During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retailers lose, on average, $250,000 per incident on glitches that would set a company back approximately $40,000 outside the holiday season. Anodot AI Analytics for Retail uncovers hidden insights in vast troves of business data, identifying outliers in key performance indicators, correlating across multiple sources, and providing valuable real-time insights. For example, Anodot enables retailers to maintain confidence in market presence (search/comparison sites/forums), product presence (inventory, types, options, product images), site and store performance, customer journey, payment process, shipping process, returns process, and more.

“For retailers, the critical holiday season means online shopping spikes, and glitches can lead to larger losses, both monetarily and reputationally,” said David Drai, CEO and Co-founder of Anodot. “Today’s environment allows very little margin for error. Our solution ensures our retail customers’ sites and interactions are perfectly consistent across platforms. It effectively tracks exact customer activity and delivers concise data that is dependable, allowing us to ensure that consumers are having a best-in-class experience.”

Retailers‘ Secret Sauce

Anodot’s AI-powered data analytics system — with multiple patents pending — uncovers incidents in real time, revealing glitches that would cost retailers millions in lost revenue, and identifying opportunities.

Traditional BI tools, such as dashboards, cannot keep up with the constantly changing and massive amounts of data in today’s retail. They prove useless for finding glitches quickly, as they typically display historical data, not real-time data. Dashboards require humans to create and interpret them, which is time consuming and frustrating, when every hour costs retailers significant revenue loss. The challenge to retailers is amplified with mobile users, who are less patient than desktop users, and will jump to a competitor site when running into the smallest slowdown or glitch.

“No matter the commerce channel, having an overall view of shopper purchase and selection behavior and the support systems surrounding them is the key to future retail success,” said John L. Myers, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a Boulder, CO based industry analysis firm. “Incorporating real-time analytics, AI, and machine learning into brick and mortar, e-commerce or a hybrid strategy allows retailers to gain greater insights into customer experience and consumer trends. The Anodot platform enables retailers across multiple categories to protect themselves from unforeseen developments in consumer tastes, customer transactions and per store revenue, saving millions of dollars in lost opportunities and brand reputation.”

The following are examples of common and costly glitches that Anodot can detect:

• $2,000 televisions were being sold for $200.
• Identifying a drop in mobile sales for a particular set of products after incorrectly updating a batch of SKUs on the site.
• Quickly identifying correlation between a celebrity’s Instagram post and a revenue spike for a particular product and allowing the retailer to leverage it to bundle another product and shift inventory orders to ensure adequate inventory
• Identifying cross promotion glitches to ensure the proper products are recommended for the appropriate customer profiles
• Identifying a revenue drop for kitchen supplies as a result of a competitor’s increased ad bids for kitchen supplies.

“During the peak shopping season, any glitches that occur can cost an order of magnitude more than during the rest of the year,” said David Drai, Founder & CEO, Anodot. “Online retailers need to learn to identify and rectify glitches in real time to avoid losing revenue and prevent brand damage. This is a difficult task because of the sheer volume of data and because e-commerce sites use many interconnected data systems and any one of them or a combination of systems can have a glitch due to human error or a technical issue.”

A Deep Dive into Anodot‘s Technology

Anodot discovers issues at a much finer granularity in real time, giving immediate results and saving companies hours spent on creating and analyzing dashboards. Anodot’s retail system also automatically alerts about any abnormal data behaviors on your site, app, or in-store and notifications can be received through Slack, SMS, Pager Duty, or Email.

Anodot AI for Retail works with:

• ERP Systems for tracking inventory, product families, pricing history, shipping information  Inventory systems (e.g. ERP)
• Web/ Mobile analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, MixPanel)
• Point-of-Sale data including groupings by SKUs and cross promotion information
• Call Center (e.g. CRM)
• Social Media Monitoring
• Marketing campaigns including coupon redemption
• Shipping information
• Devops/IT data

Anodot is capable of bringing in any type of internal or external data. For example:

• Weather
• Competitor prices
• Competitor advertising bids
• Social Media Monitoring
• Demographic Information
• Search engines
• Product comparison sites