Dive Brief:

• Personalization platform provider Qubit announced at Mobile Beat 2017 in San Francisco this week that it is developing an AI-powered solution for mobile commerce that it says enables “an app-like experience” for customer’s visiting a brand’s mobile web site, according to a press release.

• The solution’s AI-driven user experience includes capabilities such as predicted category preferences, discovery-led feeds, context messaging on each product and the capability to surface relevant products and categories that adapt as the customer engages. Effective tactics such as social proof messaging and urgency are deployed alongside each product to increase confidence and provide the customer with additional context, the company said.

• Qubit demonstrated a beta version of the product at the conference, and said it is aiming for general availability this fall.

Dive Insight:

It is no secret that as mobile shopping has evolved, product search capabilities have proven to be one of the weakest technology links in the shopping process. That's the notion that Qubit is acting on with this new solution in development, but it is hardly the first company to highlight the inadequacies of mobile search. A RichRelevance survey last year noted that 35% of respondents were generally dissatisfied with the search results they received on mobile devices, and perceived a correlation between disappointment with mobile search and shopping cart abandonment.

That makes new forms of product discovery driven by technologies like artificial intelligence and behavioral analytics a necessity, not just a nice-to-have capability. To achieve that, retailers and brands need to take some cues from social media communities, which Qubit pointed out use "immersive product discovery" through content feeds and images that are meant to provide inspiration to users for things that might want to buy.

In addition to the capabilities mentioned above, Qubit also seeks to encourage purchasing activity after product discovery by employing social proof messaging and urgency-to-buy messaging (like telling customers how few of an item are left in stock) with each product description. These tactics, intended to build customer confidence in making a purchase, were some of the same Qubit used in its recent personalization project for ColourPop.

Though Qubit's new solution is a work in progress, at least one early beta user is impressed: “We have over 30,000 products on our site, therefore discover-ability is a challenge we're constantly working to improve,” Alex Crawley, CTO at fashion marketplace operator Wolf & Badger, said in Qubit's release. “With this mobile personalization solution, Qubit directly addresses the problem by giving users a personalized selection of products and categories from across our entire product catalog, tailored exactly to the user. We’re already seeing that increases in engagement can impact revenue.”