Exclusive Q&A: Wish centers enterprise operations around customers
E-commerce marketplace Wish is trying to understand the motivations of its shoppers to drive a wide variety of operational activities.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Mauricio Monico, chief product officer, Wish, to get advice on how retailers can achieve success in areas such as online promotions and supply chain, and maximize the effectiveness of leading-edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Monico used Wish’s own efforts to always understand respond to customer needs as examples for how retailers should align their e-commerce efforts.
How can retailers ensure successful online sales events?
Retailers need to understand the ecosystem they’re operating in. If they're in a marketplace like Wish, then what are the demographics they should be serving? What is the value proposition for your product, the sales, the discounts, the time of the year? What are the kinds of products you’re selling?
Also, retailers hosting online sales events can participate in their product suppliers’ promotions and should try to reduce delivery times.
What can retailers do to improve shipping times in the face of continuing supply chain disruption?
The key is to maintain a diverse ecosystem of logistics providers. During the pandemic, Wish had several warehouses in several locations in case one of those warehouses were in lockdown. Since then, we have maintained a variety of different ways to get something from point A to point B.
It might be a direct line. It might be going across the world. But our focus has always been on delivering on our promises. So, our redundancy, variety of providers and different warehouses, and our ability to move products from one warehouse to another has been the key to mitigating supply chain disruption.
How can retailers effectively expand their assortment?
The most common way that a retailer will think about assortment is, ‘If I'm selling sandals, what are the different variations of sandals? What are the different variation of sizes and colors?’
But another way is trying to understand the journey the customer is going through. Why would they need sandals – are they going on a beach vacation? What are the things that goes with that beach vacation?
Understanding the customer needs and the reasons why they're buying lets you expose a variety of products that are not just a slightly different variation of what they’re buying, but a thematic response to the continuation of the journey that the user might be going through. It converts extremely well, and it drives a huge customer value proposition.
How do you expect AI to change e-commerce in the next six to 12 months?
Traditionally, the way a shopping marketplace has worked has been you search for something and you find it, with a bunch of AI systems behind the scenes to make sure that product is what it should be it.
What has changed with technologies like generative AI is now marketplaces are actually learning with their customers providing the products they think customers are going to need. With generative AI, retail has taken a huge leap forward with search recommendations. Now, recommendations are much more conversational rather than simply based on differences between one product and another.
I think there’s going to be a variety of things that will happen with AI, like image-driven shopping and retailers’ ability to understand similarities and connections. Going beyond that, the search experience will either become like a conversation, or feel like a conversation without actually having a conversation.
Are there any notable future plans for Wish that you can discuss?
Our focus at Wish has always been to help users fulfill their delights on a budget. That means we have been investing and will continue to invest in improving shipping costs and shipping correctly.
The number one complaint with our customers is that our time to door is anywhere between 10 to 15 days, depending on where you live for the majority of our shoppers. Wish’s cost of shipping is a $2.99 flat rate, and we're working on how do we improve both time to door and shipping cost, moving forward?
Our product quality and product range have dramatically improved with our seller standards, our invitation-only program for the retailers on the platform. and our ability to curate the products that we actually expose to our users. So those areas are going to continue to improve and our experience has been evolving over time.
[Read more: Exclusive Q&A: Wish outlines ‘three pillars’ of e-commerce success]