only going to increase.”
The business-to-business startup was founded by two computer science graduates - Salik Khan and Adil Shaikh - who were joined by an experienced Dane entrepreneur, Stefan Avivson, as a partner. “As part of our final-year project, we built a program on how news affects prices at the Pakistan Stock Exchange but couldn’t pursue it commercially due to all regulations involved. Since our area was basically predictive analysis, we looked for other avenues and found e-commerce an ideal use case for it,” Khan recalls.
Personide went live commercially around August 2019 and got its first client in Gul Ahmed Group. The startup is also part of the National Incubation Centre, Karachi.
They have a subscription model in place with slab-wise charges depending on the website’s monthly visits. As for the investment, it is still internally funded and Khan would like to grow it organically for now.
It’s fairly common for the online marketplaces to do this predictive analysis in-house for quite understandable reasons: many already have dedicated data analysts and scientists who can build an even more customisable product. But the smaller ones usually don’t have the appetite or resources and thus go for third-party solutions.
And that’s an opportunity plenty have tried to exploit, producing industry leaders like Nosto from Finland which has thus far bagged in $32.8m in funding, boasting major retail customers such as Everlast, Jansport etc.
No wonder then that Khan also wants to explore the global arena and is already hoping that his European partner would come in handy. “We are looking at the United Kingdom where the e-commerce market is worth some $432 billion and Stefan’s professional experience and network should also help,” the CEO expects.
The writer is member of staff:
Twitter: @MutaherKhan
Published in Dawn, February 23rd, 2020
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