DIGITAL COMMERCE
POWERED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Context & Challenge

As a digital commerce service provider, one of our most important challenges is improving the performance, specifically conversion rate of our partners. Our teams, always researching new methods of digital commerce and consumer interaction discovered Sentient and their Ascend product in 2016. The offering is a powerful new solution that uses an AI technology known as evolutionary algorithms to accelerate conversion optimization 10 to 100 times faster than older approaches, and infinitely faster than humans.

What is the relation between AI and business growth?

“Artificial Intelligence” is an old idea, but AI today includes a variety of technologies and tools that can solve different types of business problems. These AI solutions in turn require expert development & deployment capabilities in order to be integrated into apps and business processes that support human decision-making.

Some of these are time-tested, and others are relatively new, including Deep Learning and Evolutionary Computation, two of the most promising AI technologies.

Deep Learning platforms consist of artificial neural networks with multiple abstraction layers, primarily used in pattern recognition and classification applications supported by very large data sets. Sentient is one of the main actors in the field Deep Learning and its application, and is the leader in applying this technology to consumer purchase optimization.

The whole evolutionary computation platform use types of algorithms (called genetic algorithms or evolutionary algorithms) which are modeled on natural selection, and search for the optimal solution to a problem with incredible efficiency. They are used widely (by Sentient and others) in finance, product design, and now purchase funnel optimization.

By adding the power of Sentient Ascend into Nexway’s platform and combining Nexway’s ecommerce data and merchant of record expertise, we can now help our partners achieve unprecedented conversion growth in just a few weeks. After an initial test phase, the impact we saw from the Nexway/Sentient partnership in terms of increasing revenue, made it easy for us to accelerate the onboarding and make it available immediately to our network.

The Tests: BEFORE & AFTER AI-OPTIMIZED

Before using Sentient’s technology our teams worked with serveral A/B testing partners to accelerate the performance of our customers’ checkout pages. A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal. This is typically a lengthy process or at the minimum requires a decent level of traffic and time.

“With Sentient Ascend it’s not just a few variations that I can compare, but many. I have access to a much more responsive and powerful technology, allowing us to find winning designs faster, rapidly improving the conversion rate of our checkout pages.” Céline Aussaresses , Web Designer at Nexway

Our agency conducted an analysis of one of our client’s online stores and using Ascend, implemented a vast combination of design elements, including headers, page layouts, button colors, text variations, and more. Ascend’s evolutionary algorithms watch user behaviors on each design, and then evolve new designs which are more refined and better converting every day. Each new “generation” of designs brings us progressively closer to the right solution, for the right population, at the right moment.

The first tests impressed us – the testing velocity of the interface made us believers!

By working with Sentient, we can go much further and faster. Our account managers win time and can focus on other performance actions and strategies with our partners.

Combining Nexway’s eCommerce and Data Management Platform (DMP) with Sentient’s technology is the best way to offer increased conversion rates and maximum revenue.

Results & Benefits OF OUR FIRST USE CASE

• 1152 tested combinations – When compared with A/B testing tools that evaluate two designs at a time, we saved a significant amount time and accelerated our testing by at least 10-100X, finding winning designs faster. We got results faster, and our teams can spend more time on marketing and key strategies, not slogging through tests.

• 6 generations of continuous, adaptive web optimizations. . Ascend’s user-friendly features allowed us to create designs relevant for every type of audience, in any territory/region, detecting unconscious purchasing behaviors and move towards “emotion detection” for e-Commerce.

• Over 17% increased conversion rate from the checkout page in 3-4 weeks: the combination of Nexway’s digital commerce solution and Sentient Ascend’s capabilities allowed us to present the right cart version at the right moment for the right person.

Sentient Ascend – AI powered conversion rate optimization

“Thanks to Sentient Ascend’s technology and our expert UX designers, we were able to test radical changes in the user experience without significant investments of time. This allowed us to test a huge number of ideas without losing sales thanks to the ongoing optimization of the proposed designs. By leveraging Ascend to perform the tests, we not only realized winning combinations faster, but we reduced the costs of getting there.” Guillaume Noé, Digital Agency Director at Nexway