The wholesale platform zentrada is using artificial intelligence on a large scale. Its goal: To support independent retailers in their sourcing for a successful Christmas business with data-driven and self-optimizing algorithms.

So far, retailers had to have a lot of customer insights and luck in predicting trends in order to make the right purchasing decisions, often many months before the season starts. 

Especially in the christmas season, it is important to recognize trends early and develop new assortments that meet the demand of the customers. In addition to offering the right core assortment, it is increasingly important to also include christmassy product lines and classic Christmas goods to get the customers in a festive and therefore buying mood.

Modern platforms like zentrada increase the product selection available, but also offer cheaper purchasing sources and simplify the management of suppliers and order processing for retailers. “The value of our data and algorithms is often not recognized yet”, explains zentrada CEO Ingo Schloo. “For many small and medium-sized retailers in particular, AI is just an abstract term that they do not see as relevant to their own business.”

But the advantages of AI and data-driven decision making can be easily explained by the example of the zentrada marketplace. The current Bestsellers, Top-Pick rankings, and popularity indices can already show ahead of the season, which products could lead to a successful business for the retailer. It gets even more personal, intelligent and valuable, when the algorithms analyze the search and buying behavior of users and automatically identify similar users in order to recommend interesting suppliers, relevant discounts, or new assortment ideas.

zentrada is already using highly developed algorithms to support its retailers in their sourcing and assortment decisions - e.g. for the Christmas season - today. Supplier and product recommendations in newsletters and on the website are always personalized, the product listings on the marketplace and in shops are automatically optimized to fit the local demand, and even search results are extended to include some product ideas based on similar searches by other users. Therefore, the modern wholesale buyers can experience a lot of automated support - far beyond the classic rankings - on a platform like zentrada that help to make better purchasing decisions for the upcoming seasons.

“The personal customer service is even better as well”, claims Schloo. “Our account managers are also using our technology and data to develop better recommendations to each individual user.” The application of artificial intelligence to the decision making in in retail sourcing is constantly developed further. However, the interaction between humans and the technology remains crucial when it comes to choosing an attractive retail assortment from 400 suppliers, 20,000 Christmas products, and more than 400,000 wholesale offers. 

www.zentrada.eu