ShopRunner Relies on Digital Element’s NetAcuity Pulse Plus to Enhance Members’ Shopping Experience
Scenario
Online shopping has become firmly entrenched in our daily lives. Consumers have more shopping options now than they ever dreamed of and gravitate toward brands that provide excellent experiences. Facing fierce competition, retailers need to go beyond merely providing online access―they need to anticipate what shoppers are looking for while providing an engaging, seamless shopping experience to succeed in today’s crowded landscape. As a result, forward-thinking companies, such as ShopRunner, have developed an innovative and vibrant ecommerce presence.
ShopRunner is a unique subscription service that matches savvy online shoppers with top retailers and brands. ShopRunner’s exclusive member benefits and data-driven marketing help retail partners acquire high-value customers while increasing existing customers’ purchase frequency and spend through relevant content. ShopRunner provides retailers with robust tools that enable the features consumers demand such as seamless checkout, recommendations based on location or previous purchase, free returns, expedited shipping and more.
Staying ahead in the world of retail means effectively leveraging data science to make the shopping experience more personalized and keep consumers coming back time after time. According to Ali Vanderveld, director of data science at ShopRunner, it’s easier than one may think to perform data science poorly in the realm of ecommerce. With one bad experience, consumers look quickly to a competing brand. “Fashion is one industry where market trends can vary widely based on geography,” said Vanderveld. “What might be trending in Chicago in May is very different than what is trending in Miami at that time. Our retailers require that we have the ability to decipher trending data accurately to enable them to establish filters based on attributes so they can enhance the shopping experience by providing recommendations for shoppers’ specific areas.”
Because ShopRunner relies on accurately identifying and leveraging shoppers’ locations, it made the decision to incorporate Digital Element’s NetAcuity® solution.
The Solution
Since March 2018, ShopRunner has relied on Digital Element’s NetAcuity Pulse Plus, which combines devicederived data with reverse-geocoding data for a non-invasive way to determine members’ geographic locations and provide that information to its retail partners. NetAcuity Pulse Plus is the industry’s most robust IP targeting solution, leveraging ondevice data to exponentially increase seen IP traffic, which translates into more coverage and accuracy in location responses as well as the ability to return ZIP+4-level targeting in the United States.
“We sometimes know very little about our shoppers, but with location we have a starting point that enables us to empower our retail partners to provide a meaningful online experience for them,” said Michelangelo D’Agostino, vice president of data science and engineering at ShopRunner. “This requires extremely accurate data so we were in need of an IP geolocation provider who could ensure reliable data as well as ease of use.”
According to D’Agostino, Digital Element and three other vendors were evaluated, with the data science team analyzing IP samples against web browsing data. In addition to having the most accurate IP geo data, Digital Element was the “easiest to work with” and offered pricing that was “very attractive.”
“From the onset, the Digital Element team was very engaged with us, expressing a genuine interest in how ShopRunner was planning and/ or wanting to use the geolocation data,” said D’Agostino. “While we recognized right away the reliability of the IP data, we also knew integration across our systems was vital to our success. Digital Element offered several options to accomplish that so we could easily migrate data from one system to another. Integration has been virtually hands off, enabling our team to focus on other tasks instead of troubleshooting.”
Success
The use of Digital Element’s NetAcuity Pulse Plus data allows ShopRunner to help its retailers determine shopping trends by more pinpointed locations, allowing retailers to adapt and present products to consumers on the fly, whether on a website or through a mobile app.
“Today, we are using trend data to drive product innovation as well as leveraging latitude and longitude data in large metro areas for better targeting,” said Vanderveld. “As online shopping continues to outpace instore, we are now turning our focus to leveraging rich IP geo data to pilot same-day delivery, perform demand forecasting by geography and use geolocation browsing behavior to further enhance the shopping experience.”
ShopRunner is confident the accuracy of its geolocation data will help its retail partners continue to thrive in today’s ultra-competitive digital marketplace.