Bolt Launches Virtual Shopper Assistant for Easier Access to Personalized Experiences

Originally published by TechCrunch

Bolt, which is mostly known for its one-click checkout experience, now has a new virtual Shopper Assistant so that retailers can more easily turn guest shoppers into account-holding customers.

Company CEO Maju Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that rather than dealing with pop-ups or other disconnected methods of obtaining a customer’s email address, retailers, like its customer Tyler’s (an athletic and lifestyle apparel retailer), want a fully end-to-end connected experience for shoppers that would enable them to log in friction-free while also providing product recommendations and turning first-time customers into lifetime customers.

“In working with a lot of retailers, one of the themes that has been coming lately is how do they connect with their shoppers?” Kuruvilla said. “Today, a lot of those experiences are controlled with a lot of disparate tools, but they are a fairly disconnected experience.”

Enter the Shopper Assistant, which integrates natively into a retailer’s site and customers can get a discount if they enter their email into the Shopper Assistant to create an account without having to leave the site, log into email to find the code and copy and paste it at checkout.

Tyler’s is, of course, one of the first customers to utilize Shopper Assistant, Kuruvilla said. Shortly after putting it in place, the company yielded results, including 16% increase in account registration, 14% increase in the retailer’s logged-in shopper rate and 6% additional increase in checkout conversion.

“Tyler’s has been looking for a way to streamline account creation and checkout in order to increase our number of repeat shoppers, and we love that Bolt consistently innovates ahead of the market to help us stay competitive,” said Justin Dermit, director of e-commerce and marketing at Tyler’s, in a written statement. “We’re already seeing success in terms of increasing account registrations and logged-in shopping.”

It’s not just for first-time shoppers to a site, though. Returning shoppers get a more streamlined login experience that includes secure sign-in using Bolt’s passwordless login. Once in, shoppers can easily see items like past order history, recently viewed products, product recommendations and reorders. Similar to using Amazon.com, they can also track live orders.

On average, Bolt yields around 9.5% of shopping volume on a merchant’s site for its one-click experience, and that goes up to around 30% when merchants start using the platform for about six months, Kuruvilla said.

The company started out targeting small- and medium-sized businesses with its checkout technology but is now providing an enterprise-grade product. With that, it has been able to secure new customers like online retailer Fanatics and shoe company Revolve.

“We are very excited to continue to be a solution for merchants of our size and scale,” Kuruvilla added. “The enterprise product is helping large merchants gain a lot of great momentum.”