#minewhat

[minewhat]

We're Open For Business

MINEWHAT’s OPEN FOR BUSINESS!!!!

And now we have a sudden urge to analyse our long, eventful and rewarding journey to get here. Your initial team can make or break you, we lucked out :). The MineWhat crew has taken on projects ranging from voice acting assignments, feature animation to managing multiple cluster servers and has come out with flying colors.

We started with the simple idea that ecommerce could be a bit more of a fun experience, then came the grind, the long hours and the meetings, oh MAN! the meetings, all so we could get our research done so we knew we were building something useful.

The market is an honest mentor and sure enough we had to pick up some lessons real quick. One of the most important lessons we’ve learnt is to evolve and differentiate. Given that the industry is constantly evolving we’ve been on our toes to stay on top of it all and create a unique, useful analytics tool that’s tailor-made for  online stores with a good product-market fit.

To wrap this up here’s to the future, startups, technology and success!!! .

[minewhat]

Marketing, Fishing and Startups

Let me start with yet another Marketing and Fishing analogy. Marketing is a lot like throwing a hook into a stream and hoping with every ounce of your soul that something takes. Of course you know which fish you are after, you know what bait is likely to be more appealing and more, but there’s only so much you can control. Marketing at a startup is even harder as you don’t often have the luxury of extensive research, pilot studies and so on. Here's some of what we learned through it all.

Targeting

We always try to sell to our worst critic. That way we get to ensure a strong customer acquisition focus to everything we say or do. Start with the assumption that most people are looking for an excuse to leave or drop out and do the best you to ensure they don’t find one.

Build Castles In The Air

Well just a tiny bit of an amendment to that: Build all the castles you want, just ensure that you’ve atleast got the bricks you need. Getting an early start with the marketing efforts while the product is still in the works is usually a great advantage, especially if you need some hype to increase your visibility.  Just don’t go overboard with it and market something you don’t intend to build

The Knowledge Curse

Marketing at its core about getting a message out to a target group of people, but it doesn’t stop there. Like every good marketer knows, the interesting bit is what happens to the message as it spreads on. A simple enough message might be perceived very differently by two people.  At MineWhat, we regularly pull in outsiders to take a look at what we do and very what we think is amazing copy or a great idea usually elicits totally unexpected and often insightful observations that we would have never thought of.

Perfection Is A Myth There’s always something else you can add or change, the trick lies in knowing when to stop. Something that has worked quite well for us is to give out previews to small groups of people and use their feedback to make the necessary corrections and then go live as opposed to going round and round with changes and even more changes.

[minewhat]

Analytics for Ecommerce: Page Views vs Event Level vs User Level vs Product Level

So you are probably among the many people who use Analytics tools on your eCommerce site. They are convenient, informative and enable you to offer relevant content to users. Ever wondered how each of them are different. What can they do? What can’t they do?

Analytics tools are usually one of these types.

Page View Analytics

User Level Analytics

Event Level Analytics

Page View Analytics

Page view analytics (Google does this very well) dig into the past to offer reports on what has happened. Metrics such as click thru rates, page views and time spent on site should help with SEO, SEM and other promotional activities. While this is useful it is only indicatory. What happens between clicks? Yes, your users are dropping out but why are they doing so?

Event Level Analytics

Event level Analytics let you do much more (CrazyEgg and Mixpanel are doing some amazing work here). They enable you to understand exactly what your customers are doing instead of just tracking where they go. You can track actions like hovering, Scrolling, custom events and more to understand how users interact with the content on your Online Store.

User Level Analytics

As the name goes these tools offer in-depth analysis of customer behavior at a user level. These are primarily useful for user segmentation, User Lifetime value and more(Check out KISSmetrics).

Product level Analytics

Now if you could push it even further: if you could run a behavioral analytics engine that gives you insights at a product level(i.e) which specific product is the most engaging, which ones haven’t been viewed and suddenly a whole new world of possibilities emerge.

You can optimize your webpages to highlight your best-selling products. You can manage your campaigns better because you know exactly which product a certain demographic is likely to buy. You can manage your inventory better because you know which products are most likely to sell and so much more. A bird’s view of your data will only get you so far in your quest for conversions, opt for product level insights, take a look at MineWhat Inc.

[minewhat]

what we ARE and what we are NOT

Hiya folks

How are you all doing? We’ve been busy as a pack of ants adding bit by small bit to the product, getting closer to our goal of providing intelligent assistance to shoppers and enabling e-retailers to engage their customers.

All through the process we’ve had people ask us questions on what we are and what we aren’t. Thought we’d address some of those here.

a) Why do you think that shoppers would bother to interact with your product?

Let me set the scene, firstly the lack of effective user engagement is a well-documented problem, add to that the fact that most online stores list way more products than what a shopper can effectively sort through, finding what you are looking for becomes a huge problem.  Any tool that offers assistance in making shopping easier is in itself a sufficient incentive.

We also understand that some folks like to do things by themselves.  With this in mind the product is designed to stay out of the way while letting shoppers know it’s always there if they need assistance.

b) Ok you can manage to keep shoppers engaged. Would you get in the way of my site’s experience?

The Product is designed to avoid exactly that. The assistance widget is not intrusive. It will not get in the way of any user interaction during key stages of the buying cycle.

We’ve built the product with the idea that it would seamlessly integrate into any online store and augment all the cool features there, while providing added value to the shopper.

c) How do you increase conversions?

The product actively observes shopper behavior and uses the understanding gained to keep them engaged and drive them towards a point of purchase with intelligent assistance. There’s also the added benefit of using insights gained during the process to deliver more relevant content through other channels to further increase conversions.

d) Aren’t you just another recommendation Engine?

Nope. Recommendation engines give shoppers product suggestions based on aggregated historical data, we go one step further. What we do is on the lines of an offline shopping assistant. We combine shopper understanding and glyph based interactions with the shopper to provide relevant assistance.

e) So you give me numbers, how is that different from any of the other (free) analytics tools I could use?

The simplest way we could describe what we offer in comparison with some of the other good analytical tools out there is Pre-Purchase Analytics vs. Postmortem Analytics

We believe that offering analytics long after your customers have left your site doesn’t make much sense when you are trying to actively engage and convert them. We provide extensive metrics such as the intent to buy, trending products and most engaging products all based on pre-purchase data so you can still do something about it.

Another key differentiator is that all our metrics focus on what’s happening at a product level instead of click through data and URL based data.

f) I don’t list too many products on my online store, will you still be effective?

Yes, although it would make more sense for you to use the product if you have a fairly decent number (Above a 100 at the least) that your customers can’t effectively sort through them all to make informed decisions.

g) I am an exclusive retailer. Will the product apply in my setup?

The product works well as long as you have something to sell. The parameters of providing assistance might change but the product would still work just the same­­­. The product includes category specific assistance based on expert knowledge as well which could provide added value if you are an exclusive retailer.

h) You have an image of a robot on your site. Are you working on a Chat Bot?

 The robot silhouette is meant to signify automated intelligent assistance. We aren’t working on a Chat Bot of any kind. Our product is built to be a hands free intelligent tool providing assistance using shopper understanding and glyph based interactions with the shopper much like a human sales assistant would.

i) Do you sell beer?

We wish! We’d sure be glad to buy you one though if you do agree to buy the product.

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[minewhat]

eSparks 2013 takeaways

We have got good feedback from business development and marketing team members of top eCommerce companies of India.

Top take aways for our automatic assistance product & predictive analytics

1) Assistance will differ for every product, every category. Most users need specific assistance based on their need. For example: assistance for buying TV is different from buying cloth. Importance of a retail product feature varies based on geography of user, category of product, purpose of usage.

2) Three important data points any eCommerce company looks for  1) who comes to the website (persona) 2) why they have come 3) what is their experience on the website 

3) We need to add more data points apart from user behavior on the website like reviews, forums , curation.

We are iterating faster to improve the product and best fit the market needs. We are open for your feedback and suggestion. Please write to [email protected]

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MineWhat latest BETA offer

Signup now, our latest brochure designed for eSparks event.

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basic concept