Case study: ShopSee

Marketing analytics for mobile shopping

Shop together when you can’t be together

When it comes to shopping, technology has forgotten that shopping is a social activity. Simple Matters founder Jonathan Drazin watched his daughter trying to involve her friends when she was shopping. She had sent URLs, take pictures with her phone and resort to chat apps to get opinions on things she wanted to buy. Not only do shoppers find difficult to swap between a retailer’s app and their friends’ comments, but retailers are left out in the cold. Links to Twitter or other social platforms push people away, rather than immersing them further in the online retail experience. There had to be a better way.

ShopSee: Answering the needs of shoppers and retailers

ShopSee was created to answer the needs of both shoppers and retailers. Shoppers want a safe, secure and private way or swapping ideas, without leaving the retail app. And retailers need a way of getting anonymized data about shoppers’ likes and dislikes. Answering both needs wasn’t so easy, though.

Analytics that retailers can trust

ShopSee designers, Simple Matters, turned to Anatec BI, specialists in marketing analytics and Microsoft SQL Server database and data warehouse technologies. The brief was to design a robust analytics solution that would be trusted by retailers and shoppers. The analytics had to provide complete privacy for shoppers, and provide retailers with the insights they need to understand how shoppers think.

Anatec BI used their experience of database and data warehouse design to create a scalable architecture that could cope with large volumes of data, while providing a responsive experience for shoppers.

To safeguard shopper’s anonymity, data is never be attributed to an individual or group of individuals. Minimal information is transmitted from phone to server, so the design had to ensure that all the pieces of the jigsaw were correctly assembled ready for processing. A scalable and reliable architecture was designed, made up of three separate databases running on Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform. The data is anonymized and aggregated, and provide retailers with a fresh perspective on how shoppers think.

Anatec BI, Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server

ShopSee provides a new way for retailers to understand what shoppers want. As the software moves towards trial Anatec BI are creating more in-depth analytics to provide deeper insights into shopping sentiment. Microsoft Azure provides a robust and scalable platform, with SQL Database providing solid functionality for the databases.

Anatec BI’s continuing investment in Microsoft technology has allowed ShopSee to fully exploit the power of Microsoft Azure and SQL Server, and provide retailers with completely new insights into their customers’ views.

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