Palexy empowers retailers to increase in-store sales with the help of Google Cloud

Many people are again crowding store aisles as they look for their favorite products and eagerly try on clothing, shoes, and jewelry. Although some shoppers purchase multiple items, others leave the store empty handed. As retailers know, there are many possible reasons why some people only window shop. Perhaps a favorite item is too expensive, out of stock, or too hard to find in the store.

The problem for many retailers, though, is that they often lack real insights into why shoppers leave without ever buying anything. That’s why we built Palexy. With the Palexy platform, any retailer can easily use in-store video feeds combined with point of service (POS) data to gain actionable insights about customer shopping behavior, preferences, and interactions. The real time insights enable retailers to improve store layouts, stock popular items, set more competitive prices, and train more responsive staff. 

Today, hundreds of retailers worldwide use Palexy to create exciting in-store experiences that boost customer engagement and increase sales. As we continue to grow, Palexy will introduce new features and services to analyze and perfect every step of a customer’s journey so brick-and-mortar stores can more effectively compete against online shopping.

Building a comprehensive retail analytics platform

We started Palexy with a small and dedicated team based in Southeast Asia. From the beginning, we were determined to positively disrupt the retail market. However, as a new startup with a limited budget, we quickly realized we couldn’t affordably or efficiently scale without a reliable technology partner.

We looked at the options and identified Google Cloud, including the Google for Startups Cloud Program, as the best choice for us. In just a year we created a comprehensive retail analytics platform that delivers solutions for management, operations, merchandising, marketing, and loss prevention. We now have hundreds of customers around the world—and recently made the CBInsights list of top 10 global indoor mapping analytics vendors! We accomplished all this on the highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud.

To accurately analyze the in-store customer journey with our computer vision and AI technology, we built our own model and processing pipeline from scratch, and we use a lot of T-4 GPUs from Google Cloud for our processing pipeline. These solutions enable Palexy to leverage existing store cameras to intelligently track how many customers enter the store, what they try on, how they interact with staff, and which aisles they visit. 

We also rely on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to rapidly build, test, deploy, and manage containerized applications. We optimize GKE performance by streaming custom metrics from Pub/Sub to automatically select and scale different node pools. Since we started using GKE, we’ve lowered our application deployment costs by 30%. We’re also seeing Tau VMs reduce video decoding costs by up to 40%.

We use additional Google Cloud solutions to power the Palexy platform. We store and analyze customer data with Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, build API gateways on Cloud Endpoints, create mobile applications with Firebase, coordinate Cloud Run on Cloud Scheduler, and archive processed videos on Cloud Storage.

Perfecting the in-store customer journey

The Google for Startups Cloud Program has helped us to rapidly build a comprehensive retail analytics platform that is used by thousands of stores around the world. We continue to tap the deep technical knowledge of the dedicated Google for Startups Success Team who work closely with us to roll out new features and services. We also use Google Cloud credits to affordably explore additional solutions to manage and analyze the terabytes of videos, images, and data generated by our customers. 

Our customers are seeing incredible success with Palexy. For example, a major sporting goods retailer in Southeast Asia increased sales 59% after rearranging store shelves, redesigning window displays, and retraining staff. Point of sale data (POS) combined with video analysis also helped a fashion chain boost customer interaction rates 38% and raise conversion rates 24%.

Worldwide demand for Palexy continues to grow at an impressive pace. As we expand our team, we look forward to launching Palexy in new markets and empowering retailers to perfect in-store shopping experiences. 

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