Wynshop buys personalized ad company Halla 2024-03-11 (1)

Ecommerce platform provider Wynshop has acquired tech company Halla, an AI-powered tool that creates personalized ads for shoppers. 

Halla, which launched in 2020, had already partnered with Wynshop prior to the acquisition to provide the custom recommendations, substitutions, and searches for grocery ecommerce storefronts.

Halla’s proprietary tech draws from more than 100 billion data points to predict shoppers’ needs.

“Grocers have historically relied on shopping trends, lagging sales data, intuition, or ‘people like you also bought’ algorithms to predict what shoppers want,” Wynshop said in a press release. “Unfortunately, these methods work poorly, and may even lead to negative outcomes like bad substitutions for out-of-stock incidents, which can drive up to 20% of grocery shoppers to competitors, according to McKinsey.”

That tech takes a variety of forms such as “buy it again” and “you may also like” options on grocer websites and “did you forget” options at checkout, Halla CEO Spencer Price said in an interview with Supermarket News.

“Wynshop’s developed this extremely comprehensive platform, and we plug in perfectly, because we’ve got these purpose-built point solutions that are all about bringing AI into the customer experience via personalization,” Price said

The company also provides opportunities for substitutions by providing options that better fit with the shopper, Wynshop CEO Neil Moses said in an interview. 

“So it's not somebody guessing what a person may want, but actually, quite a lot goes into figuring out what’s on somebody's mind and what would be personal to them, and Halla’s proven that out quite a bit with recommendations in terms of how well it's done based on what we've seen,” Moses said.