Wine.com Boosts Sales with Next-Generation Personalization from RichRelevance
Highly relevant wine and gift recommendations drive nearly 10% of all site sales and deliver a 15% increase in average order value for #1 online wine retailer
Las Vegas – September 22, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that Wine.com is using the enRICH™ personalization platform to create an online experience that both mimics and surpasses the experience of choosing a bottle at a local specialty wine store. Through enRICH, the nation’s #1 online wine retailer now delivers highly relevant personalized recommendations of varietals, vintages and related accessories throughout the Wine.com site. Recommendations are tailored to each shopper’s current browsing behavior and geographical location and incorporate the point of view of the Wine.com community – what they looked at, how they shop, what they buy – in order to expose shoppers to relevant products that they might not have considered otherwise.
“We offer a huge assortment of wines to an extremely diverse customer base of wine lovers who could be looking to restock their cellar, buy a statement gift, pick an inexpensive party wine, or just find something that they love to drink,” said Amy Kennedy, Vice-President of Marketing at Wine.com. “The idea of personalization has always been attractive to us but difficult to realize in our market. RichRelevance helps solve this problem and delivers an unmatched customer experience. With recommendations already driving a 15% increase in average order value on Wine.com – and as much as a 26% increase in recent weeks – we’re very pleased with the results of personalization.”
Wine.com implemented RichRecs™ from RichRelevance in under six weeks to deliver a more relevant customer experience by offering personalized product recommendations on product, category, home and search pages. RichRecs leverages multiple recommendation approaches including collaborative filtering, personalization, analysis of current and past individual and “crowd” shopping behaviors, cross-placement optimization and a closed feedback loop to deliver the most relevant recommendations for each shopper at every moment. Automatic “competition” among 40+ recommendation types ensures accuracy and immediacy in the product recommendations.
As a result, no two shoppers at Wine.com are recommended the same products – even when considering the same bottle of wine. Both recommendation types (such as “people who bought this also bought…”) and recommended products constantly evolve and adapt to provide a targeted and unique customer experience.
“RichRelevance provides an intelligent technology that can assess multiple inputs – including geographical availability and pricing – to deliver an engaging shopping experience,” Kennedy continued. “Even better, their team took the time to understand our business and our goals. We expect the partnership to deepen as we look to integrate more of their personalization products across our customer lifecycle.”
“Wine.com is on the forefront of using data and technology to provide shoppers with an online experience that parallels if not surpasses the offline experience,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “With personalized recommendations, customers can immediately find products that they love but would have never discovered on their own. In the case of Wine.com, these are varietals they would have never encountered at a local wine store with a restricted inventory and no means to optimize data on behaviors and preferences. As the online experience continues to evolve, it’s companies like Wine.com – who harness the power of personalization to drive sales and loyalty – that will emerge as real ecommerce leaders.”
About Wine.com
Wine.com is the nation’s #1 online wine retailer, according to Internet Retailer magazine’s annual ranking of websites by revenue, offering thousands of wines, wine gifts, gift baskets and monthly wine clubs. Wine.com’s mission is to be the ultimate resource for wine enthusiasts, whether shopping for themselves or sending a gift, by offering a great selection, low prices, convenient delivery and helpful information. Wine.com is the world’s most visited wine web site, according to research conducted by comScore Media Metrix. For more information, visit http://www.wine.com.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com, BassPro.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.
