Bolt launches virtual shopping assistant

New assistant powers convenient experiences for shoppers and drives higher account registrations, more logged-in shoppers, and conversion for retailers

Bolt, a checkout technology company, today announced the launch of its latest product, Bolt Shopper Assistant, the first virtual shopping assistant of its kind – enabling retailers to turn anonymous guest shoppers into account-holding customers, providing a faster login for returning shoppers, and increasing conversion with personalized shopping experiences.

Digital retailers often use countless pop-up functions designed to prompt first-time shoppers to sign up for discounts or subscribe to newsletters. These, however, require shoppers to leave a retailer's site to find a discount code in their email; or even worse, they only collect emails instead of creating accounts – so retailers miss out on the critical opportunity to convert guest shoppers into account holders. Many online retailers also showcase product recommendations, past orders, order tracking, and more; although valuable to returning shoppers, this information is often in disparate locations across a retailer's site.

Shopper Assistant: the unified solution

Not only do merchants have to manage multiple vendors to offer all of these capabilities, none of them offer a unified solution for driving store account creation, logged-in shopping sessions, and conversion at checkout. Shopper Assistant consolidates these different functions.

• For first-time shoppers, Shopper Assistant incentivizes them to create an account to receive a discount on their first order. The discount is immediately applied at checkout, so there's no need for shoppers to leave the site and hunt through their email for a discount code when they're ready to buy.
• For returning shoppers, Shopper Assistant creates a more streamlined login experience, allowing them to quickly and securely sign into their accounts using Bolt's passwordless login, increasing the amount of logged-in shoppers for retailers. Once shoppers have logged in, Shopper Assistant personalizes the experience by enabling them to see their past order history, recently viewed products, product recommendations, reorders and easily track their live orders, driving higher engagement and, ultimately, higher conversion at checkout.

Tyler's, an athletic and lifestyle apparel retailer saw significant success with the assistent:

• 16% increase in account registration
• 14% increase in the retailer's logged-in shopper rate
• 6% additional increase in checkout conversion, on top of the baseline improvement in checkout conversion already offered by Bolt

"Tyler's has been looking for a way to streamline account creation and checkout in order to increase our number of repeat shoppers, and we love that Bolt consistently innovates ahead of the market to help us stay competitive," said Justin Dermit, Director of E-commerce and Marketing at Tyler's. "We're already seeing success in terms of increasing account registrations and logged-in shopping, and we cannot wait to see what's next."

"Our goal is to help merchants thrive by giving them tools to create trusted shopping destinations that turn visitors into lifetime customers," said Greg Greiner, SVP of Product at Bolt. "Shopper Assistant does just that and it's exciting to see what our newest product has already done for Tyler's."