While online shopping can be a seamless, convenient experience, there is something about being able to physically hold or see a product that’s hard to replicate. Answering questions like, ‘Will this watch look good on me?’ or ‘How will this table fit in my kitchen?’ can be far more difficult when looking at products digitally.
Tangiblee is trying to cross the digital divide between e-commerce and in-store item analyzation with its platform that offers realistic product previews or item pages. At its core, the technology brings product images to life.
“You go into the store — that's the homepage,” said Eliad Inbar, co-founder and CEO. “You go into the aisle — that's the category page. You stand in front of a product, and now you're going to decide if you want to buy it. You usually pick it up or look at it from different angles. Tangiblee helps you bridge that gap with the interaction experience we add to the product detail page, and that's the exact point where you make the decision.”
Founded in 2014, the small Chicago-based team has been actively scaling its efforts and currently serves over 70 brands and retailers across three major categories — jewelry, luggage and purses, and home décor. Some major clients include Jewelry Television, Aldo, JanSport, Samsonite and Apt2B.
Over 50 percent of the new improvements and modifications we're doing to the experience come from external input from our clients.”
Inbar said within those three categories, each company has specific needs they hope to address based on their own shopper feedback. So, the Tangiblee team works to make each iteration a custom-fit for its users with a ‘sell first, build later’ mentality.
“One of the first things we ask a client is, ‘Which categories are relevant to you and how do you want to try solve this problem?’” Inbar said.
But getting to this point did not happen overnight. Early on, Tangiblee’s UI struggled to complement the high level of branding that many companies work to achieve on their sites. The Tangiblee team had to evolve its UI over time using customer feedback, ultimately building a new platform from the ground up.
“Over 50 percent of the new improvements and modifications we're doing to the experience come from external input from our clients,” Inbar said. “We’ve re-written everything from the ground up to give us a lot more flexibility. We built the platform from the understanding that there's a lot more feedback that's going to come in.”
Tangiblee 2.0 allows shoppers to take a product like an earring, watch or handbag and place it on a real model so they can see what it looks like being worn; shoppers can even change the model’s skin tone. Another feature is the room view, which virtually places furniture in a room so users can customize how it would look against their specific flooring or alongside the other furniture in their own home.
These implementations can be rolled out on the client side by adding a single line of code on the company’s backend. From that point, the Tangiblee team pulls the information they need from the client’s website to build the product previews around the data. They then work with the client’s tech and marketing teams to determine how pages should be set up to best suit visitors and issue on-the-fly platform updates. The work is symbiotic — Tangiblee helps clients meet their needs, and the customizations they request help make the overall platform more robust.
Inbar said the platform has the capability to be used by large companies with hundreds of thousands of product pages, and he hopes to see more of that clientele soon.
“We developed a lot of the core product to be matured to the level where we can sell it to more enterprise clients,” he said.
