Flyfish helps you increase your e-commerce sales: Founder, Shridhar Marri

Shridhar Marri, CEO and Founder of Flyfish shares how his company harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help e-commerce companies increase sales, reduce customer acquisition costs and deliver a transformative search experience.

The convenience of e-commerce is unmatched. However, browsing through thousands of products is time-consuming and tiring for consumers. Also for e-commerce companies, maintaining catalogs and ensuring accurate search results is a constant challenge. Bengaluru-based Flyfish.ai helps ease the search pain for both consumers and online sellers by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

In the year and a half since its founding, Flyfish has worked with over 20 brands to help them increase e-commerce conversions and sales by transforming their search capabilities.

The company has offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Gurugram, London, Toronto, New York, Chicago and Bellevue.

In an exclusive interview, Shridhar Marri, CEO and Founder of Flyfish, shares how his company harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help e-commerce companies realize tangible benefits. Edited excerpts…

Tell us about what Flyfish does.

We help increase e-commerce sales and repeat purchases and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC). This is our reason for existence. How to do it? Helping e-commerce companies transform their search capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI).

Can you elaborate?

When people visit an e-commerce site, search is their only contact with the company. However, most websites offer the traditional, stupid keyword search. But people’s needs evolve. They want the products or looks they see on Instagram. But there are many products in one set – not just the dress. There are shoes, accessories… We analyze the photos they upload, we analyze all the products involved, we search the customer’s catalog and pull products that match it or things that are similar to the customer’s e-commerce website or application. Therefore, the first step is AI-powered image search.

The second is voice search… Nowadays, people often use voice search, especially on mobile phones, because typing is cumbersome. We provide detailed voice search in over 100 national and international languages.

Tell us more about image search.

So customers can upload a photo from social media or their gallery, or point the camera at something they like, such as a mannequin in a store window.

That’s why all your solutions focus on search.

It’s one layer. The second layer is the AI ​​data curator who works on the client’s catalog. Currently, many catalogs are a mess – some do not have appropriate descriptions, others do not have appropriate tags. Men’s products are often marked as women’s, etc. We have reviewed thousands of catalogs and identified problems. When we come in, we sanitize the entire catalog and organize it once and for all using machine vision algorithms.

Flyfish will look at all the images and products in the catalog and guess what objects are in each photo. Some images have four or five objects, our solution identifies and assigns a product type to each. Is it an accessory, a dress, a bottom or a top? After assigning the product type, you go further and decide on the product attributes. So if it is jewelry, is it a pendant, if so is it gold or diamond? And it creates this database. After rebuilding the catalog, most problems are solved because you no longer have to do it manually, except for entering the price.

The third layer is targeted sales, which simplifies search. Let’s say you visit Amazon today and are looking for a red jacket. It will list at least 10,000 products from hundreds of brands. Even after applying various filters, about 700 or 800 products remain. You have to look through everything… read the descriptions and reviews… to find the one that is right for you. This leads to decision fatigue. Now, thanks to AI, you can just say, “I’m going to a party, do you suggest anything?” The AI ​​chatbot that is part of the search will ask you a few questions and then respond with text and images from the same website.
So instead of browsing through 10,000 products, you can simply look at the refined list of products that we will offer you.

The three parts: intelligent search, AI curation and targeted selling can be extended to all channels, whether it is WhatsApp, website, mobile app or Instagram.

Typically, companies have to look for multiple vendors to provide each of these features, but we provide it all in one place.

INthe hen makes ROI start cooperation with the brand?

Typically, it takes about four to six weeks to implement any feature. Up-to-date information about your brand. Brands will then be able to see the impact in about four to six weeks. First, they will notice that search volume and conversions will increase.

How to measure impact?

In addition to search volume and conversions, the metric we measure is average order value (AOV), which also increases because you engage differently and help customers find the right products right away. When search is time-consuming and tedious, it leads to a lot of abandonment, which is reduced because search time is reduced by almost 80% and the overall purchasing cycle is much faster. And better experiences keep customers coming back, which is why we also consider repeat purchases.

So your product Is perfect for all categories?

We operate in a broad spectrum. Currently, we deal with, among others: fashion, cosmetics, jewelry, consumer electronics and furniture. Several large banks have also contacted us.

Similarly, some real estate players have approached us to help them prepare a huge list of potential clients.

That’s why we created a real estate consultant for one of the developers in Mumbai. Answers questions and helps narrow down your search. Increases the number of leads by 20%.

INhat is next Flyfish?

We want to provide Indian brands with world-class customer service. In retail today, almost 90% of the time searches are sub-optimal, and brands currently have no solution for this. Even the largest of the large search firms in existence are legacy technology firms. Everyone uses keywords that produce inaccurate results if the tagging is incorrect and incomplete. This requires a lot of manual work, which is tedious. We want to take the pain out of retail from a search standpoint. Search should work like a beautiful experience.

Brands like Amazon have invested millions of dollars in improving their search engines, but not all companies have that financial clout. We want to be that bridge and help all retailers experience world-class technology at a price they can afford. And we want to cover the entire retail segment, including all sub-industries.