Battle of the titans of voice commerce

This article, translated by PayOnline, a processing company team, describes in detail examples of the integration of online shopping management tools by major US technology corporations.

Google, Apple and Amazon have made a big bet on voice control as the driving force of e-commerce of the future. Each of these companies has already laid out a lot of money and has prepared cool new technologies for this area. But expert Karen Webster believes that not the one who is most forked or will offer the coolest devices wins the upcoming commercial battle. The winner of this bout will probably be the one who succeeds in understanding how consumers are actually looking for the right products. According to her, more and more it happens not with the help of applications from the App Store or Google Play and not even through the search bar.

"The murmur of her voice flowed into the sound of rain like an invigorating elixir."

This is a quotation from the fifth chapter of the Great Gatsby , a literary masterpiece from Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Everyone read a book (or watched a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio). Rich, leading an indecently luxurious lifestyle, protagonist Jay Gatsby becomes a millionaire to impress the love of his life Daisy Buchanan, who married another guy. For five years, Gatsby has been watching Daisy from his home, located on the other side of the strait of the fictional town of West Egg, where they both live. Gatsby's friend named Nick organizes a meeting of Gatsby and Daisy. The words cited above from the 5th chapter of the book show how a person who doubts, is vulnerable and on the verge of a breakdown has turned into a self-confident person.
')
And all this happened under the influence of the enthusiastic and lively voice of Daisy.

Yes, voice is a powerful elixir

And this power turns out to be enough to convince the major players in the technological sphere to invest in voice control technologies for the sake of increasing the value of their ecosystems in the eyes of the stakeholders that these ecosystems serve, and especially consumers.

Google, Amazon, Apple - they all recognize the omnipresence of the voice and the possibilities of its practical application in a variety of cases, especially in commerce. Each of these players is already preparing their own set of technologies and assets for a party of voice products. The total market capitalization of these companies exceeds $ 1.5 trillion and each of them has a considerable basket of assets and investment capital for creating its own elixir in the field of voice commerce.

But assets and money alone do not guarantee victory in the next major battle, maturing in the commercial sphere - the battle for voice control of the purchase process through personal assistants. The winners of this fight will be those players who are the first to understand and put into practice one simple basic idea: how consumers decide what they want to buy in the digital world and where this process begins.

And, wow, how here everything has changed!

Search engines have ceased to be the starting point from which most consumers begin the shopping process.

That’s not good news for GOOG . However, for her this is no longer news.

In a study conducted by PYMNTS in the summer of 2015, experts asked consumers to tell us how they begin the shopping process. In particular, respondents were asked what they turn to in the first place in order to find the right product - search, marketplaces, social networks or favorite merchants.

And that's what turned out.

48% of responses indicate that survey participants begin their search on the site of a particular merchant. 29% of responses indicated social networks.

However, shocking if you are Google, 64% of responses suggest that users begin the search process on marketplaces. And since Amazon is the largest such platform, it would be quite plausible to conclude that this is the place where most of the consumer’s attempts to find the necessary goods originate. In fact, recent studies indicate that more than 50% of consumers are starting to search for the right things on Amazon.

And only in 40% of cases, participants in the study said that the first thing they do is “hammer” the necessary search query into the search engine.

If you were Google, you should treat this information as the tip of the change in consumer habits, which is extremely dangerous because of its depth of iceberg.

And the main driving force behind these changes is the emergence of access to mobile phones and applications.

According to the international research company ComScore, the modern consumer spends 65% of its digital life in mobile devices, and this figure has grown by 12% compared to last year. Most users probably know that retail shopping and shopping applications take only a fraction of this time - about 4%.

But wait, there's more

According to Forrester, 61% of consumers install fewer than two shopping applications on their smartphones. And since “less than two” actually means “one”, it will not be very difficult to guess which one or two applications have managed to find their way to the main screen of custom smartphones: a marketplace like Amazon and probably a favorite retailer, in stores where consumers are more often total purchases, such as, for example, Walmart, Target or Walgreens.

Now take this fact and compare it with the following data.

The new collaboration of scientists from the universities of Tilburg, Hong Kong and Duke provides even more food for thought about consumer search and purchasing habits. These guys studied the behavior data of 2 million users who wondered about buying a digital camera. In particular, the study analyzed data on thousands of cases of purchase. Scientists have found that 25% of consumers need only one online session to select and buy the right product. The other 40% looked for products of a certain brand, while another 20% looked for a specific model.

The study was aimed at helping marketers increase their effectiveness in influencing customer behavior.

This analyst is consistent with the behavior that we observed during last year’s study of more than two thousand consumers. It seems that most buyers know from the very beginning what they want to buy, and therefore they apply for a purchase to one of two types of stores that they trust - to a marketplace or a favorite merchant, and then, having already reached their sites, they are determined with the final selection based on the range or delivery options available.

What they don’t exactly do is not surf on huge search waves.

Think about how you shop

Most likely, if you are going to buy something that you already bought before or know a product or brand, because you have already read about it or discussed it with friends, Amazon and / or your favorite merchant will be your first and last stop point. A web search usually takes too much time and most likely will again lead you to Amazon or your favorite retailer's website. This was the finding of international scientists from the research described above: people often make a purchase on the first site they visited, even if they “walked” on several others in the search process.

Obviously, this situation does not really like the companies from Mountain View, and therefore she created Pixel.

What giants put in the voice control game

Pixel is an Android-based hardware and software suite designed to compete with Alexa and other Amazon devices and bundled with Apple's Siri and iPhone. Among other things, Pixel provides access to personal voice assistant Google Allo. The search giant hopes that its key knowledge and skills in the organization of global information, technology of in-depth and machine learning, access to consumer knowledge graph in conjunction with cool hardware will offer the consumer an enriched and more useful experience based on voice control.

Google also claims that Allo is able to engage in a two-way conversation with the consumer, and the company's access to the vast search and consumer databases it has been accumulating since 1998 greatly facilitates the provision of such a context.

However, presenting Pixel to the general public, the information giant has in fact just brought a competitive Android solution to the mobile ring. According to the company, some features will be available only within Pixel, which will probably encourage other manufacturers of Android-based mobile phones to devote their strength to the development of competitive products. Google’s decision to license Android as an open source operating system and at the same time create its own version for rivalry with other Android manufacturers looks very strange, and the recent example of Nokia and Microsoft is an excellent illustration of what this may lead to.

All these events are taking place against the background of close attention of the European Commission, which threatens to deprive the company of its large golden Android-core - the integration of Google’s advertising applications into Android. Moreover, a careful examination of the company's activities from Mountain View can even come to the conclusion that it lacks successful projects that go beyond its narrow specialization in advertising sales, especially when it comes to integrating hardware with some combination of software. . The relatively recent failure with Motorola and the situation with Nest, which also seems to have ended badly, immediately come to mind. Even YouTube, which now literally prints money for the company, has taken the place of its own unsuccessful project and demanded a lot of effort and work to bring it to its current state.

Google expects to use voice control to set up its business in the field of commerce, trying to grasp the declining share of consumers who still use the search in “shopping mode”, while at the same time trying to convince those who already know what they want that smart A virtual assistant is a useful thing anyway.

Well, maybe someone will decide for themselves that this combination of hardware and software is so cool that it's time to buy an Android phone and become a user of a whole set of Google Internet devices.

Maybe against the background of recent problems with the Galaxy Note 7, this idea seems like a win-win option. However, problems with Samsung devices are more likely to say only about how difficult the mobile phone business can be.

And now let's move on to Siri, which, frankly, also does not cause immense delight

Since 2011, Siri has been under the constant attention of the public and has already become a kind of the oldest leader of the voice control segment in mobile ecosystems. However, all this time she was constantly criticized for being not smart enough. To such an extent that it began to cause hostility because of its inability to understand many things. As a result, people simply stopped using it as often as before.

Trying to quickly enter into a contest for voice commerce, last summer, Apple announced that it would open Siri for third-party developers.

That is, it will be available only for those who are invited to participate by Apple itself, and to develop something, these "lucky ones" can only for the App Store.

At the moment, the number of accessible speech-driven applications in the Apple ecosystem is so small that they can be counted by fingers and toes. But even despite the fact that Apple, according to some sources, is working on an Echo-like device for its phones, the problem is that in the future Siri will still be available only on Apple smartphones and smart watches.

Apple’s voice assistant also finds it very difficult to try to provide the kind of help that consumers would like to see from her, including when she searches for goods and makes purchases. Apple seems to be planning a very selective approach for applications that, according to the company, consumers will want to use in order to buy something. However, in reality, the choice of a company can very quickly and very entertainingly disagree with consumers' opinions on what really is valuable to them.

Apple is hoping that it will be able to convince its many fans, buyers to adapt their consumer habits to their set of Internet devices and voice applications that have access to Siri.

This approach looks risky. As we found out earlier, very few consumers now hold a whole bunch of shopping apps on their main screen. Not so many people use the search, which in iOS is represented by Google (for which the latter officially pays about $ 1 billion). Those iPhone owners who still use the search when choosing products also have the opportunity to do so with the help of Chrome, which has its own voice control functions. Considering all this, Apple can easily make a mistake by supporting completely different voice applications that consumers will actually and most often use to search for goods and make purchases in the near future. Such, for example, as Amazon.

Well, if we are talking about Amazon, then let's talk about Alexa

In November, she and her device called Echo will knock for two years. The Alexa voice control ecosystem today boasts more than 3 thousand skills, which is almost two times more than at the beginning of summer. According to Amazon, "millions" of consumers use it to search for information or make purchases. Recently, the company also expanded the scope of speech service, integrating it with other devices, including cars.

Amazon sees Alexa as an open platform for everyone. That is, if you have any idea, you can “zalexit” it using the public SDK open. The company has established a special investment fund of 100 million dollars, designed for strategic financing of useful ideas, applications and technology that can help expand the capabilities of the service. Amazon recently hired Angel.ai, the AI ​​platform chief director, whose activities, judging by the information on her website, are aimed at using artificial intelligence to support commerce. It seems that this transaction is yet another proof of the company's commitment to the idea of ​​constantly improving the process of finding and buying goods for its consumers.

Amazon relies on the fact that it will be able to use Alexa to consolidate profitable relationships with consumers who already know what they want to buy on marketplaces - usually at Amazon itself. After that, the company will also be able to start convincing everyone else to start searching for products from its platform.

And these plans are quite feasible. Let's see why.

Alexa and Amazon users are already used to making purchases using voice control. Now, these functions are available for a variety of network-connected devices. Amazon’s regular customers get a stable opportunity to shop on its platform using any type of digital media — PCs, laptops, mobile devices — and any operating system that supports Amazon applications. And now, with the help of Alexa, this opportunity will be expanded to voice control devices in the room at home and even in the cars of those manufacturers that support the technology.

If a recent collective attempt to spur demand for intra-mobile mobile payments can be a conclusion, it is clearly that changing the behavior that has taken root in the mind of the consumer is very difficult, especially if the process to which he is used does not cause him or difficulties.

In practice, this means that the victory in the upcoming commercial battle will get not the player who writes out the check for the highest amount, reaches the highest rate of monthly unique visits to the site. And not even the one who hangs the coolest, graceful or brilliant new tech toys before the eyes of users.

Winners will be determined by consumers. This will be the player who will best cope with giving them the opportunity to use their voices in conjunction with a wide range of devices for shopping wherever they are - in their homes, offices, cars and even in the premises of traditional shops.

And make it so that they can do it in the usual way for them.

Now - and this is only about an early stage - Alexa gives the impression of the very “ear caressing her ear” voice technology, “flowing into the sound of rain” of e-commerce. She skillfully uses Amazon's consumer interaction schemes, turning the company's trading floor into the first and last point for everyone who wants to make a purchase. The implications of this approach for the payment segment, commercial ecosystems in terms of which intermediaries leave the game and why, may be completely unexpected.

But this is a story for another rubric and for another time.