Live video shopping specialist eyezon powers ahead
eyezon started life in 2019 as a live video sales tool aiming to put human salesmanship and customer interaction back at the heart of retail.
It was founded by Dragorad Knezi, Maria Tikhonova and UX designers and developers Vlad Klimuk and Anton Lyubokhinets. Knezi and Tikhonova first met in 2016 when the latter was the head of a business accelerator programme for the creative industries in Eastern Europe.
In 2022, through the advancements of its technology, eyezon has now become a one-stop turnkey solution for brands which allows for a seamless and intuitive live shopping experience that is both wholly accessible and inclusive.
Bringing value to both customers and brands, it is a powerful platform which optimises the marriage between software and service.
This makes eyezon perfectly scalable and truly touchpoint agnostic with our clients’ stores appearing whenever the customer wants them.
The recent introduction of eyezon ads also means that brands can engage their target audiences directly through social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Boasting an impressive client list of 60 businesses which includes household names such as BMW, Adidas and The Body Shop, eyezon’s technology allows customers to interact with sales teams in stores via live streaming, so they can ask questions about products and see them in action.
And it was the desire to put people back at the heart of retail that first inspired Tikhonova.
“I had 15 years’ experience working with innovative technology projects at an international and local level, supervising and developing tech startup projects,” she says.
“But from 2007, I was looking for new ways to develop a market which could be more sustainable and people oriented.”
Knezi had spent 17 years as Chief Strategic Officer in international media and advertising companies throughout Eastern Europe and says there were two things which inspired the original idea for eyezon, the first was a move towards wearable tech.
“An obvious trend we’d seen five or six years ago, was the shift from handheld to wearable devices and the question of what is going on in the world with social connectivity and interactivity between people and businesses,” he says.
“We understood that a lot of ways we currently convey information is going to become much more condensed, simple and proactive. And it’s going to be built around the live video format.”
The second inspiration was that social media and the online marketplace was starting to merge to form one ecosystem.
“We understood that social media and the marketplace are two of the three main strategies for stakeholders in the future digital ecosystem, the third is search.”
“The Amazons and Facebooks of the world are converging into a point where social media becomes a commerce tool.”
“Marketplaces online are striving to merge with social to produce a new, very exotic - yet still unclear format, with regards to how we buy, sell, exchange information and eventually consume goods and services.”
The importance of people
While the technology which underpins e-commerce has made huge strides in the last two decades, Knezi says an aspect which he feels has sometimes been overlooked is the one thing which was the cornerstone of commerce for centuries – people.
“There are three main drivers offline to online – data, artificial intelligence, and automation.
“But you’re losing one component of commerce which is the human factor, the selling, the human interaction that makes a difference.”
From attention to retention
The use of video and more personalised shopping experiences will be a cornerstone of what Knezi feels will be a fundamental shift in the industry, moving from continuous growth to customer retention.
He says: “We do not believe in the e-commerce market being able to grow much longer tech wise.”
“We do believe, however, that eventually the make it or break it factor will become retention, the potential of businesses to build long term relationships with customers.”
“This is built on trust to deliver long-term tangible value to customers. Live video and streaming is the most natural form for communication. It has to be the foundation for the way we interact with businesses as well.”
He says that the traditional ways of sales and advertising, through grabbing attention via TV ads and billboards had initially been replicated by the ecommerce sector but feels that is now changing due to the unique qualities it possesses.
“We’re living in an attention-based economy (but) shifting to a retention-based economy.”
“We started using it the way we used advertising in TV. Which could be sustainable only to the point where it’s losing quality and becoming more expensive.”
“Also, businesses don’t own that traffic, you have three or four players in the world who own all that traffic and data.”
The way forward was building unique experiences for customers, based not only around how retail shops looked, but how customers interacted with staff, with video streaming being a central component of that evolution.
Continued growth
Since it started life the company has honed its offering, starting out with a B2C app and then launching B2B products. Between 2017-19, it did not go looking for investors but spent the time undertaking R&D instead.
Headquartered in Singapore, the workforce has grown from six employees to 60, and last year established a new presence in London.
Of its 60 clients across 18 categories, 26 of those companies are what Tikhonova describes as ‘big clients’, including major brands and retail chains.
But it is this rapid growth which has provided the biggest early challenges for eyezon. Tikhonova says that building the workforce was one such challenge.
“For big companies it’s not a big deal, they have thousands of people.”
“But for us it’s challenging. We need to integrate workspaces and systems, organize them to collaborate with each other. They’re all very experienced, but in different fields.”
Another challenge was that as the company grew, it ran the risk of losing the personal touch of interacting with clients which had made it such a success early on.
“We had four clients when we started and had an intimate connection with their businesses,” Tikhonova says.
“We’d enter the shops, talk to the products teams, had everyday communication.”
“With 60 clients, we lost that connection on the ground with the product teams for a while.”
“But luckily that blip is in the past. Now we’ve adapted and reinvented our approach to how we work with the product streamers and businesses in order to have this intimate connection which is profitable for the client.”
Forging ahead
Focussing on the future, the company has three products which will be available this year.
The first is eyezon ads.
This lets retailers embed a link in their ads such as banners, native advertising in articles, emails, contextual advertising, YouTube previews, even QR codes, which can enable an audience request. When a customer clicks on it, they can watch a live stream of the product.
The second is eyezon showrooms, where products can be displayed via live stream in a bespoke showroom setting.
QR codes can be placed directly on a physical product to instantly transport customers via live stream to the showroom.
Knezi says: “You deliver the product, scripts and brand guidelines and we can create a dark showroom space.”
