Key Highlights

Problem

The rising competition in D2C space and reliance on channels like Google ads and Meta ads led to a rise in Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) for D2C brands.

Approach

Create a network of brands who collaboratively partner with each other and grow together

This partnerships can be leveraged in multiple ways:

• Brand Plugins - For promoting compatible brands on each other’s store
• Data partnerships - For insights and audience sharing
• Collaborations - Bundled products, Social media campaigns
• Rewards - Shared rewards systems within network

Space+

We have 2 main stakeholders:

• Customer
• Merchants

Merchants

Merchants have 2 sides:

• Show - Showing their partner brands
• Marketing - What and where to show their own brand

An important aspect is Matching. Which will be discussed later

Show

Showing will happen on the post-checkout - Tracking order page of the partner brand

The look of the show space can be customised by the brand

The partner brand gets to decide what all brands are acceptable to show (Read: Matching)

Marketing

Brand gets to decide where to show their brand.

They decide on the marketing material. It would initially be an image of a dimension to be upload with a check-now button at checkout and moving forward it could be customisable box area with logo and text

Dedicated Coupon code is a must

Matching

Big brands would prefer control over the brands they would want to collaborate with.

The initial approach to set up partners would be:

• Invite - Brands get to invite alreadu in contact brands to join their network and establish relationship
• Suggested - We can evaluate brands on platform and external to suggest new connections

If 2 brands match then it’s agreed as a two-way cross promotion

Customer

Customers journey can be mapped into phased:

• Discovery - This happens at a store’s post-checkout when it gets coupon/promotion for partner brand
• Store - This happens via email / whatsapp to send coupon won
• Retrieve - This is where customer explores what coupons they have
• Apply - This is done with Ace’s application ✅

Designs

Merchant

Customer

Ads+

With this we want to empower the Meta and Google ads with specific customers likely to buy from a given brand

Current limitations of Ad targeting:

• Little insight into actual spending propensity of a given customer
• Customers could explore or intend to buy costlier products, but actually ends up buying at a lower price band
• Little insight into willingness to spend on D2C brands
• A huge customer segment could be marketplace first for conveninece and trust.
• They may not be willing to try brands which have an online-first presence

By connecting with brands backend systems, we have insight into their customers’ data. This helps us to model what kind of persona will be relevant to another brand. The interactions on Space+ gives us information into a customer’s preference of brands and products.

A collaborative filtering algorithm was developed leveraging these datasets to curate a final custom audience and subsequent target similar audience for each brand. This can be securely and privately be transferred to Meta / Google as custom audience