I won back 91% of the customers Skroutz was keeping from me

The context

Skroutz started as a price-comparison engine and grew into an Amazon-style marketplace. That shift had a critical consequence for partner stores: the platform stopped sharing the customer’s contact details. In the past, a customer who discovered you through Skroutz ended up at your own e-shop; they knew you as a brand, and you knew them: you could serve them, make them an offer, keep them. Under the new policy, the customer belonged to Skroutz; the store simply processed a “blind” order.

The challenge

For an e-shop, that translates into permanent dependency: you pay commissions that keep rising, without ever building your own relationship with the customer. And the problem grows even larger when you sell consumables the customer reorders every few weeks. In those cases, keeping the customer and getting them to buy directly from you again is enormously valuable.

The objective, then, was clear: to find a way to regain the customer’s details and consent, legally and for a large number of orders. A problem that affects every Greek e-shop selling through Skroutz, and that, until then, no one had managed to solve.

The solution

Instead of fighting the platform, I changed the perspective: I gave the customer themselves a reason to want to leave me their details. I designed a gamified gift mechanism that the customer activates voluntarily, handing over their contact details and permission to join our offers list. I don’t reveal the full details here: the mechanism is a product I sell, not a public recipe.

Equally important is how it was built. The entire platform was developed with code written by Artificial Intelligence: my team and I provided the framework, the logic and the instructions, and it handled the implementation. The result wasn’t a rough experiment, but a stable product, which today exists as a WooCommerce plugin.

The results

• A few months after rollout, around 91% of customers via Skroutz voluntarily handed over their details and consent.
• The direct relationship with the customer was restored, and with it the ability to do email marketing, offers and after-sales service.
• Dependency on the platform and its commissions was reduced, especially on repeat-purchase products.
• The solution became a product: configurable, applicable to any e-shop facing the same problem.

What this means for you

Two things. First, that faced with a problem everyone took for granted, I seek out and find solutions no one else has thought of. Second, and more crucial for our era, that I can turn an idea into real, working software by directing Artificial Intelligence, without being a programmer myself. That very ability, inventiveness and harnessing AI to build, not just to talk, is what I bring to an organisation.

If you run an online store and face the same problem, we can talk about how you can have it.