Using AI to become world’s number one shopping discovery site

RedBrain was born out of shopping affiliate business, ASAP Compare and is part of the Potential group of companies. The ASAP business has grown since 2010 to manage 300 million plus products across 13 different shopping  sites, delivering sales traffic to over 3000 merchants across the world.  The RedBrain business is set to build on this experience as it bids to become the number one shopping discovery site in the world.

RedBrain tracks consumer shopping behaviour across the web from Google and Bing to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to not only deliver traffic to retailers but to be able to identify highly targeted prospects at the time they are ready to buy. “Instead of delivering a million leads to a retailer we can deliver 50k people that are ready to buy their product right now,” said RedBrain CEO Alex Major. “As an example; we know that if someone checks out a 4K TV on a review site on a Saturday that person is more likely to make a purchase on the Monday. Using that intelligence we bid high for the relevant search term on the Monday. It’s worth our while because we know there is a good chance of making a sale. If we get it wrong then there is no cost to the retailer. If we get it right they get a sale they would not have otherwise made and we receive our commission via the affiliate network.”

RedBrain is working with a wide range of retailers from the likes of eBay and Walmart in the US to John Lewis, House of Fraser, Currys, Nike and Argos in the UK, without compromising other paid search and advertising programmes.

“Some of our biggest retail customers are not even aware that we are delivering sales to them because we work with the affiliate companies and we make our money via affiliate commissions. We would like a closer relationship with retailers in order to secure direct product data feeds that would enable us to deliver even better levels of sales,” added Major.

With 70% of the business coming from the US, RedBrain has plans to rapidly develop hundreds of niche shopping sites globally and to expand its footprint in Europe over the coming months while at the same time moving into new areas like shopping chatbots. “People are using Amazon Alexa and Google Home to add items to their shopping list to remind them to pick up bread or washing up liquid. We believe there is potential to use chatbots for more considered purchases and we can facilitate answers to highly specific shopping search queries like: Where can I buy a black Nespresso Vertuo coffee machine near to where I live, today?” said RedBrain COO Paul Humphreys.

In addition to delivering online sales traffic, RedBrain can help retailers improve their own online marketing efforts by providing intelligence on consumer online shopping behaviour. Understanding people’s search history can help retailers build up and optimise their own remarketing campaigns, for example. Working with affiliates, retailers and media buyers we can add a lot more value and, with the rebrand from ASAP to RedBrain we are looking to become more of a strategic partner for the companies we currently provide sales traffic to,” concluded  Humphreys.