Etsy’s CEO said the company is running experiments to see if customers will engage with chat bots to help them find the perfect gift. Etsy CEO Josh Silverman was speaking at a Canaccord Genuity Virtual Ecommerce forum on Thursday when he made the remarks.
Just as sales associates in a store can help customers narrow down 300 television models to a few TVs, Silverman said, shoppers have the same need when coming to Etsy. He used an example of a shopper looking for a gift for their sister’s baby. “There is a tremendous amount of context in that which we don’t get in today’s search engine,” he said, “like, this gift isn’t for you, it’s for someone else.”
Referring to chat bots, Silverman said, “You can imagine a conversation that would very quickly narrow from many, many ideas to a few ideas, and the very best item within each of those few ideas.”
“And given the incredible breadth of Etsy inventory, that kind of context, and that kind of conversation, can be even more valuable for Etsy than for many. So we’re very much investing with experiments live as we speak. I do think it’s going to be a journey. I think that the technology is coming a very long way very fast.”
The CEO had been asked about the difficulty shoppers had finding things among the 100 million handmade, unbranded items on Etsy and about the momentum in AI and chat-based search tools.
He acknowledged that Etsy’s handmade items “don’t map to a SKU,” so step number one is understanding what the item is.
“A seller’s input is not always very reliable,” he said, so Etsy is using computer vision to understand what the item is. The next step is to understand what the shopper means. Etsy has been using neural network translators for several years to bridge the gap “and get really good at understanding what you meant and therefore what inventory is relevant.”
“Having consumers understand and be confident in how to engage with chat bots, when do they want to engage with chat bots, where do they want to engage with chat bots, how will the presentation layer look? There’s going to be a lot of test-and-learning on that.
“We are very active in that, I think it’s a great investment for us, and I think that the tailwinds – it provides real tailwinds for us, and I think they’re going to be very fruitful in years to come.”
Etsy search is awful. They have no incentive to improve it since they make more money if buyers some through Google ads.