Helping Companies Create The Ultimate Digital Product Experience

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Blue Meteor’s Amaze platform is helping companies make the most of their precious product content

It’s been said that people may not remember what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. The big brains behind Blue Meteor’s Amaze product experience platform want to make every online shopper and seller feel thoroughly satisfied—and yes, amazed.

The impetus to provide comprehensive product selection frequently causes online sellers to neglect the basics of shopper behavior. In a nutshell, all shoppers—whether procurement specialists, business owners, or general consumers—want to be pleased. When products are difficult to find, and when details about them are sparse, poorly organized, or sloppily communicated, online buyers flee.

In a highly commoditized environment where real differentiators between sellers of goods and services are few and far between, Blue Meteor endeavors to transform both B2B and B2C companies by establishing a highly effective e-commerce strategy founded on the rudimentary building blocks of product experience. This includes the tenets of rich product content, customer focused organization, data accuracy & completeness, and timely responsiveness to continual change. This creates a foundationally strong e-commerce strategy (not just superficial flashiness of web pages) which dramatically increases conversion resulting in rapid revenue growth. The cloud-based Amaze platform gives e-tailers control of their product data, assets, and experience all in one place. Amaze brings merchandising design, product attribution design, and the creation of product data and enriched content together on a single platform for the very first time.

Blue Meteor is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Mumbai, India, and Market Harborough, UK. They have an established deep domain knowledge of the practical business problems companies face when designing product content to best suit their customers’ experience. This spun out the ambitious SaaS platform. “We built this product from a real-life, multidecade experience of solving hard problems in this sphere,” Blue Meteor CTO Pratik Chakraborty said.

“We're focused on enabling our clients to deliver a best-in-class product experience through the data that they have on their e-commerce site,” said Justin Stange, Blue Meteor’s sales lead. By supercharging digital asset management with enriched data, comprehensive data governance tools, quality metrics reporting, and validation failure management, Amaze enables sellers to use their data to its fullest potential while providing the flexibility to shift with changing consumer expectations or market movement.

“We have tremendous knowledge of how this industry works,” Chakraborty said. “We understand the business problems, the operational inefficiencies that exist, how and where business processes are ineffective, how different personas behave and what they need; how the actual consumer goes through the purchase journey and decision-making. That’s what’s led to our pragmatic solution approach of building the Amaze software, which eliminates most of these issues. We know exactly what the problem is, and what the best solution to it is. Many software companies don’t have that experience to fall back on and guide us in what we build and how we build it.”

Beyond the basics

“It doesn’t matter how good a product is from a quality perspective. If consumers can’t get the information they want about it on an e-commerce site they will not buy it,” Chakraborty said. Getting basic product information is only one component of what’s needed to inspire purchasing decisions.

The level of interactivity needed to pull a consumer into the buying experience varies with the product being sold, but the essentials include compelling product imagery, background information such as user manuals and videos, and an intuitive approach to finding the products themselves.

The powerful platform is designed to meet the needs of both B-2-C and B-2-B merchants, and offers advantages to manufacturers faced with managing and effectively communicating the features and benefits of thousands or millions of SKUs.

“We’re helping an industrial association create a data standard between the manufacturers and distributors in their space, which I think is really exciting,” Stange said. “They can share the data more effectively because it can be described in so many different ways. Competing sellers don't want to use the same terminology for their products, so if you’re a manufacturer it can get really daunting trying to manage all these differences for all the people you're trying to sell to. We try to smooth out that pain in that process so you can customize your data whether you’re a manufacturer or retailer.

“You might want to sell products based on the industrial job or construction job that you're doing, for example. We allow you to curate your catalog according to the specific niches of your business instead of trying to solve problems with broad strokes. The most effective companies use the platform to its full ability and really customize what they're presenting to their customers.”

Justin Stange

Amaze helps sellers confront what Chakraborty calls “the syndication problem.” As he put it, “Manufacturers don’t sell through a single distributor. They may sell through 50 channels if not more, and all of these distributors and retailers have their own way that they demand product information to be sent to them. It becomes a hugely daunting task for the manufacturer to manage that same product information, manipulate the data, and send it to all of the different places. The Amaze platform’s syndication module, called Bridge, essentially automates that entire process.”

Pratik Chakraborty

Without the need for technical experience, users can input the business rules that govern how their product information is used, and once those rules are established, Amaze applies them to every SKU, whether there are 10 or 10 million of them. “It works like a charm,” he added. “Manufacturers can send their data to every channel without worrying that the distributor will reject the product information because it doesn’t conform to their desires. It works on the other side, too. Many distributors get information from hundreds of suppliers ... the Bridge module within Amaze helps both sides.”

“No matter how good your storefront is, if you don’t have the right information, people aren’t going to buy from you; 73% of shoppers say that detailed product information is the main reason they click buy. After price, that’s the most important thing when deciding to make a purchase,” Stange stressed.

“People aren’t as brand loyal online as they are in brick-and-mortar settings. Making sure that information is right is important, because if you lose someone the first time, they will go back to where they’ve had success with a trusted seller they’ve used before. Getting information right the first time isn’t just important in converting a first-time buyer, but for the lifetime value of that customer,” he added.

Staffed with a slate of seasoned developers, engineers, and designers, Blue Meteor is mature in action, startup in spirit with work hard/play hard culture that gets the job done while still having fun. “We have the acumen, knowledge, and strength to not be swayed in all directions,” Chakraborty said. “We are focused, yet flexible. We want to keep it that way, even if we someday become a billion-dollar company.”

No matter how spectacular Blue Meteor’s future valuation might be (and we suspect it will be impressive), their contribution to making shopping pleasant, easy, and intuitive is, dare we say, amazing.