Lenskart is India's biggest optical retail store chain, with over 500+ offline stores catering to 70+ cities. With an annual turnover of over 480cr, Lenskart has been one of the biggest and most successful startup stories in recent years.

Lenskart has adopted an omnichannel strategy of sales – unifying the retail store and online shopping experience. Customers have been delighted with Lenskart's endless aisle, which gives them unlimited choices.

What does that mean for the end shoppers?

Endless Aisle is a strategy that enables ecommerce brands to integrate offline and online retail seamlessly.

Suppose Peter navigates to Lenskart's website to buy red frame spectacles. He searches for those red spectacles, chooses the most suitable model from the search results, and places an order. After a couple of days, the spectacles are delivered to Peter's home.

What if Peter had been to the physical store in the city? In the store, the salesperson would have assisted the shopper with finding the right product off-the-shelf or searching for the product in their online catalog of products.

In both instances, product discovery becomes pivotal for showing customers the relevant products, fastening the purchase process, and enhancing the online shopping experience. The company ensures Peter has a smooth and uniform experience in both purchase journeys. Hence, bridging the gap between the online and offline retail shopping experience.

An endless aisle creates a seamless customer experience while saving inventory and supply chain management costs. In such a scenario, finding the most relevant product for each customer in the fastest time possible is highly critical, as the website's search functionality is heavily used – both while shopping online (by the end customer) and offline (by the retail salesperson). Having brilliant AI and ML-driven search that understands the user's intent and personalizes the results at a shopper level automatically increases the overall conversion rate by a considerable margin.

Unbxd works with Lenskart to provide that kind of experience.

"We at Lenskart are bridging the gap between the online and offline retail shopping experience. This requires us to ensure that our shoppers can find the products at the convenience of their homes or our retail outlets. This is where Unbxd, with its comprehensive and relevant search results solution, has made the product discovery and selection super simple for the shoppers and our in-store sales assistants.", says Dhruv Wali, Head of products at Lenskart.

How Unbxd helps Lenskart power its Product Discovery?

Unbxd integrates very closely with the Lenskart interface to enhance the seamless experience between offline and online. This ensures shoppers can see and buy the most relevant product each time they visit Lenskart.

Dhruv adds, "Unbxd easy integration and product enhancements made us believe quite early in the value we derived from an AI-powered search solution. Easy to use dashboard with meaningful business insights, a good technical understanding of the complex use cases, and prompt customer service has kept us engaged with Unbxd. That's why we also went on with Unbxd during our launch with a fresh site in Singapore."

AI and ML-Driven Search

Lenskart deploys Unbxd's AI-powered Site search to provide the best-in-class online experience to high-intent customers. It also enables product discovery and selection for its active retail salespeople (in the store). Utilizing AI and machine learning algorithms, Unbxd offers personalized search results based on user behavior and shopper interests. As a result, each user gets unique results for their search queries, which are based on various signals and data points that Unbxd studies over time.

Along with this personalization, site search also shows smarter results by autocorrecting mistyped queries. This is done by looking for contextual synonyms and predictions while users type search queries in real time. This responsive interface is key to Lenskart's stellar customer experience for end customers searching on its website. This provides instant gratification, which is beneficial for retail salespeople. This enables them to recommend the most relevant product to a shopper in the shortest turnaround time possible, reducing customer waiting time.

Out-of-the-box Merchandising

Lenskart maintains a catalog of 6000+ SKUs at any given time. When a user searches for a particular item, many products in that catalog will match exactly the specified search queries. While our AI and ML models show the most relevant products to shoppers, our slick and smart merchandising techniques allow Lenskart to tweak these results based on business needs.

Using these merchandising filters, Lenskart prevents shoppers from getting confused by not showing out-of-stock products or hiding behind outdated models. Lenskart also manufactures its eyewear under the brand names Vincent Chase and Jacobs and uses these merchandising features to push home-brand products up. This way, Lenskart can push the most relevant and high-converting products to the top.

Trending and Popular Search

For every fashion retailer, it's paramount to remain up to date with the ever-changing market trends. Therefore, Lenskart invests a lot in identifying the current fashion trends in the market, which helps them identify potential products that will sell more and faster.

Technologically, these constantly changing trends are tracked and reflected on the search and home page of the website, providing an easy incentive to purchase for shoppers. Irrespective of a new vs. repeat shopper, the experience is fine-tuned for each shopper. The same experience is captured in the Typeahead or Autocomplete feature on the website, what we call Autosuggest.

Search using model code

The search on Lenskart is used by end-users shopping at the convenience of their homes and by the retail salesperson serving the needs of an in-store shopper. The salesperson has a thorough knowledge of the various inventory available and can, by experience, pinpoint products by the exact product code. However, that is different with end customers like you and me.

It's always essential to pay attention to human intelligence and capabilities and be overly dependent on technology. But clearly, that can be ignored if we deal with Alpha-numeric product codes. Lenskart's search powered by Unbxd allows the retail salesperson to search for specific products by model codes. A faster response to the in-store shopper guarantees a higher chance of a purchase!

Lenskart has developed a harmonious medley of AI and ML technology with human intelligence and decision-making capabilities to provide the best-in-class and consistent customer experience across offline and online verticals with the help of Unbxd.