Online designer eyeglasses retailer BestBuyEyeglasses.com boosted sales of one of its product lines – Dolce & Gabbana frames – by 21% over a recent four to six week test using a product recommendation strategy that blends personalized product suggestions with business rules, says site principal, Eyal Gutentag.
BestBuyEyeglasses.com uses the product recommendation engine of vendor Richrelevance, which allows the retailer to determine which items are most likely to appeal to a customer, and then adjust how those recommendations are presented according to what the retailer most wants a consumer to do.
Product recommendation is one of the most elusive–and potentially profitable–forms of merchandising online, where consumer behavior can bring in reams of data about the way people shop. But figuring out what to do with that data, and how to present what you learn, is a psychological challenge all its own.
Most e-commerce retailers are familiar with the science of product recommendations. richrelevance has created an addition to its SaaS platform called myrecs, which uses more data to recommend more products per page, and updates customer information to recommend those products in real time.
Built on the enRICH™ platform, MyRecs offers shoppers a dedicated area for highly personalized product recommendations directly relevant to their shopping activity
San Francisco, Calif. – April 1, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today launched MyRecs™. With MyRecs, retailers can now offer every shopper a personalized web page that provides immediate access to all the recommendations associated with a customer’s shopping activity and history. This breakthrough SaaS-based solution can be integrated onto a retail site in minutes to help shoppers quickly discover new products explicitly related to their interests. Retailers using MyRecs increase customer loyalty and sales by engaging shoppers with fresh and relevant product recommendations – all on a single page and under the control of the shopper.
“We’ve innovated beyond Amazon.com to create an integrated page that is entirely focused on the consumer – what you’ve bought, what you’ve searched for, what you’ve viewed, and what other people like you have done,” said David Selinger, founder and CEO of RichRelevance. “All the recommendations are clearly explained, making them easy for customers to review, understand, and manage. And like RichRecs™ and RichMail™, MyRecs is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of large retailers, with enterprise scalability and merchandiser control over content display.”
Beyond Amazon: A New Way of Product Discovery
Most eCommerce sites currently limit customers to finding products through a categorical hierarchy and a search option. In contrast, MyRecs offers merchants a unique way of exposing customers to “personalized inventory” – a breadth of products related to a shopper’s expressed interests. MyRecs creates a new category of discovery by providing a shortcut to personalized recommendations.
Unlike Amazon.com’s “recommendations for you,” MyRecs is not exclusively based on a customer’s purchase history. Instead, MyRecs integrates purchase behavior with recent site activity to generate a variety of recommendations linked to distinct events. Recommendations are displayed in chronological order, and explicitly relate to recent actions such as purchases, searches, or product views. Further, MyRecs empowers shoppers to interact with and improve their recommendations through an intuitive interface that allows them to specify preferences and remove previous purchases from being considered, such as gift items for others.
For retailers, MyRecs is a ground-breaking new personalized shopping tool to drive sales and build customer engagement and loyalty. Recent research from JupiterResearch finds that nearly half of all online shoppers (48%) plan to spend less this year, but a majority of those reluctant to make certain purchases (61%) can be positively influenced by online shopping resources. With MyRecs, retailers can now offer customers a way to directly customize their shopping experience to their preferences through this meaningful new method of product discovery and navigation.
Features and Benefits
MyRecs is built on RichRelevance’s patent-pending enRICH platform (Enterprise-class Retail Influencers and Controls) and offers all the advantages of enRICH, including enterprise scalability, sustainable lift and robust merchandiser control. The platform uses multiple feedback loops and more than 20 distinct recommendation types to present the most appropriate products with clear messaging to each shopper. Recommendation models are continually tested and rebuilt in real-time to adapt to any changes in individual or crowd shopping behavior.
Key features include:
- “Drop-In” Implementation: All of RichRelevance’s products are SaaS-based offerings that are easily integrated with eCommerce sites.
- Multiple Recommendation Types: MyRecs features recommendations based on site activity, purchase history, top sellers, and more.
- User Controls: Intuitive controls allow each customer to improve his / her recommendations.
Availability
MyRecs is currently live on select RichRelevance customer websites. For more information, please call 415.956.1947 or visit https://richrelevance.com.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and sustainably increase sales by 5-30% while enhancing the shopping experience. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control, are exclusively retailer focused, and employ over 20 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.
The myrecs system creates a page filled with product recommendations organized by product type, customer behavior and visit chronology. The page serves as a way to navigate a retailer’s e-commerce site by recommendations.
David Selinger was first recognized as an expert in the field of e-commerce data analytics and personalization for his work on the research and development of Amazon’s data mining and personalization team. He founded richrelevance, a provider of personalized product recommendations.