Qubit launches an Instagram-like, AI-powered product news feed for mobile

Qubit’s Aura product discovery solution

Finding new things to buy on your smartphone can be a painful experience, as you browse large product catalogs through that small screen.

To help mobile users find more products they want, personalization tech provider Qubit is out today with a mobile-oriented and patent-pending product discovery solution called Aura.

It’s an AI-powered layer that sits on top of a mobile website, complementing existing personalization and able to be quickly integrated into a site. After tapping the Qubit icon, the user sees an Instagram-like news feed of images. A menu icon returns the user to regular browsing.

Previously, Product Director Simon Jaffery told me, the company’s personalization engine had focused on persuasion that reinforced certain product recommendations, such as “social proof” that shows what’s trending or ad retargeting after users leave unpurchased products in shopping carts.

Now, he said, Aura predicts what products or categories a user should be shown next.

The previous kind of Qubit personalization is still available, but Aura emphasizes the next possible choice for a user — anonymized or registered — who has looked at or purchased certain products.

So, a user who previously looked at a casual jacket might now be shown some possible matching outfits, from the same or other product categories. The newsfeed style is similar on different sites, although any two visitors see a different sequence of products that Aura predicts will be of interest.

If the user is new to the mobile site and has no history, Aura will show choices based on what others have seen and chosen.

Qubit’s clients are retailers, including ones in cosmetics, fashion, clothing and hobbies. Jaffery said about 20 brands worked with Aura in the beta phase, which saw a 3.6 percent increase in conversion for fashion brand Wolf and Badger, and an increased order value of about 4 percent for arts and craft retailer Hobbycraft.

The reason, he said, was the greater range of quick discovery on a mobile device, where users are on the go.

Even low single-digit increases can help mobile commerce’s conversion rates compared to desktop. For nearly three dozen fashion and cosmetics brands since the beginning of 2017, Qubit said, desktop conversion rates were more than twice that of mobile, while revenue per visitor and average number of products viewed were similarly much higher on desktop.