Ecommerce marketers and business owners weighed down with growing their business while retaining customers typically turn to AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make demanding eMarketing tasks easier.
Entrepreneurs using ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify or PrestaShop want to automate some of their processes and access reliable data to forecast sales and manage their stock.
One such newly established solution that aims to help with precisely that is Shimoku. So, we're reviewing Shimoku here in this blog post to give you a better idea of whether this is the right platform for your business needs.
Let's dive in!
Shimoku Review: What’s Shimoku?
The Barcelona-based company believes that adopting AI can help “create a better world for everything and everyone.” The site describes itself as “the first integrated ecommerce grown management platform (GMP),” with a range of features powered by AI and machine learning capabilities.
It's used by the likes of Flax & Kale, The Vap Club, Coverfy, and Milanuncios. Established in 2020, Shimoku is definitely a new kid on the block. This machine-learning app provides businesses and eMarketers data on customer churn, purchase forecasting, and predicts stock coverage, individual product sales and kW demand planning. Shimoku works by connecting ecommerce platforms with business CRM solutions to combine an automated service that will “boost your performance through advanced predictive analytics.”
A quick glance at its LinkedIn page tells us it's held a series of crowdfunding events. Its most recent being around three months ago when the company raised an impressive 175,000€.
Shimoku Review: Features
Ecommerce marketers and business owners wanting a deeper understanding of their customer's behavior and sales figures, including predicted forecasts, can access Shimoku’s Pedictive Analytics to help grow their business.
This comes in handy for making more accurate customer, sales, and stock-focused predictions. You can then share these figures business-wide using tools like Google Drive, Slack, or Dropbox.
Shimoku says that no one needs to be a data scientist to use its platform. In fact, it's explicitly designed for marketing users with little or no technical knowledge to help them utilize customer, sales, and stock data to grow their revenue.
With that in mind, Shimoku's features are separated into two separate areas:
- Product
- Engagement
Let’s take each one in turn.
The Product Suite
Features in Shimoku's Product Suite provide the data you need to manage and control stock so that you can avoid over or under-stocking. You can also forecast sales and plan for product demand using machine learning algorithms.
Using this type of data empowers businesses to increase their prices appropriately if algorithms predict a high stock output. The same goes for decreasing costs, reducing wholesale purchases, and moving stock to more prominent positions on your ecommerce site if there's an overstock.
You'll also get the info you need to track sales trends for particular products. If these trends change, you can then predict how much each product will sell in the weeks and months to come. You can also see which products are expected to sell more or less. With this you can diminish warehouse expenses, as you will know exactly what you are going to sell & that you can avoid the extra costs that are supposed to have goods that can be damaged (food for example).
In other words, Shimoku’s AI analyzes product demand patterns and builds demand profiles. Its predictive methods assess stock, analyze sales volumes and frequency, individual sales transactions, and factor in any emerging trends in products sold by different businesses.
It’s possible to access detailed sales forecasts for every product sold on your ecommerce site. With this invaluable data to hand, you're better positioned to increase revenue by improving the customer journey. For instance, you can launch hyper-targeted campaigns to lead prospects to the exact products they're interested in buying based on this kind of data.
The Engagement Suite
The Engagement Suite’s features, perhaps unsurprisingly, focus on customer engagement and retention. There are three ways in which Shimoku aims to do this:
- Predict Next Purchase
- Predict Recommendations and Upsell Opportunities
- Predict Customer Churn
Shimoku’s machine learning technology can predict what a customer might buy, so eMarketers using the app can target customers with products that might interest them. This type of data makes it easier to target specific groups of customers, including those at risk of churn, by sending them separate emails, special and discounted offers, new product alerts, etc.
In short, Shimoku’s AI can accurately predict what customers will buy and how much money they'll spend on your ecommerce site. This data allows eMarketers to target customers with a propensity to consume. Likewise, you can also tailor your marketing campaigns for customers who are less likely to buy in an attempt to increase their spending. Of course, when you let the data fuel your online marketing strategies, you're more likely to enjoy higher customer satisfaction and retention levels.
Lastly, you can use Engagement Suite features to track customer behavior on your ecommerce site. You can even predict the types of customers and categorize them by best, good, average and bad customers, depending on their recurrence in purchases and monetary importance.
You can offer high-risk churn customers personalized offers and discounts at the right time to increase the likelihood of a conversion. In contrast, low-risk churns need less retention marketing campaigning. With this info to hand, you can better distribute your marketing budget so that it bears the most fruit. This hyper-personalized approach enables ecommerce store owners to offer customers a more tailored website experience using Shimoku’s predictive analytics software.
Shimoku Review: Pricing
A 30-day free trial is offered on each of the four price plans. These are:
- Engagement Single Suite Plan: For $99 a month
- Product Single Suite Plan: For $99 a month
- Double Engagement and Product Plan combined: For $149 a month
The above three plans are aimed at businesses with up to 5,000 monthly orders. Each program grants you access to standard customer support, easy report sharing, and connects with all your data sources.
- Enterprise Tailored Plan: No prices were available for this package at the time of writing. This program is aimed at companies generating 5,000+ monthly orders. You benefit from Golden Customer Support service and can share information through tailored shared channels.
Shimoku Review: Integrations
Shimoku recognizes one big problem ecommerce businesses experience when adopting machine learning apps: integrating and connecting them easily with their existing tech stack.
This is where Shimoku comes into its own. Users can integrate any data source, integration, and visualization tool with ease. Some of their native integrations include Woocommerce, Shopify, Prestashop, Hubspot and Mailchimp.
Shimoku Review: Security
Since this is all about data and analytics, businesses want to know their data is secure when they subscribe to Shimoku, right? While there’s little information on the site about security, we had a quick peek at their Privacy Policy.
Here potential clients can read that Shimoku guarantees mechanisms that protect the confidentiality of any data processing. Where needed, data is encrypted and maintained at the “required level of security”.
Shimoku's Pros and Cons
Before we wrap up this review, let's take a quick look at Shimoku's core pros and cons:
The Pros:
- It’s a robust ecommerce growth management platform
- It integrates with multiple tools, including Shopify, PrestaShop, and WooCommerce
- There's a generous 30-day free trial
- It’s super new, so you’re part of something fresh from the get-to
- Shimoku facilitates an ample number of monthly orders
The Cons:
- It isn’t cheap
- It’s super new, so if you’re risk-averse, you may want to sit back and wait for more customer reviews to roll in.
- There isn't much deep-dive information online about how the platform works.
Shimoku Review: Our Verdict
Shimoku is very new, having launched less than a year ago, so it's still very much an unknown entity with a tiny online footprint. We’d like to see more customer testimonials on its website and some more resources such as How-To guides on topics like customer engagement, the pros and cons of discounted offers, and so on.
At first glance, this looks like a potentially great tool. It’s pretty much a one-stop-shop for ecommerce businesses wanting to improve their stock control and make the most out of sales forecasting while attracting and retaining customers. Shimoku provides you with all the tools you need to handle these tasks without breaking into a sweat.
Are you interested in adding Shimoku to your ecommerce stack, or are you already using it? Either way, let us know your thoughts in the comments box below.
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