Exclusive event will connect marketing and analytics professionals in an open dialogue on the opportunities and challenges facing their organizations and the industry
San Francisco – September 21, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, in partnership with Endeca, the search applications company, today announced the first Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable at the W Hotel in San Francisco on September 30, 2009. The roundtable is designed to generate an open dialogue among marketing and analytics peers on the specific opportunities and challenges they face as pioneers in online commerce.
The event will feature a keynote from Paco Underhill, founder and CEO of Envirosell and author of the best-selling book, “Why We Buy,” immediately followed by an open discussion of key topics ranging from managing executive expectations through addressing the disconnect between online and offline analytics.
Retailers have amassed enormous amounts of data on shopping behavior that can be used to drive business decisions,” said Underhill. “Now the time has come to shift away from focusing on strategy to recognizing the tactics that drive sales, loyalty and satisfaction. I commend RichRelevance and Endeca for presenting a forum to facilitate the exchange of the specific tactics that underpin the success of the world’s largest retailers.”
Participation in the inaugural Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable is limited to 30 business professionals who are senior members of their company’s marketing and analytics team. For practitioners outside of the Bay Area, RichRelevance is planning a series of quarterly Ecommerce Analytics Roundtables across the country. For more information or to register for the September 30 event, please visit https://richrelevance.com/analyticsroundtable/savethedate.
“The Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable is a forum for marketing and analytics professionals to talk about the realities of their jobs, the expectations that they face, and the innovations that help them succeed,” said RichRelevance Founder and CEO, David Selinger. “We’re very excited to provide a place where these conversations can take root and grow into a larger body of knowledge. Paco’s insights provide a great starting point for discussion, and we anticipate a memorable event for all involved.”
“We appreciate the unique opportunity to convene a renowned industry thought leader such as Paco Underhill, with marketing and analytics experts from the front lines of e-commerce,” said John Andrews, Vice President, Solutions Marketing & Product Management, Endeca. “We expect this forum to generate many innovative ideas for shaping the customer experience and managing the demands of this holiday season.”
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.
About Endeca Endeca is a leading provider of search applications. Search applications built on Endeca’s technology deliver the clearest visibility into information, driving hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and increased revenue for our customers. Powering these solutions is Endeca’s Information Access Platform, a major enterprise search innovation based on a fundamentally new architecture for building high-ROI applications that let users access any data from anywhere any way they need it. With this improved information visibility, customers make better choices, and employees better decisions. More than 250 million end users around the world access information through Endeca solutions, which are in use at more than 600 leading organizations including: ABN AMRO, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Dell, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, the Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com.
About Envirosell Envirosell is the premier consumer behavior research and consulting agency for commercial environments, integrating analysis of layout, merchandising and operations. Envirosell has 25 years of experience conducting in-store research for major consumer product manufacturers, retailers, banks, restaurants and design agencies, with a client list that includes almost half of the Fortune 500 list.
by Darren Vengroff
Netflix
created the $1 million Netflix Prize
The idea sounded seductively simple: If developers could predict how users would rate a film, they could use that prediction to decide whether it makes sense to recommend the film to them or not.
A new product recommendation feature on Wine.com is helping drive up average order values by 26%, Wine.com Inc. CEO Rich Bergsund says.
Search for red Bordeaux wines on Wine.com, for example, and columns on the left and right sides of the landing page will recommend lists of related wines-but no two shoppers will see the same lists, Bergsund says. The underlying recommendation engine is from richrelevance Inc.
CIO magazine award profile acknowledges RichRelevance’s use of SSD drives within cloud computing network to accelerate performance and algorithm sophistication
San Francisco – September 1, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that it has received a 2009 Intel Premier IT Knowledge Award. The Award heralds RichRelevance’s unique innovations in addressing the IT challenges faced by enterprise-class online retailers, specifically through the enablement of previously impossible algorithm development.
RichRelevance currently serves more than 200 million personalized product recommendations per day for such retailers as Sears, Kmart and Burton on its enterprise SaaS infrastructure—maintaining 100% uptime even during the busiest shopping days of the year. The company has now slashed response times to an average of under 25 milliseconds using solid-state drives (SSDs), enhancing an already unparalleled geographically distributed infrastructure.
Most personalization providers rely on just one data center, which can cause a delay of up to 800 milliseconds in response time. RichRelevance has invested in six distributed data centers, where the deployment of SSDs ensures that 99.99% of response times are under 100 milliseconds across all partners—for even the world’s largest retailers. The resulting increases in speed and relevance of personalized recommendations safeguard key competitive advantages for both RichRelevance and its enterprise-class retail clients. A recent Amazon study found that page-load speed provides not just a better shopping experience, but is directly tied to the retail bottom line: every 100 milliseconds of delay cost the company 1% in sales (Kohavi & Longbotham 2007).
The introduction of SSDs was led by Elya Kurktchi, architect of Akamai, Hotmail and Qualcomm’s infrastructures. “Intel’s SSD technology gives our already advanced infrastructure an additional edge, enabling us to accelerate the complexity of the algorithms and computation models we employ without sacrificing performance,” explains Kurktchi. “SSDs allow us to further exploit our core technology’s full potential through the nearly limitless number of computations we can conduct simultaneously.”
“Enterprise-class retailers choose to partner with RichRelevance based on the strength of our technology and our team’s unmatched experience in e-commerce, merchandising, personalization and data analysis,” said RichRelevance CEO David Selinger. “Our success as the preferred personalization provider for two of the largest US retailers is founded upon industry experts like Elya, whose sole focus is to deliver best-in-class results for our clients.”
The Intel Premier IT Knowledge Awards program was designed to recognize and reward North American IT managers / groups who have generated best practices, driving business value and innovation. RichRelevance was chosen by the Intel Premier IT Professionals community from among eight award finalists to receive the award in the Professionals Choice category. Additional information on the awards and RichRelevance’s SSD initiative is available at http://ipip.intel.com/go/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2009/08/intel_premier_it_awards.pdf.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.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.
by Darren Vengroff
Online product recommendations have been around for almost as long as e-commerce itself. Most online retailers today offer some type of product recommendations on their sites, with research proving that presenting shoppers with items that fit their interests boosts sales and increases customer satisfaction. But the truth is, many retailers are not doing all they can with recommendations; they plunk them down on product pages, do little to monitor performance, cross their fingers and just hope the recommendations work to boost sales a bit. Often, there is an initial spike in conversion, but performance tends to fizzle out after a few months.
However, there are simple ways to make recommendations work better–proven tactics that not only drive a greater initial lift than standard recommendations, but also create a lasting and sustainable lift over time.
RichRelevance expands US operations to meet rapidly increasing demand for its next-generation personalization product suite
San Francisco – July 28, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced the opening of a new office in Seattle, Washington. RichRelevance continues to expand its operations in order to work more closely with regional clients, prospects, and partners, as well as tap into the area’s remarkable talent pool. The office will be led by RichRelevance Chief Scientist Darren Vengroff, who drove several high-profile personalization, navigation and targeting innovations as Principal Engineer at Amazon.com and was named one of Seattle Business Monthly’s Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs in 2008.
“Our decision to expand into Seattle is driven by our desire to most effectively serve the needs of the largest online retailers, while assembling the industry’s best team of retail and technology experts,” said David Selinger, founder and CEO of RichRelevance. “Over the past year, RichRelevance has more than tripled its staff. The new Seattle office is in line with our rapid growth and steady focus on creating a culture that fosters excellence and innovation.” RichRelevance was recently recognized as the #1 “Best Place to Work 2009” in its category by the San Francisco Business Times.
“I am thrilled to lead an office that includes some of the best technologists anywhere,” said Vengroff. “We’ve assembled an amazing group of integration engineers, lead developers and analytics team members to drive the next phase of product and platform development as we take personalization in directions that are totally new to the eCommerce industry.”
RichRelevance currently serves more than 200 million recommendations each day on over 35 sites. This has translated into channeling hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for its customers through its enterprise-class enRICH™ personalization platform. The company, whose clients include Sears, Wal-Mart and Burton, is the only personalization provider to successfully serve two of the top 10 online retailers.
To support this success, RichRelevance has continued to attract world-class talent with experience at leading Internet and eCommerce companies such as Amazon.com, Overstock.com, Staples, eBay, PayPal and CVS.com. Key hires last year included Tyler Hoffman who most recently spent seven years building and running PayPal’s enterprise sales, as Vice President of Sales; Todd Pearson, former Vice President of Sales at PayPal, as Chief Customer Officer; Darren Vengroff, former Principal Engineer at Amazon.com, as Chief Scientist; and Jake Bailey, former Director of International Business and Director of Marketing at Overstock.com, as Head of Advertising.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.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.