"No-Regret Work" for the AI Shopping Era - with Syndigo's Leah Allen

This episode is brought to you by It's Rapid. When great content meets AI, the impact can be truly remarkable. At It's Rapid, we've seen customers achieve outcomes like an 8x sales lift after a content refresh and 21% conversion rates on sponsored videos created with the It's Rapid AI studio. While results vary by customer, our AI-powered creative automation platform and optics analytics help brands create, optimize, and scale content for modern commerce. Learn more at It's Rapid.ai Welcome to Beyond the Shelf with Dave Fineleed. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind e-commerce. Through conversations with innovators in the space, we learn the stories of these leaders and their strategies for e-commerce success. We publish new episodes every Tuesday morning, so be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And now, here's your host, Dave Fineleed. I'm Dave Fineleed with Beyond the Shelf. Welcome back to another great episode. Today I'm talking with Leah Allen, Chief Marketing Officer at Cindigo about her role at Cindigo, all the great work that's going on there and an exciting new research report that Cindigo recently released that we'll be talking about today. Leah, welcome to Beyond the Shelf. Thank you, David. Great to be here. Tell us about you before we dive into this report. Take us back. How do you get your start in the space? Absolutely, so I started my career managing global web experiences at Symantec and Veritas. Then I moved into Martek at Demandbase. Just as account-based marketing was really taking shape, great experience and time there, and then eventually that grew into marketing leadership roles at Model N, Shopify, Storyblocks, and now at Cindigo. Amazing. Great experience with marketing, great experience with tech, and you've got Shopify and some other opportunities there. You must know a ton about the space. We may have to come back and do a full episode with you just on your history there, but tell us about Cindigo for our listeners that might not be familiar with the company. What does Cindigo do and how do people use the platform and the services? Absolutely. So, in short, Cindigo helps great products get chosen, and that means by everything from a human to an algorithm to an agent, how do you make sure that your products as a brand or a retailer get chosen? And what that under the covers means, you have to organize and structure your content. You have to syndicate it everywhere. Products are purchased, enhanced it, add ratings and reviews, and a whole lot more. But in short, that's what we're doing. Love it. So, you mentioned shoppers like myself and the algorithm. We just take a minute and tell us what's going on, what's new there. We're all hearing about how we need to optimize our content and all that, but what's kind of the big change, if you will, in this area? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, everyone is talking about AI all the time. And what does that, so what we think about deeply is how do we translate that into what it means for our customers, for brands and retailers, and how that's adjusting in consumer behavior. And one of the interesting stats that we found in our research is that 32% of our respondents are a half or are willing to let an agent autonomously make a purchase on their behalf. That is really a huge leap forward. We've talked a lot about discoverability and how you have to be discoverable, not only for the human shopper, but also for search engines in digital commerce and now we add in this new layer of AI searches and discoverability, but now even agents who are able to act autonomously. The shift there is that your data really speaks for your product. The human, the agent, the engine, the algorithm may never, will never actually touch your product. That's really your product data that is the most important. Incredible. So having great data and a surprisingly large number of shoppers are having the agent do some shopping for them. So it's incredible. Tell us about this research report just recently released. What's it about and what are some of the big headlines? Yeah, absolutely. So we have been running this report for four years doing this research. And this year the data genuinely surprised us. So in addition to that 32 percent that I mentioned, we also saw that reviews now rival price as the top driver of purchase decisions. And that's not something we expected. This was one of many findings of our survey surveyed over 8,700 adults across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK and the US. And the goal with the research is to help brands and retailers understand what actually gets a product chosen today. And now in this landscape how that's changing as AI increasingly becomes central to the shopping journey. So one of the big headlines is reviews really matter. Price clearly still a factor for everyone in this environment, but reviews playing this big role. You also mentioned good product data gets chosen or products now get chosen. Good product data gets costly, parts that apart for us. What does that mean? Yeah. Yeah. So we found that 83 percent of shoppers will leave a product page if they can't find enough product information. So every gap in your product information gives shoppers a reason to look elsewhere. And if the content isn't there that can mean just losing the sale entirely. But the good news also is that we're seeing evidence that investing here actually works. So one of our customers, the good crisp company, was able to increase their content accuracy by 90 percent on their key channels. And that translated into an increase in online sales of 60 percent. So that's really meaningful in fact. So you can see where the research that we're seeing, the results that we're seeing in our customers actually investing in this really are connected and telling that same story. Yeah. This is great. So if you invest in the data, you'll get that kind of enriched content. And then all the audiences you were talking about, the shoppers, the algorithm, and so on, can then figure out the right things to recommend and so on. What is the journey like for a customer? Let's say they start off and they say, hey, we know we need to do some work on our data. And they see that ROI. What do they need to do to really get that lift that you just mentioned? Yeah, absolutely. So we recommend doing what we consider no regret work. So organizing and structuring your product data in a way that is valuable and useful for all of the shoppers of today and the ones that may come tomorrow in the form of additional agents that may purchase on your behalf. So organizing structure that we're get it into a format that is digestible and easily accessible and enjoyable is a great product experience. So not only is that attributes that feed into the engines and the algorithms, but it is also the visuals. So the photos, the rich media that is associated, the videos that are associated with that product detail page, really giving that full experience. And so then once you have it all organized, then it's easy to syndicate that content out to publish that content out everywhere you want it to sell. Whether that is upstream across your own e-commerce platform across all of the retailers where you may sell your product and also downstream into your supply chain into all of the ecosystems where that product data really matters and is really important to all of your channels. This is great. And we have so many shoppers now on mobile, I imagine that's probably also playing a factor in the visuals and all the getting the right content in front of them. Absolutely. Tell us about reviews. You mentioned a little bit of surprise there on reviews being so important now. What's going on there? What's changed? Yeah, I think even for the first time in our four years of research, we found that something does rival price and that's not a promotion or a discount but it is reviews. So even under economic pressure, consumers are not making decisions on price alone. They're not necessarily looking for the cheapest option. They're looking for the one that provides reassurance that their money is not going to be wasted. And so this tells me that confidence has become just as important as price in the decision. Yeah. Great point. All right. Talking about the PDP, your PDP is your brand. I love this way of talking about it. You've got another great stat here. 80% say poor product presentation hurts how they review of brand. Tell us what that means for folks that are working on PDPs or working on their content. What could they be doing? Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, we've seen this number climb every single year. So in 2023, when we did our first survey, this was at 62%. And so we're growing each year and then going to 80%. This year, really, it's just increasing and important. And the way we see it is that the PDP is where brand perception gets clicked to the test. So you can build a great campaign. You can tell a great story. But if someone gets to your product page and the information is incomplete or inaccurate, there are no reviews. You can't really look at the product. It can undermine all that trust you work to build. I can just picture the slide now where we show the increase. What do you say from 60, 1% up to 80%. We'll have to check back on the survey next year and see what the numbers are. But obviously the PDP, just such a great place to represent the brand and make sure you have the right info. The other thing you mentioned early on was the shopping agents and the algorithms, AI being your newest customer. Tell us more about that. What does that mean in terms of building content and thinking about the brand? Yeah, absolutely. So, so increasingly, AI, whether it's a large language model like Cheshire BT, doing that discoverability or an agent acting on someone's behalf is the first audience to reach your product before it ever reaches a human shopper. So you can see whenever you're doing online shopping and that can be online shopping from your home. It can be online shopping in a store where you want to look up the reviews or maybe there's a discount on a product or you want to learn more about it even as a human in the store. The first result that you get is an AI-generated result, right? Most of the time. So, so it's increasingly important. It evaluates your products differently. So, while a person can bring, so that's that first gateway. That that AI gateway is the first one. And while a person can bring context or familiarity with a brand into a decision, AI can't do that. It's only looking at your product data, your descriptions or imagery, your reviews and other attributes. So the data now has to even more so speak for your brand and it needs to be complete, structured and consistent enough for AI to trust it. So if I'm if I'm in the e-com team, I'm working on the PDP. What what should be top of mind for me when it comes to kind of thinking about AI as my as my customer? Yeah. Yeah. I think all of the again, no regret work is still really important. So making sure that you have all of the product attributes that those are updated and that they are consistent everywhere you publish. So, an e-commerce team where a product for a product or company where you publish in a lot of different places, making sure that all of that data is consistent and that this organize, that's organized in a central place and then publish consistently across all those places. And that it is robust so that it is enriched with the best possible imagery 3D, 3D views, videos. If you have them, the ratings and reviews are really important to make sure that those are part of the PDP and that you can and that you can encourage customers, give them the confidence to buy once they're on the product page. So we also see a lot of value in these dynamic messages that can help give consumers the confidence to purchase once they are on the product detail page. So a lot of that comprehensive work, consistency and making sure all of it is structured and readable for humans and for machines. No regret work, I think that may be the title of this episode in addition to the great research that you all have put out in the study. All right, it's time for a rapid rundown, a couple of quick thoughts. First off, one commerce trend that you're most bullish on. AI agents that don't just research products, but buy them. We're in the early stages of that like we talked about, but the brands and retailers getting the data right now are the ones that are going to show up when this becomes mainstream. Their products will get chosen, others will be invisible. As a shopper, what's the first thing you notice on a product page? For me, it's two things, the imagery and the stars. And in fact, I'll often click down to the reviews first to see whether it's even worth reading a product description. Totally. I was, yeah, I was, I was recently shopping for a casual dress for a trip. I'm taking over labor day. I'm going to Santa Barbara to add you to give me a few recommendations like click through the product pages and one really notable retailer website showed up really well in AI, great description, highly recommended. But I went to the page and there was one photo and zero reviews. And I moved on to the other options. 100% yeah, great, great insight. All right. One AI use case you think will feel completely normal in just a few years. Yeah, I think it will feel completely normal. And honestly, it's still starting to feel that way to me to have AI research and compare products for you before you ever visit a product page. All right. Outside of work, you mentioned an upcoming trip, but what's your favorite way to recharge? I'm a, I'm a big reader, so I recharge by putting my nose in a book. I also love going out in nature. So hiking skiing, getting into the mountains with my family. Book recommendation for our listeners that be on the shelf. Yeah, I just started a great book called Orbital. It's, it's about the, the space station and just really beautiful descriptions of earth and space and really fascinating read. Orbital will have to check it out. Okay, what's the best way for our listeners to get a hold of this study? Yeah, yeah. The best way to find the study is on syndigo.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn too. Perfect. Leah Allen with Syndigo. Thanks so much for joining me today at Beyond the Shelf. We hope you have a great trip. We'll check out Orbital and of course hope our listeners will take a look at this study. Tons of great info, some great stats and we'll hopefully check in next year to see if all those trends are continuing. Great speaking, have you? Cheers. That's it for this week's episode of Beyond the Shelf. If you enjoy the show, be sure to like, subscribe and leave us a review. It really helps us grow and feel free to share us with your colleagues so they too can hear weekly perspectives from the brightest minds in e-commerce. You can also check us out on LinkedIn, where we post clips from each episode, share Dave's takes on breaking industry news, and much more. Beyond the Shelf is a production of its rapid. Our host is Dave Finley and our producer is Jake Musiker. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Beyond the Shelf. [BLANK_AUDIO]