About

expondo is an e-commerce business which sells thousands of products within various categories including gastronomy, industrial tools and equipment, sports and wellness, and home and garden, across 25 countries in Europe.

Introduction

Every year, thousands of new products across dozens of categories are introduced into expondo’s supply-chain. Products are manufactured by a few hundred suppliers and shipped to Europe where these new products are unboxed, assembled, captured on camera and film, and added to expondo’s e-commerce website across 25 countries with localised content.

Opportunity 

There was a significant cost of bringing each new product to market. A large part of that cost came from the number of people hours it took to capture and edit photos of the new products, create sales and how-to videos, write compelling and SEO friendly content about the product and translate it into 15 languages for localised websites. Efforts to do large parts of content generation in China had proved futile due to the fragmented supplier network, so the teams in Europe were largely responsible for this process. However, with AI, we now had the opportunity to transform the entire process, by not only reducing the number of people hours, and hence the costs, but also the time to market new products.

-55%

cost of bringing products to market

+40%

improvement in employee engagement

Process

We engaged with management across the Photo, Video, Content and Translations teams on three levels. The first was communication and psychological safety – most people were worried about job security in the face of AI adoption, and getting them onboard was critical to our success. Second, we upskilled the teams by giving them training, not only in the fundamentals of AI, but also in the actual use of specific AI tools across their respective areas. Finally, we introduced structures to encourage and facilitate the use of these tools.

Impact

Within 3 months, the business was on track to reduce cost of bringing products to market by 55%. Engagement levels of the teams involved in the AI-led transformation increased by over 40% and average number of days taken to go live reduced from 7 days to 4 days. In a capital-intensive e-commerce business, the ability to sell faster has an immediate impact on working capital.