Over the past few years, a new feature has emerged on content sites in Israel and across the world, a row of recommendations for additional content often appearing at the bottom of an article. After reading their selected piece, readers are invited to look at links to other items, both from the same publisher and from external sites.
Two Israeli companies, Outbrain and Taboola, who invented the category, are the market leaders with a foothold in the largest content sites in the world.
Now a new Israeli startup Cymbio wants to extend the revolution to online shopping. Cymbio was founded by two partners: Mor Lavi, formerly CEO of Vigo, a subsidiary of the IFAT Group, which specializes in social media analysis; and Roy Avidor, formerly a senior adviser for the minister of industry, trade, and labor as well as CEO of Israeli clothing line Original’s.
“Our idea is very similar to what Outbrain and Taboola have already done in the content world, and we are doing it precisely in the results page of online shopping sites,” said Lavi, “We want to avoid the situation in which a consumer searches for a product and is told there are no matching results. That’s why we teamed up with a group of shopping sites to prevent that from happening.”
Lavi claimed that Cymbio’s system, like Outbrain and Taboola, can recommend additional results on the same site, or on an external site. “If a specific store doesn’t have the product you wanted, we can pull up a number of recommendations a few of them will turn a user towards other products on the same site and a few others will present the searched-for item on an external site that also works with us,” he said.
“If a person wants Nike sneakers but the store only has Adidas, our system will show him the Adidas sneakers sold on that site alongside a link to Nike shoes on an external site we work with,” explained Avidor. The pair claimed 10% of online shoppers come to a dead end on the site they are using and they makeup Cymbio’s audience.
“The fact that we are interfacing with the search helps us know what people want and what they are not finding. From that, we know what is popular among shoppers,” said Lavi. “Our strength is the data, because we know what people are searching for within sites. That information Google cannot access, unless those sites use Google for their internal search engines.”
For every search an answer
Cymbio operates on an affiliate model: an external site pays Cymbio for a referral from certain sites and that amount is split between Cymbio and the referring site. The system allows its clients to block referrals to competing stores similar to Outbrain and Taboola, which allow their clients to block links to their competitors.
Cymbio has already indexed more than half a million products and hundreds of stores and they focus specifically on smaller sites. Avidor explained: “Smaller players cannot compete with the big ones; instead they share the traffic with each other. Much like in the real world, if my store doesn’t have the product the customer is looking for, then I will refer him to a nearby store. In our case, we are compensating the seller for referring to another online store.”
Lavi added: “Until we have enough sites in our network, we are using external referrals to products on Amazon and eBay as a safety net.”
Making his pitch, Lavi emphasized: “From the customer’s point of view, when he enters a store that works with us, he is essentially having a limitless shopping experience. No matter what they search for they will find it. From the seller’s point of view, he is maintaining his customer base because he is presenting consumers with relevant products from within his storefront. He also can derive good traffic through us, from other sites, from people who searched for his products on other sites and came up empty.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 15, 2015
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