Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers. The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money. I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about?  Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on.  Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about.  So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall? Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen.  Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough.  I'm very old and I go