Ben Parr, Co-Founder & President of Octane AI

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To understand why personalization is so crucial in ecommerce, let’s take a step back and look at the brick and mortar shopping experience.

When you walk into a store, there’s a human element to the shopping experience: the concierge. A salesperson will greet you, ask questions about your preferences, and provide guidance on products. This gives you confidence in your purchase, but it also provides an opportunity to build a relationship with the retailer through that conversation.

Many ecommerce customers, says Ben, don’t know what they want, and are looking for guidance. In fact, a significant percentage of shoppers were doing the majority or all of their purchasing in brick and mortar italy phone data stores until the last year due to the pandemic, when the ecommerce audience skyrocketed.

“The vast majority of people, this is the first time they’ve ever done ecommerce really. And so they’re looking for that equivalent experience. You need to deliver that for them, that humanized, suggestion, that concierge.”


There really hasn’t been an equivalent to this human element in ecommerce, says Ben, until conversational commerce.