I know the absolute last thing you want to be thinking about right now is the Christmas holiday, but this year RichRelevance is giving you your gift early. Today we released our “12 months of Christmas” white paper—chock full of best practices for retailers to help jump start their Holiday 2012 season planning.
For every month, we offer insights and best practices on ways to maximize your efforts in a variety of fields, including:
- Cross-Channel Marketing
- Mobile
- Search
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
You’re invited to get ahead of the curve, and start utilizing all of the opportunities you have at your fingertips right now to make your next holiday shopping season your best ever!
Happy (early) Holidays!
“Twelve Months of Christmas” showcases what (and how) today’s shoppers expect their favorite brands and retailers to deliver throughout the year and into Holiday 2012
San Francisco, CA – Jan. 26, 2012 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today released a new whitepaper entitled 12 Months of Christmas. The report showcases insights and innovative best practices to help retailers put the customer at the center of their marketing strategy, no matter what the touchpoint (online, in-store, mobile, social media and email). Through the new whitepaper, retailers can ensure they have the right tools to cement year-round powerful, personalized and profitable customer engagement.
“We don’t know what shiny object will be the Next Big Thing for retail in 2012, but consumers’ need for respect and engagement with brands and products will never change,” said RichRelevance CEO David Selinger. “Personalization and relevance are evergreen and ensure the customer comes first regardless of touchpoint. We’re very excited to release this new whitepaper to catalyze innovative thinking in retail and further our commitment to enabling a better shopping experience for consumers.”
The new whitepaper from RichRelevance takes the form of a calendar, revealing more than a dozen best practices for retailers to leverage throughout the year, along with research and insights from the company’s network of world-class retailers. Topics range from mobile promotions and shopping cart abandonment and include actionable tactics for Facebook Commerce, juggling channels, and the ever-connected consumer. The whitepaper is immediately available here.
AboutRichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Target and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $3 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called Shopping Media which allows manufacturers to engage shoppers where it matters most – in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com
Leaders from academia and industry will review RecLab Prize submissions and select up to ten teams to move on to compete for $1 million cash award
San Francisco, CA – Jan. 11, 2012 –– As Overstock.com and RichRelevance continue to accept entries for the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com, the companies today announced the formation of the Prize’s Peer Review Committee. Leading researchers Eugene Agichtein of Emory University, Oliver Downs of Analytical Insights, Inc., and Alexander Tuzhilin of New York University Stern School of Business will join RichRelevance Chief Scientist Darren Vengroff to review all Prize submissions and select the ten semifinalists who will advance to compete for a cash award of up to $1 million.
The RecLab Prize on Overstock.com, which encourages innovation in retail personalization, will continue to receive submissions at overstockprize.com until March 1, 2012. Current teams represent leading academic institutions around the world, including BYU, Hong Kong University and Warsaw University of Technology, among others.
“Algorithm development is one of the most complex tasks in technology today, and we’ve assembled some of the brightest minds in computer and mathematical science to help us oversee the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com,” said Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist of RichRelevance. “As we move further along into the competition, the committee will ensure that the best teams or individuals get the recognition they deserve. We’re excited to welcome such notable visionaries into the RecLab Prize and look forward to garnering their expertise.”
The Peer Review Committee for the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com
The Peer Review committee brings deep expertise in mathematics and computer sciences and years of experience at the top of their fields. The committee will review submissions based on novelty of design and expected effectiveness at generating sales lift. It will also ensure that the semifinalists represent a unique, diverse set of approaches to the problem, rather than a large number of subtle variants of a single approach. Members include:
- Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Math and Computer Science department at Emory University, and is on the core faculty of the Biomedical Informatics program. Eugene founded and leads the Emory Intelligent Information Access Laboratory (IR Lab). He is a recipient of the “Best Student Paper” award at the ICDE 2003 conference, and of the “Best Paper” awards at the SIGMOD 2006 and SIGIR 2011 conferences. Eugene received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a BS in Engineering from The Cooper Union.
- Oliver Downs is President and Chief Scientist at Analytical Insights, Inc. His extensive background in algorithm design has resulted in 21 U.S. patents pending in the fields of Bayesian prediction, statistical estimation, outlier detection, real-time GPS data processing, and 10 granted patents in the fields of Quantum Optimization Algorithms, Dynamic Time Series Prediction, Location-based Data Probes, Anomaly Detection and Scalable Spatial Search. Previously, Oliver was Chief Scientist at Atigeo where he developed a learning semantic platform for personalization and search. He holds PhD and MA degrees in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University and BA, MA and MSc degrees in Experimental & Theoretical Physics, from the University of Cambridge, UK.
- Alexander Tuzhilin is a Professor of Information Systems and an NEC Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business. His current research interests include data mining, personalization, recommender systems and CRM. He has served on the Editorial Boards of several leading journals in his areas of expertise, and currently serves on the boards of the ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, the INFORMS Journal on Computing (as an Area Editor) and the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal. His various academic and industrial activities have been featured in major media publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and the Financial Times. Alexander received his BS in Mathematics from NYU, his MS in Engineering Economics from Stanford University and his PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.
- Darren Vengroff is responsible for all of RichRelevance’s analytical and machine learning development—from high-level strategy and analytics, to strategic implementation plans. From startups to industry leaders Amazon.com and Goldman Sachs, Darren has designed and built a variety of world-class, customer-focused, scalable applications. Prior to RichRelevance, Darren was CTO and co-founder of Pelago, Inc. (makers of Whhrl) where he oversaw Pelago’s technology and actively supported product definition, fundraising, and business development. Before Pelago, Darren was a Principal Engineer at Amazon.com and a Vice President at Goldman Sachs. Darren holds an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, where he studied I/O-efficient algorithms with Jeff Vitter, and a B.S.E. in Computer Science with Highest Honors from Princeton University.
“The RecLab approach to personalization innovation cleverly addresses the way we commonly need to treat proprietary data industry-wide today and provides a great framework to catalyze this industry through an exciting and practical competition,” said Peer Review Committee Member, Oliver Downs. “I am extremely honored to have been selected as part of this committee and look forward to working with the teams and individual contestants, RichRelevance and Overstock.com in bringing this innovation to the market.”
About the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com
- In May of 2011, RichRelevance and Overstock.com unveiled the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com, a contest that provides a cash reward of up to $1 million to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations on Overstock.com.
- RecLab Prize contestants are granted access to a high-quality and comprehensive synthetic dataset via RichRelevance’s open-source RecLab project, which enables researchers to develop their algorithms against synthetic data and then test against real data.
- Top performing algorithms will be exposed to real data and will run live within the RichRelevance cloud environment (as real product recommendations to Overstock.com’s customers).
- The RecLab Prize rewards the highest performing individual or team based on the results delivered within a defined judging period (up to $1 million for a 10% or greater lift).
- · To ensure that all eligible teams are able to participate, RichRelevance and Overstock.com have extended the contest deadline to March 1, 2012. The contest is still actively accepting registrants and teams and individuals interested in participating should visit: overstockprize.com to register.
Additional Resources
- Additional information on the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com can be found here: overstockprize.com
- Additional information on the RecLab Project can be found here: http://code.richrelevance.com/reclab/
- You can also connect with RichRelevance on Facebook and Twitter for updates and news.
About Overstock.com
Overstock.com, Inc. is a Savings Engine offering brand-name merchandise at discount prices. The company offers its customers an opportunity to shop for bargains conveniently, while offering its suppliers an alternative inventory distribution channel. Overstock.com, headquartered in Salt Lake City, is a publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ Global Market System and can be found online at http://www.overstock.com and http://www.o.co. Overstock.com regularly posts information about the company and other related matters on its website under the heading “Investor Relations.” Overstock.com® is a registered trademark and Savings Engine™ are trademarks of Overstock.com, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
AboutRichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Target and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $3 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called shopping media which allows manufacturers to engage shoppers where it matters most – in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com
iPad and iPhone shoppers account for 90% of all mobile purchases; spend 19% more per order than Android users
San Francisco, CA – Dec. 21, 2011 – Retailers will ring in the New Year next week having wrapped up a successful holiday shopping season that saw consumers utilizing more channels to interact with their stores – predominantly through mobile devices. This is a trend that will continue to accelerate with more than 90 million smartphone users and 24 million tablet users in the US. In this changing technology landscape, RichRelevance, the global leader in dynamic personalization for Retail, today released its inaugural Holiday Shopping Study to give companies new insight into how these consumers shop and buy. The study analyzes 3.4 billion shopping sessions between April and December to uncover the trends that have shaped Holiday 2011 and will define 2012.
“The numbers across our retailing partners sites demonstrate just how powerful the iOS platform is enabling mobile web shopping and, while still below 5 percent in total conversion, mobile traffic’s doubling in eight months is a trend we only see accelerating,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “In order to succeed in this dynamic market, retailers and brands must ensure they are addressing relevance throughout the channels where people are shopping, ensuring a seamless experience across the interplay of device, context and consumer behavior.”
Key findings from the Holiday Shopping Study include:
• Mobile Continues Strong 9-Month Growth: In the last nine months, the share of U.S. online retail dollars attributable to mobile devices has doubled from 1.87 percent in April of 2011 to 3.74 percent in December 2011. RichRelevance also tracked a spectacular increase in mobile traffic as share of commerce page views with more than 15 percent of shopping sessions occurring on mobile devices. In April of 2011, just under 9 percent of all shoppers were browsing digital aisles via a mobile device. By December of 2011, the share has more than doubled, reaching 18 percent of all consumers.
• Mobile Percentage of Overall Sales: Shoppers purchasing from their mobile devices represented just over 3 percent of total sales.
• Thanksgiving And Weekends: After enjoying their holiday meal, consumers got busy shopping and jumped online: on Thanksgiving, 24 percent of all shoppers were on a mobile device, the highest share of online shopping between Nov 1 and Dec 18. In general, weekends and holidays are prime time for mobile shopping: for the six week period from Nov 1 to Dec 18 on average 14 percent of shoppers were on mobile devices. On weekends it jumps up a notch: on both Saturday and Sunday, 17 percent of the browsers are on mobile devices.
• iPad and iPhone Dominate Mobile Shopping: Apple mobile devices account for the bulk of all online non-desktop sales: just over 92% of the sales originated from an iPad or an iOS-enabled device in December 2011, up from 88 percent in April. Apple mobile devices also have a larger AOV compared to other mobile platforms ($123 for Apple vs. $101 for Android in December 2011) – and far outstrip desktop orders ($87)
• Average Order Value Slips – But Mobile Stays Strong: Overall average order value (AOV) declined beginning in November 2011, due to economic factors and the influx of shoppers during the holiday period when there are more buyers and orders tend to be frequent and smaller. However the AOV on mobile devices remained stronger. In April, desktop and mobile-originated online average order sales (AOV) were neck-and-neck ($149 and $153, respectively). Now, in mid-December, mobile AOV is averaging $120 compared with desktop orders, which have slid to $110.
The Holiday Shopping Study analyzes the shopping patterns of US online consumers. The study is based on more than 3.4 billion online shopping sessions, which took place between April 1, 2011 and December 18, 2011 on the web sites of US online retailers. These retailers include mass merchants, as well as small and specialty retailers, including 10 of the 25 largest retailers on the web.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Target and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $3 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called Shopping Media which allows manufacturers to engage shoppers where it matters most – in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com
Jan 2011 after the 2010 holiday season….
Still in the glow of 100% uptime, response rates around 80ms, 5.5K requests per second served at peak.
We’re all sitting around in IT Ops excited, pumped and ecstatic for our performance. We’re beating our chests and basking in the glow of success. 5500 Requests per Second (RPS) peak—our measurement of capacity reached and slayed. Hey guys, I have the year-over-year page-view graphs. Look at that, over 147M page views in one day—wow.
Then someone chimes in, “but, guys, we are bringing on more than five of the top 20 retailers this year, and we’ll double that traffic. In Europe we will easily double what we did in 2010. What if online shopping takes off even more, and we TRIPLE that?”