Ecommerce and marketing are converging and, as a result, e-tailers are uniting their supply chain, CRM and marketing stacks.
Qubit, a startup founded by a bunch of former Google employees, is tackling that technology intersection.
Following a $40 million Series C round in February from Goldman Sachs and the venture arms of SAP and Salesforce, Qubit launched on Wednesday a tool called Adaptive Targeting that works across back-end systems to speed up segmentation.
Over the last several years, Qubit has expanded from providing A/B testing tools into an offering known as Visitor Cloud, which straddles the lines of CRM, tag and data management.
Graham Cooke, Qubit’s CEO, describes Qubit’s technology as a “caching layer” that processes data across all of a marketer’s touch points, whether it’s business intelligence and analytics through an integration to Tableau, the marketer’s DMP or their commerce platform. In some ways, the system acts like a data management platform in that it has segmentation qualities, but can also pull in sales and site data in addition to the behavioral.
For instance, Chain Reaction Cycles, a global online retailer of bicycles and biking accessories, uses Qubit’s Visitor Cloud alongside Oracle Commerce to manage more than 70,000 SKUs from more than 500 brands and bike manufacturers.
The retailer used Qubit to create a customer profile graph to create a tailored home page experience for, say, loyal Shimano shoppers, or to retarget them off-site on Facebook or through Google AdWords.
The system is designed to enrich customer profiles with real-time site and analytic data – as opposed to a static record of past transactions.
“We have a 90-man call center and our ecommerce and marketing team spend a lot of time with them,” said Mark Lilley, VP of ecommerce for Chain Reaction Cycles. “We want to be as insight-led from data as possible and the Adaptive Targeting piece is where we’re getting really excited.”
The gap between commerce and marketing technologies traditionally made it difficult for retailers to do deep segmentation and personalization.
Although traditional supply chain and commerce systems had insight into what product was moving and at what price point, they had little visibility into what the consumer browsed for, clicked on or where they ultimately converted.
“Retailers’ first websites looked very much like a print catalog that they just applied to digital,” Cooke said. “Mobile demonstrated an entirely new way to interact with digital where it tied the knot behind the offline and online world. Now you’re seeing [commerce] where it’s not just mobile app or web, but it’s apps within apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.”
