Shipt’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Calvo took the stage at key industry conference Shoptalk to discuss one of the hottest topics in retail tech today: how the company is leveraging the latest technology advancements to enable even more relevant, engaging and personal experiences.

Joined by leaders from Kate Spade and The Estee Lauder Companies for the session titled, “Achieving Personalization at Scale,” Mike highlighted Shipt’s work to uplevel personalization across its web and app platforms for customers, shoppers and partners alike. 

“If an experience feels like personalization, then you’re probably doing it wrong. If it feels easy, if it feels like the retailer understands you, you’ve done it right,”  said Mike. 

Mike discussed the new tech upgrades and ways Shipt is using machine learning to further enhance the shopping experience, including: 

A Higher Quality Search Experience

On average, Shipt customers use our search capabilities between 15-20 times per shopping trip. It’s an important tool and we wanted to make it even easier, removing friction from the experience. Not only did we optimize our search infrastructure to improve speed – today we deliver search results as much as 15 percent faster – improved capabilities also drill down even further into a customer’s intent, not just their words, enabling users to build their digital carts more efficiently. An example? Using machine learning to better understand the semantic meaning and predict when a customer types in dresses, that switches from results for dressing to apparel. 

Adding Popularity to Product Inspiration

When a product becomes popular with our customers, we can't keep the secret to ourselves! While Shipt already has a long history of recommending products to customers based on individual purchasing behavior, we’re now helping connect the dots. When a customer searches for a certain product, we’re now recommending products that other people chose after looking at that same product, which is helping people discover new, related products to love and helping build digital carts faster. 

Even More Personalized Deals

We know what it feels like to score a good deal, and in order to help customers do so, Shipt teams leveraged machine learning to restructure how we show products that are on sale in the digital experience. By tailoring these suggestions, we’ve seen customers add sale products to their carts 13 percent more often than before - so customers are loving the inspiration and discovery. 

A Custom Chat Platform

We’ve invested recently in building our own chat platform, enabled on Shipt web and app, to promote seamless and reliable communications between the customer and shopper. By prioritizing conversations during a shop, we’re helping to foster a personalized connection and experience for customers, as well as an easier way for shoppers to wow with detail and care during a shop. We see custom chat as an opportunity to bring differentiated communications to the Shipt experience. 

Display Advertising Across the Shopping Journey 

As a way to inspire customers before they even reach the search bar, Shipt recently introduced three different display ad products. These new offerings allow brands to further tailor the audience and experience to inspire customers as they build their baskets, trial new products and unlock savings. By combining multiple, tailored product placements into one site experience – from the Shipt homepage to checkout  – we’ve unlocked the ability for brands to build more personalized campaigns.

“These recent investments and upgrades are improving the customer experience and allowing CPG brands to deliver tailored programs that matter,” said Dave Young, Shipt’s vice president of consumer product goods. 

At Shipt, we’re committed to creating solutions that integrate the ease of technology with the feeling of human connection to create unique and one-of-a-kind shop and deliver experiences. Enhanced search and advertising capabilities are just a scratch on the surface of all of the ways that Shipt’s tech team is investing in personalization.