An Interview With Pavan Sondur, CEO & Co-founder, Unbxd

E-commerce is growing exponentially in India with rise in online shopping trends and increasing use of smartphone and internet. The India e-commerce market grew at a whopping 88 percent in 2013 to $16 billion from $8.5 billion in 2012, as per ASSOCHAM report.

Such exponential increase in e-commerce portals has given rise to product recommendation platforms. These platforms are useful for product managers and marketers to target right audience. One such start-up is Unbxd whose SmartEngage platform helps e-commerce sites increase sales by recommending the right products to visitors. The Bangalore based companies in-site search bosts e-commerce revenues by helping visitors find the right products.

Here is an excerpt of our email conversation with Pavan Sondur, CEO & Co-founder, Unbxd

1. How did you come up with the idea of Unbxd? Take us through the journey of the company?

At the time we started working on Unbxd, the ecommerce industry was growing rapidly. There were multiple small and large players and they were all trying to solve key problems like logistics and traffic generation. One key area that no one was addressing is what happens when users are on your site. Not a lot of companies were focusing on the on-site experience like search and navigation. We saw most ecommerce companies showing irrelevant results and not personalizing the experience for users. This is when we realized that this is a problem we can solve. We focused our efforts on the improving the on-site experience through personalized & relevant search and navigation.

We started in October 2011 and spent the next year and a half developing our intelligent platform and our merchandizing & reporting dashboard. We started working with a few of our earliest customers including travelguru, cbazaar, redmart etc. In 2012, we secured seed funding from the Indian Angel Network and went on to receive a Series A round from IDG Ventures and Inventus Capital in October 2013.

Over the past few months, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the best ecommerce companies in the country including Caratlane, Yepme, Zansaar etc. We’re currently well on track to getting more Indian ecommerce companies on board and are also focusing on the North American and APAC markets.

2.   What kind of services do you offer? Tell us about your business.

Unbxd Inc, is an on-site product discovery software for ecommerce companies. Our products make it easier for eCommerce players to showcase targeted & relevant products to visitors. Our products include relevant & personalized site search that helps users find the products they are looking for.

Relevant Navigation: Dynamic navigation with the ability to create merchandising rules using a web dashboard. Our intelligent engine constantly analyzes user preferences and dynamically orders products as users navigate to various categories on an ecommerce site.

Merchandising Control: Ecommerce managers can easily create merchandising rules to promote certain products and brands in search and navigation results. They can also decide the placement of products in the search and navigation results. Our dashboard allows merchandisers to create filtering & sorting rules, boost products, pin products to specific places and create landing pages with one click. In addition to this we provide insights and comprehensive reports on key data like top searches, top selling products, conversion funnel per query & category and much more.

3.  How many clients do you serve?

We currently serve 25 clients including companies like Yepme, Caratlane, Zansaar, Trendin, Redmart etc. We’re also currently integrating Unbxd with about 5 more ecommerce companies and they’ll be live very soon.

4. What are the changes in this market as you are up against one of the leaders Oracle?

The trends in this market include context-awareness and personalised experiences. One thing we’ve seen with companies using either Endeca or GCS or SOLR is that that they struggle with relevance. Even simple queries like ‘Brown Leather Jacket’ don’t show relevant results as their engines aren’t advanced enough to understand that the jacket is the intent of the search & brown as well as leather are attributes. Therefore, in case there aren’t too many brown leather jackets in the catalogue, their search results start showing other brown or leather products instead of focusing on the user’s intent. This is the primary problem we solve across head, torso and tail queries.

The second trend we focus on will be the defining trend for ecommerce companies in the future – Personalization. Personalization helps set an ecommerce company apart and offers a superior experience to customers. We solve this by offering Search & Recommendations that are personalized per user i.e. we understand every single user’s preferences and show search results and recommendations accordingly.

5. How many people do you have in the team currently? Do you plan to add more workforce?

We’re currently a 30 member strong team spanning across engineering, solutions, sales and marketing. We’re always on the lookout for great talent so if anyone is interested they can reach out to us on [email protected]

6. Any upcoming new product launches lined up for this year?

There are some interesting things we’re working on right now. The first is the beta launch of our new product – product recommendations. We already have a few early adopters trying this out and we plan to open it to even more beta users in March. This product will allow any ecommerce company to start offering personalised product recommendation widgets quickly and easily. This will include widgets like ‘Recommended for you’, ‘Similar Products’, ‘People who bought this also bought’ and more.

We’re also working on releasing a new version of merchandising dashboard. Apart from being gorgeously designed, this will be amazingly intuitive and will allow ecommerce merchandisers to control their merchandising efforts without any developer intervention.

7. How has the $2M funding last year helped you expand?

Our series A funding is being used primarily to expand the team and focus on markets like North America and APAC. We’ve hired some great talent over the last few months and are now focusing on increasing our customer base in the aforementioned markets. We’ve recently opened an office in the US and are well underway to launch operations there as well.

8. Where do you see the company three years from now? Any specific goal or target?
We’ve always considered ourselves a global product company. In the next three years we’re looking at being the leading provider of ecommerce site search & recommendations in India and APAC and capture a significant part of the huge North American market. We also plan to consistently improve our products and provide ecommerce companies with a platform that helps improve the shopping experience for their visitors.

9. What kind of challenges do you face in this business as you serve one of India’s fastest growing markets, E-commerce?

The first challenge we faced was in helping companies understand the importance of having an exceptional search & navigation experience. However, with the success our last few customers experienced, this has gotten a lot easier. For instance, on an average, our clients see a 25-30% increase in conversions after implementing Unbxd.

Another challenge we see is that a few larger companies speak of building such intelligence in house. However, we are speaking to quite a few businesses to help them understand the benefits and the convenience of using a third-party platform like ours, which is solely focused on this aspect of ecommerce.

10. Any tips for budding entrepreneurs like you.

I guess one tip is to make sure that the benefit from your product can be identified and is easily measurable.

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