My current ambitions are centred around scaling and becoming the market leader for online merchandising to match the market-leading technology in GrapheneHC: André Brown of Advanced Commerce

“Helping retailers compete online and becoming the gold standard for online merchandising are goals that will persist and drive me forward every day.”

André Brown founded Advanced Commerce in 2020 and currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the company. It serves clients in the UK, Europe, Australia, and America.

Advanced Commerce is a search and personalization merchandising company that helps merchants better showcase and sell products. The company’s flagship platform GrapheneHC is making waves in the industry and is widely taken as the new gold standard for merchandising.

Incredibly, GrapheneHC outperforms the competition in terms of speed, breadth of functionality, and price.

The Silicon Review reached out to André Brown, and here’s what he had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. How did the idea of Advanced Commerce originate? What pain points did you set out to solve?

I have been involved in eCommerce for quite a long time. I co-founded Attraqt and served as the CEO for 15 years; during that time we grew from zero to the leading online merchandising platform in Europe. In setting up Advanced Commerce, we solved the biggest pain points, such as speed, usability, and accessibility. I wanted to create a platform that was lightning fast, easy, intuitive to use, and priced at a point that ensures no barrier for any business, big or small, to use our platform.

Q. How does Advanced Commerce help retailers merchandise their online stores effectively?

The paradox of choice states, the more choice we have as consumers, the harder it is to make a decision. As we have entered the digital age, there has been an explosion of choice - the physical boundaries and constraints of floor space in a shop are removed online and in a bid to offer great service and grow revenues more and more choice has been offered, and this is making it harder for consumers to make decisions.

Merchandising in the online world is really about controlling the product display sequence, it’s a retailer's way of helping shoppers navigate the paradox of choice by showing relevant products that a customer will like instead of trying to show every product in the catalogue. If you have a catalogue of 3,000 products we know there is little chance of a customer viewing all of them. Shoppers’ attention spans are short so the decisions we make about what to show first in any and every part of our online stores are becoming increasingly important. This type of merchandising happens all the time in brick-and-mortar stores. They are carefully laid out making sure the right blend of products based on price, stock level, popularity, etc. are displayed throughout the store, and the last 18 months have really emphasised the need for this kind of merchandising online. We have had a monumentally seismic event in Covid-19 that has driven online sales with lockdowns preventing store visits, and then ongoing restrictions all adding to consumers deciding to shop online instead. I saw some statistics that stated there has been something like a 40% year-on-year increase in online orders and that has driven attention to online merchandising as retailers realise they are taking a lot more money online and they need to manage the customer experience effectively or lose the sale. 

Also, retailers are finding when they merchandise their online stores and they take control of their product curation it has a waterfall effect on things like conversion rate, average order value, the volume of orders, and even things like returns and cancelled orders. Most merchandising platforms work on a one-dimensional ‘boost or bury’ logic - boosting items that are popular to the top of the page and ‘burying’ unpopular items, but this logic makes the assumption we all like the same thing and it makes it extremely difficult for new items to gain popularity. Our platform allows retailers to use a blend of attributes such as popularity, margin, availability, trending, price, etc. to determine their product sequencing. It is computationally complex to do this quickly in real-time, which is why most technologies out there use really simple merchandising techniques like boost or bury, but we have solved the complex nature of this and can do it really quickly, giving average page load speeds of below 100ms.

Q. What can you tell us about GrapheneHC? What makes it revolutionary?

I think that the question ‘how do we offer better online experiences’ to our customers is really accelerating the growth in eCommerce technologies and headless commerce is allowing retailers to connect the best technologies to their current eCommerce platform which is why GrapheneHC has been built to connect with any eCommerce platform. The question ‘how do we offer better online experiences’ also drives right to the solution of the paradox of choice. Merchandising our online stores is a start, but it doesn’t solve the paradox of choice, it merely changes the products that are displayed to the customer. The solution to the paradox of choice is using merchandising to show customers the products they want. Those that are really navigating the paradox of choice and those that are truly giving the best online experiences ensure their online stores and brick-and-mortar stores treat their customers the same and have a merchandising strategy taking into account everyone is different, using personalisation tools to change the product display sequencing based on the user, or user decisions. Ultimately, this is what GrapheneHC does. It gives retailers all the tools they need to visually merchandise their online store and provide a curated product display sequence that is personalised to the shopper; meaning customers find the right product quickly and easily, which in turn has a waterfall effect on increasing conversions, average order values, and revenue. 

Q. How is the industry you serve currently evolving, and where does Advanced Commerce stand at the moment relative to other participants in the industry?

Helping retailers compete online and becoming the gold standard for online merchandising are goals that will persist and drive me forward every day. My current ambitions are centred around scaling and becoming the market leader for online merchandising to match the market-leading technology in GrapheneHC. And we aim to become predominately self-service, making it easy for retailers to implement our technology and ensuring we can scale very quickly.

Our platform has been designed to be deployed by retailers themselves or their technology partners, which makes onboarding of new clients and implementation a lot quicker, and is helping to prevent us from becoming our own bottleneck as implementations try to keep up with sales. This also means we don’t have to charge a set-up cost removing another barrier to entry for small to mid-tier retailers.

Q. What's the one thing you want Advanced Commerce to be known for?

The gold standard for online merchandising!

Q. So, what's next for Advanced Commerce?

I am completely focused on building the brand and talking to as many people as I can about GrapheneHC, whilst building up a network of complimentary technology partners that together deliver an unrivalled online shopping experience, who can all help each other grow. We have partnered with a fashion-specific AI platform whose detailed product attributes feed directly into our merchandise blends and give fashion retailers even greater control over their product display sequencing even producing a joint demonstration utilising both of our platforms. I have lots of events planned as I network and build our brand. I have the development team focused on our product roadmap which includes becoming self-service but also develops on the unique features we already have.

My dream would be to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to deploy merchandising strategies across the entire website, that constantly tests and improves its own performance, whilst giving manual control for those who want to ‘roll their sleeves up and get stuck in’. With self-service implementation, AI and machine learning optimising performance, a team dedicated to GrapheneHC and Advanced Commerce’s growth, and a growing reputation, I genuinely believe the sky is the limit and we can become one of the largest technology providers to the eCommerce sector in the world.

André Brown, Founder & CEO | In His Own Words

I have been involved in eCommerce for quite a long time. I co-founded Attraqt and served as the CEO for 15 years. We signed a lot of really large, well-known clients - if you walked through any major shopping centre every third or fourth store would be one of our clients. I also oversaw the acquisition of Fredhopper, which was our largest European competitor. I left Attraqt in 2018 to work on my new business, Advanced Commerce, so what you see today is the culmination of around four years of work for me despite only trading for approximately one year. I have taken all my learnings from 15 years in the online merchandising industry and used them to create a unique, market-leading platform, GrapheneHC, which I am incredibly proud of.

“GrapheneHC is a merchandising Rolls Royce for the price of a motorbike.”

“Ultimately, this is what GrapheneHC does. It gives retailers all the tools they need to visually merchandise their online store and provide a curated product display sequence that is personalised to the shopper.”