Watch the short introduction AMAZD during the Curaze Trend Tour to learn more about our key features and benefits of AMAZD. Make sure you have your headphones in place and be ready to get amazd.

‍

What do we want to do?

We want to close the experience gap in eCommerce, because ultimately we want to see happy faces when shopping online and not grumpy and screaming faces. Additionally, we want to give back the power to merchants and brands away from platforms by providing superior shopping experiences. Unique from anything that you could experience on conventional online platform businesses. 

What is the experience gap?

The experience gap today exists between physical retail and e-commerce, in which offline allow for human interactions and online is restricted to impersonal help. This creates a clear distinct advantage in today’s offline world. Physical storefronts enable product discussions and detailed deep-dives on certain elements of a product, in an effort to build a meaningful relationship between two human beings. Especially if you converse with someone who is also passionate about a product the trust level increases quite significantly. Additionally, through personal interactions the customer’s confidence level in their purchases rises.

Disadvantages of conventional eCommerce

Despite the fact that eCommerce is convenient, there are a lot of disadvantages when it comes to online shopping, compared to offline shopping. On the one hand online is very self-service oriented these days. This self-service approach is optimized in terms of data funnel conversions and standardized customer experiences. On the other hand personalized innovation remains of crucial importance, however, becoming harder and harder to implement these days with new laws and restrictions emerging on third-party cookies. This makes personalization more and more difficult to implement. As a result the customer experience will become even further streamlined and monotone.

Customer expectations nowadays

Nowadays, customers have clear purchase intentions for specific products, especially when it comes to high configuration, high quality,  complex, emotional and large purchase decisions. Exactly here, support should be offered to customers to enact on the purchase intent. Instead customers receive a flawed online experience, unlike the personalized offline world. 

Co-Founder experiences and motivation to create AMAZD

When I founded AMAZD together with Fabian two years ago during lockdown we both wanted to buy a road bike. In the process we faced multiple challenges. On the one side there was a clear agony of choice. There's so many product options out there with huge feature sets and often for me as a rookie not knowing a lot about road bikes this was quite overwhelming. All I ended up with in my search, were artificial FAQ pages, or very technical SEO optimized product descriptions, that failed to answer my questions. This demonstrates how limited the support options are online. 

The fallacies of chatbots

Chatbots are a great example of failed automatization. Studies in Germany have shown that 90% of chatbot conversations today contain swear words. Why would you want to deflect a customer's purchase intent with a chatbot? Instead of increasing the purchase intent, it raises the cost of customer acquisition, this simply doesn’t add up. Instead of deflecting purchase intentions, the shopping experience should be designed to help customers and guide them through the purchasing journey. Chatbots simply have failed in eCommerce due to the lack of sufficient training data available, in order to have meaningful discussions on a detailed level. 

‍Corona pushed forward the social commerce revolution

The good news is that digital leaders started to act on this gap during corona and during lockdowns, to bring certain one-to-one virtual consultation services online. This also met the demand of customers, seen as there was no viable way to get in contact with these brands. There's a clear indication that more and more brands want to invest in tools promoting more uptime interaction time between experts and customers. 

Current duct tape and spit solutions

Nevertheless, the current tool landscape which exists today is not satisfactory, but more of a duct tape and spit solution. Instead of being seamless, customers have a concoction of different tools, involving Calendly links,  zoom links, and email to actually get in contact with the brand. Alternatively, customers can opt for various other communication channels, like live chats, or calling, however, these are rather impersonal, without face-to-face interactions and away from the website. This translates into lost customers, longer sales cycles, and lost customer intent. There’s no reason why a brand should make it unnecessarily hard for a customer to reach out and interact?

Furthermore, these transactional tools are not designed for e-commerce infrastructure transactions. The distance to your eCommerce infrastructure makes it really hard to close your sale over video or over text. That's where we come into play, we want to convert the old world, the duct tape and split solution, into the new world, essentially shoppable conversations. An all-in-one solution, taking the good out of the old tools and offering some more amazing features on top. 

AMAZD all in one conversational storefront

AMAZD brings guided shopping to one's website and is optimized for shoppers to engage with real people, to have meaningful, and personal product discussions. It also helps customers to make the right decision on the right product without any second-guessing. Furthermore, the platform is optimized for experts to first focus on the quality of advice and also to enable them to sell. The ultimate goal is, to sell more, and more often. AMAZD not only enables first-time purchases but also upselling and cross-selling. For example, if I want to go ski touring, I need a ski, I need some additional equipment, poles and maybe an airbag backpack, etc. With AMAZD there are a lot more products I can integrate into the conversation with the customer, increasing the average order value. The personal one-to-one connection, will ultimately increase the likelihood of a transaction with a customer and build long-term relationships. 

The importance of clienteling

Clienteling is important because it ensures the longevity of customer relationships and leads to multiple purchases. Also, it makes customers want to stay connected to the expert, making experts revenue generators instead of cost centers. On the one side, brands can leverage internal experts, for example, omnichannel retailers repurposing their already present retail staff to serve clients in a digital space and allow them to sell online. Alternatively, you could also use back-office staff, with the added plus of a better sales channel. 

Additionally, you also can use external experts, a very new use case, which leverages people in your community with product domain expertise to further support your sales operations and client conversions. We are currently working with b2b brands and b2c brands to leverage these external experts to convert customer inquiries. These could be mountaineers who are using their equipment daily, therefore providing an added trust-level and credible know-how. Another example being influencers, who are already doing endless unboxing videos on Youtube. These individuals have a huge knowledge wealth on your products, which could be leveraged for your sales. It's all about loyal customers who are real fans of your brand and can help you sell. Even better, this requires barely any integration, and takes only a few minutes.  

‍

I’m happy to have a chat, reach out anytime at get@amazd.co and always happy to help you  upgrade your shopping experience.

‍