MonotaRO Selects RichRelevance to Provide a Personalized Experience for Customers
RichRelevance significantly outperforms in-house product recommendation system in A/B testing; new personalization capabilities will extend across site, mobile applications, search and email
San Francisco, CA – May 11, 2015— RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that MonotaRO has switched to RichRelevance to deliver a superior customer experience through personalization. MonotaRO is an advanced e-commerce technology and data-driven B2B online retailer with origins in catalogue shopping. As the largest Japanese retailer in the online Maintenance-Repair-Operations (“MRO”) space, it has over 1.5 million business customers and a customer base that is rapidly expanding at an average rate of 30,000 new customers per month and a product offering expected to grow continuously.
MonotaRO is using RichRelevance’s Relevance Cloud™ to present shoppers with the most relevant products from a varied and complex lineup of over 9 million SKUs on its site. MonotaRO is using and will expand adoption of the Relevance Cloud suite of applications, including the Build™ open platform to personalize search, mobile apps and email campaigns. It will innovate using its unique known-how and understanding of its customers to develop its own personalization strategies to complement RichRelevance’s extensive suite of 130+ personalization algorithms.
“Personalization is a strategic imperative for MonotaRO,” said Mr. Masaya Suzuki, MonotaRO’s CEO. “We continuously analyze the purchasing behaviors of all of our customers and provide personalized information and product recommendations to each of them, which results in a high repeat ordering rate. RichRelevance is an important partner in this effort. With RichRelevance, we can combine powerful personalization products with an open innovation platform to quickly and effectively meet our vertical business needs and, most importantly, those of our customers.”
MonotaRO chose to implement the Relevance Cloud following conclusive A/B tests that demonstrated lift in revenue per session and increases in conversion and average order value were achieved with RichRelevance Recommend™ over its existing in-house recommendation system.
Mr. Suzuki further adds “what became very apparent early on in the evaluation was that thanks to RichRelevance, MonotaRO could dramatically reduce bounce rates, thus helping us protect the extensive monthly investment we make in the purchase of ad words from search engine providers.”
Based on these strong results, MonotaRO has already embarked on new personalization capabilities to orchestrate a comprehensive personalized experience across all digital touchpoints. The company plans to extend Recommend across mobile app and email, as well as implement Discover™ to personalize search and browse capabilities with the most relevant products. In addition, MonotaRO will use the Build™ open platform to innovate customized, innovative experiences that meet the unique needs of its business customers. All personalization is powered through the Relevance Cloud using real-time data to provide the most consistent, coherent experience wherever MonotaRO customers engage the brand.
“MonotaRO stands out in Japan as a regional player in its space, and one focused on using best-of-breed technology and solutions coupled with strong internal software and systems development skills and experience,” said Eduardo Sanchez, CEO of RichRelevance. “MonotaRO and RichRelevance have learned a great from each other during the evaluation, and this partnership ensures RichRelevance’s understanding of—and execution capabilities—in the world’s most demanding services market. We are honored they decided to be an early adopter of our solutions in Japan.”
About MonotaRO
Established in 2000 in Osaka, MonotaRO is a direct marketer of maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) supplies to small and mid-sized manufacturing companies in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and other South Asian countries. MonotaRO has successfully innovated in the Japanese MRO market, the second largest industrial market in the world.
With approximately US$400 million in online revenue, MonotaRO adds on average 30,000 new customers/month to its existing one million customers. It has nearly nine million products on offer and more than 1.5 million customers.
