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Constructor Aims to Solve Cart Abandonment with Zero-Party Data

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Online retailers lose $18 billion each year to cart abandonment, when shoppers start the check-out process but drop out before completing their transactions. It’s a costly challenge and one that martech vendors and retailers themselves are racing to solve.

Last week, the search and product discovery platform Constructor announced a new solution designed to decrease cart abandonment rates for retailers. The company’s Quizzes product provides retailers a way to ask customers questions while they shop online, similar to how a sales associate might interact in-store. 

“​​The concept of Quizzes came from the feeling that with our prior range of offerings — search, browse, recommendations, and collections — we weren’t fully satisfying all the needs of shoppers,” says Eli Finkelshteyn, CEO and co-founder of Constructor. “If someone knows what they want, we can help them find it. If someone just wants to browse around, we can help them do that, too. But if someone is in analysis paralysis, not sure of the right product for them, or not sure how to evaluate a product, searching and browsing doesn’t help. What they really need at that point is for someone to ask them the right questions to get at what they’re really looking for and make guided suggestions based on their responses.”

How Quizzes serves retailers and shoppers

Finkelshteyn likens Quizzes to getting an expert’s guidance in finding the right product specifically based on each shopper’s personal tastes. Using on-site questionnaires with custom questions, retailers are able to collect detailed information about each visitor’s lifestyle activities, shopping preferences, and health and wellness goals. Constructor then leverages AI and machine learning through its search and discovery platform to provide retailers with suggestions for specific, personalized shopping experiences that are unique to each customer. 

The solution is already being used by LuckyVitamin, an e-commerce nutritional supplement retailer. Quizzes also provides retailers the opportunity to collect zero-party data, or information customers proactively and consciously offer to businesses, often through surveys and other conversational formats. Constructor said it will not use information gleaned from Quizzes to target shoppers on third-party sites.

Finkelshteyn says the goal is for retailers to be able to drive more conversions and revenue, build stronger relationships, and reduce time to purchase — without relying on third-party data.

“Privacy is one of the biggest benefits of the solution because it relies on zero-party data – data that users want retailers to have. It’s personalization meeting privacy in the best possible way,” Finkelshteyn says. “For too long, personalization has worked against shoppers. Quizzes, like the rest of Constructor’s solutions, helps put personalization on shoppers’ side.”

How Quizzes differs from other survey products

Constructor isn’t the first martech firm to use online quizzes as a way to learn about customer preferences and personalize shopping experiences, but Finkelshteyn says his firm’s solution is different from anything else on the market because it’s part of a single user journey, and all of the technical services powering that user journey are connected through the Constructor platform.

The company is also combining its online questionnaires with AI and subject-level experts working for its retail partners to make product suggestions that are more accurate than competing solutions.

Another important differentiator in Finkelshteyn’s eyes is the transparency Constructor is providing. Quizzes is designed to work in concert with Constructor’s other AI-powered search and discovery solutions. He says Constructor customers have complete visibility into how the company’s algorithms rank products, and they maintain full control over what their customers see for any query.

“We don’t want to just help you with a search, or a browse, or a quiz. We want to help you create best-in-class product discovery journeys that feel like magic for your users and that lead to provable increases in the business metrics retailers most care about, like revenue and conversion rates,” Finkelshteyn says. “We’ve proven we can do that in every other aspect of our product discovery solution by having never lost an A/B test, and now we’ll do the same with Quizzes.”

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Stephanie Miles is a journalist who covers personal finance, technology, and real estate. As Street Fight’s senior editor, she is particularly interested in how local merchants and national brands are utilizing hyperlocal technology to reach consumers. She has written for FHM, the Daily News, Working World, Gawker, Cityfile, and Recessionwire.