Online furniture marketplace Pepperfry has been using digital technology to change how Indians shop for furniture. Its technological architecture, developed in-house, has helped it garner more than 60% share of the online traffic.
“Our discrete ‘Products’ enable the front-end experience, the fulfillment and logistics experience, the customer support experience as well as the omnichannel experience. We bind these discrete systems together with a Data Control Network that ensures that the appropriate information is available to the relevant user at the right time,” says Abhimanyu Lal, chief product officer, Pepperfry.
It has also established Pepperfry Studios wherein it has replicated the online experience. A user who has placed products in her shopping cart but then subsequently does not take any action or is unable to complete the online payment, can benefit from an assisted buying experience at the Studio. “Through our technology, we pipe these leads into the nearest Studio which then gets in touch with this user and in a large number of cases is able to convert the lead into a satisfied customer. This approach has been a complete game changer for us and our Studios are now contributing to more than 30% of our total business volume,” he says.
The use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning has improved consumers’ shopping experience.
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“When a customer visits our portal for the first time, she often has a broad sense of what she wants but is open to evaluating multiple options. Therefore, our task is to highlight the most relevant products in order to display something that she likes and therefore move forward in the purchase journey from simply browsing to actively evaluating a product,” he explains.
3D technology is another area which the company has used for visualising products better. 3D experience for a large number of furniture products allows changing the orientation to view it from different angles, zoom in and out and also get the experience of opening cabinet doors, pulling out drawers, etc.
The move has helped in conversion rates for products which have 3D models which clearly conveys that there is high consumer affinity towards this feature.
Pepperfry is now looking to launch Augmented Reality(AR) feature in its app. However, this may require users to download a significantly larger app.
“However, this is definitely an area that we are investing in and we also have a superior concept app ready. This application will be launched when we are certain that a large segment of consumers is actually able to make use of the functionality,” he shares.
Startups have limited resources in comparison to legacy companies. Resources translate into both time and manpower, hence the architecture needs to be such that it can scale and deploy with a quick pace.
“At Pepperfry, the service-oriented structure helps us build our functionality in small but impactful portions without interfering with processes that are already ongoing and effective. The service-oriented architecture also helps us achieve higher software reusability and also avoid multiple pieces of code doing that same thing, therefore, making the job of the QA/Testing team simpler,” explains Lal.
