Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Besides geography, what other parameters do you personalize on?

Darren Hill: For a lot of our fashion clients, we personalize on sizes. For instance, if you have come to the website and you’ve looked for a specific pair of shoes, we’ll actually tag your account and we’ll know what shoe size you are. So the next time you look at shoes, we will filter and sort that specific shoe category. We will make sure that the shoes at the top are available and are in sizes that you indicated that you were interested in. That simple little tweak can increase the conversion rate by about double for specific clients. That is pretty significant.

Sramana Mitra: What else in fashion is interesting in terms of personalization? I’ve started one of the first Internet fashion companies about 15 years ago. I know this category cold. What are you seeing in terms of trends? I’m a big believer in online fashion. It’s happening finally. When I started my company, it was a long time ago. The market was not ready yet. Tell us more about what other parameters are people in the online fashion industry getting significant conversion against through personalization.

Darren Hill: One of our clients is Free People, a fashion retailer. They have about 150 stores and they run our technology for their site. One of the more interesting things that we’ve done is to allow consumers to go in to the website and customize the website for themselves. They can go in and create specific categories. The shopper could put in all of the different products that she’s interested in. She can share those categories with her friends. Her friends come in and look at those products. We can track which customers drive the most traffic. We can also share the content that those customers create in cross-sells and up-sells within the website based on the amount of attention they’re getting from their friends.

It’s crowdsourcing the merchandising of this specific fashion site. Many other things that we do from a user-generated content perspective is allowing the customers to upload photos of themselves wearing a specific product. Unsurprisingly, with Instagram being so powerful, the photos tend to be pretty good and they tend to work very well. The biggest thing is when a girl uploads her photo and she’s on the Free People site, she shares it like crazy with her friends, thereby, driving a lot of traffic.

Sramana Mitra: I’m on the Free People site as you’re talking. It looks like the pictures are actually professionally-generated model pictures. These don’t look like user-generated content. Is that accurate?

Darren Hill: Yes, the defaults are definitely model photos. They need to start with something.

Sramana Mitra: What is the logic behind how the site flows to support the site in making this determination whether you show me model pictures or you show me user-generated content?

Darren Hill: The default is always going to be model photos. I’m looking at a specific product that is called the Embroidered Austin Dress. The default photo is definitely a model photo. If you scroll down, there are dozens of user-generated photos about that product. Whatever product you’re looking at, make sure you scroll down a little bit to be able to see the alternate photos on that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc
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