With the growth of online shopping, there are now a significant number of entrepreneurs and developers creating tools to help retail businesses improve their conversion rates and sales – and Bunting is one such venture.
Established by Stephen Tucker, an experienced programmer who has been working on e-commerce sites for more than a decade, Bunting allows small retailers to increase sales with a simple plug-in.
“A total of 30 per cent of Amazon’s revenue comes from product recommendations – it’s a huge amount of money they make because their recommendations are very accurate,” explains Tucker.
“This poses an enormous problem for regular retailers who can’t afford to build that level of personalisation into their website, so therefore can’t complete. That’s where Bunting comes in.
“It plugs in within 10 minutes and once it’s installed, a user can easily change the content of their website.”
Ease of use is the key for Tucker, and he aims to ‘empower’ the end user.
“Our audience don’t want to go through their IT person every single time they want to make a change to their website, so our tools allow them to do that.”
The tool originally started life as a click fraud application to help businesses identify and fight bogus clickthroughs from Google adverts but pivoted into a website personalisation application.
“Building a personalisation tool was a natural culmination of my two skillsets: programming and understanding sales psychology and commerce.
“Bringing those two together created what Bunting is today – a very exciting, fast growth and profitable business.”
The business is based at Entrepreneurial Spark in Manchester. The dedicated ‘Hatchery’ at the incubator site was established by NatWest in partnership with KPMG and is currently home to 80 businesses, many with a tech background.
Each intake gives the entrepreneurs a base for an initial six months and access to NatWest staff and mentoring sessions with KPMG.
But why does a business like Bunting, which is achieving significant growth and profit already, need a place there?
“I’ve worked on this project in a vacuum,” he explains.
“One of the first things I wanted was outside experience and knowledge, and input from people who have different views from me.
“That’s something at the Hatchery has really helped me with. It’s an inspiring place to be and the advice and feedback that I can get from, not just my enablers, but the other people I’m working amongst is fantastic.”
Tucker is optimistic about the future potential of Bunting.
“In five years, we will be the biggest player in the small to medium business website personalisation industry,” he said.