CHRIS: This applies across a lot of nuances like you were talking about, Ron, with, “Do they have the ability as users within the marketplace to give feedback to the system that's explicit, that's very direct, like selecting favorite stores? Or is the system just going to learn based on their behavior? If there a lot of feedback that this marketplace can get just based on how long people are looking at things and what their intent appears to be based on their behavior within that particular product detail page, or within a particular search result.
We're responsible, within the marketplace software side of things—as the operators of the marketplace, as the developers of this technology—we're responsible for making sure that we're at or above this baseline that you're seeing in the overall marketplace market. I’m interested to hear if you have any thoughts on that. It is a very dynamic space, and one of the biggest foundational pieces is being able to deal with the fact that there is going to be potential to have a lot of confusion.
As an eCommerce marketplace owner and operator, you have to work with software that's going to be proven to be able to deal with that and elegantly present it to the user in a way that they don't see or deal with the inner workings. They just get the result that they're expecting. And then you have to have a constant feedback loop around that, one they can directly influenced by favoring things, by selecting stores, by changing the filtering based on the category they're in, and it being very discrete and specific to that category.
But also intuitively learning based on their dwell time and based on their actual searches. “Okay. This person is really interested in custom wheels for their car.” So we need to learn from that and present accordingly.
RON: Yeah, I agree. Some call that machine learning language, some call it AI, some call it predictability and personalization. But I know that we've been doing for the last few years—and it's funny because we've had a machine learning module in our platform for more than five years. I don't know, I've been selling it for a long time, but it's only been about the last year that people are really starting to understand it.
You know, it's almost like they call me, they ask me, “Can you guys design and build a high-end website?" And then when I start asking questions about, “How do you want to market it, what's more important to you, SEO or CRO? We need to do both” And they're like, “We don't need to do that.” And it's just like they understand one concept and myopically think about the one thing, but they don't think about the full aggregate view of everything that they need to deal with.