Retailers Select Pay-for-Performance Business Model as One of Five Best Ideas for Success in 2009
San Francisco, Calif. – February 3, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalized product recommendations that enhance the shopping experience and drive sales, today announced that it has won the inaugural Shop.org Innovation Contest. The contest awards the top five ideas for how retailers can succeed in the current economy and prepare for future success.
Shop.org’s retail members selected RichRelevance for its pay-for-performance business model. The company, whose clients are among the largest in eCommerce including Sears.com, does not charge clients any upfront, installation or license fees, instead employing a pure pay-for-performance model. This means RichRelevance is incentivized to get retailers up and running as quickly as possible with effective integrations that deliver maximum results.
As one of the five winners, RichRelevance will take the stage today at the 2009 Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum in Orlando, Florida. During the presentation, RichRelevance will speak to the benefits of securing accountability from technology partners. By paying only upon receiving a return on investment, the retailer can ensure that technology vendors deliver on their promises, allowing the merchant to be more competitive by increasing sales at the lowest possible cost.
“RichRelevance is in tune with the needs of our market, and we are very excited to be recognized by the retailers themselves for our innovative business model,” said David Selinger, Chief Executive Officer of RichRelevance. “We do not require retailers to make an up-front investment in our recommendations platform, and we only charge our customers for sales that we drive on their sites. For RichRelevance, this means we need to deliver the absolute highest-quality product recommendations on the market, and for our clients, it means they can immediately boost sales with zero risk and a minimal investment of resources—a perfect win-win in this economy.”
RichRelevance provides next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites, including Burton and Kmart. In order to provide the most appropriate product recommendations to online shoppers, RichRelevance analyzes dozens of shopping behaviors and data inputs in real-time, including previous purchases, key search terms and specific product preferences. As shoppers navigate a merchant’s enhanced web site, they are presented with the most relevant products that suit their needs, style and purchase intent in each moment. With RichRelevance, recommendations automatically adapt throughout the shopping experience based on a customer’s real-time behavior—not just their past purchases—driving measurable improvements in conversion and greatly enhancing the customer experience.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the market and technology leader in next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites, including Sears.com. Founded by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, the company’s products increase sales by 5-30% by personalizing the shopping experience through targeted merchandising. The RichRelevance recommendations platform outperforms popular collaborative filtering-based solutions through the use of over 20 different recommendation types, cross-placement optimization, and a closed-feedback loop. The SaaS-based offering is easily integrated, and empowers merchandisers through a robust, patent-pending suite of dashboard.
ReadWriteWeb has been running a special series on recommendation engines and this episode of RWW Live is part of that. The show features 3 exciting and very knowledgeable guests: Jesús Pindado, Strands Vice President, Business Solutions; Yosi Glick, Jinni CEO & Co-Founder; and David Selinger, richrelevance CEO & Co-Founder, who previously led the R&D arm of Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization team.
Personalized product recommendations are driving nearly 25% of total sales at Burton Snowboard’s online store since it implemented the recommendations program last year, the retailer and manufacturer report.
Burton’s site, which previously had served product recommendations to shoppers based on its top sellers, started using vendor richrelevance to help it offer a more personalized shopping experience. The personalized recommendations are based on an analysis of shopping behaviors and other data, including previous purchases and key search terms. Shoppers are presented with the relevant products at key points as they navigate through Burton’s site.
Leading sports retailer successfully implements RichRecs in less than 4 weeks; personalized recommendations are driving almost 25% of total sales on store.burton.com
San Francisco – January 26, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalized product recommendations that enhance the shopping experience and drive sales, today announced that Burton Snowboards has launched RichRecs™ on store.burton.com. RichRecs was successfully implemented in less than four weeks and is driving almost 25% of overall site sales.
“Burton customers don’t follow the pack. They demand the best quality snowboarding products that suit their unique style, skills and personality. It was natural that Burton wanted to provide its online customers with the most highly personalized product recommendations possible,” said Justin Olson, Head of eCommerce at Burton Snowboards. “RichRelevance not only delivered on this promise, which significantly increased sales and materially improved the customer experience on day one, but did so in only four weeks and in a way that wholly exceeded our expectations of a professional services team.”
Burton, which previously displayed static recommendations based on in-house data for top sellers, realized its customers wanted a more personalized shopping experience. But the company did not want to deploy costly, cumbersome personalization technologies that required extensive IT resources and offered no guarantee of real results. Instead, Burton decided to join Sears and other top retailers by working with RichRelevance for its advanced recommendations technology, superior professional services, and robust SaaS infrastructure that currently delivers an average of 100 million product recommendations a day.
Faced with a tight deployment deadline, Burton worked with the RichRelevance professional services team to develop and execute a rapid implementation plan based on proven best practices. The team ensured that RichRecs seamlessly integrated into Burton’s existing technology platform, and was optimized for maximum conversion and sales lift while providing an enhanced shopping experience. Burton had immediate access to detailed program analytics and reporting through RichRelevance’s web-based dashboard.
“Burton is the leading brand for snowboarders, and they knew that they would connect more deeply with their customers by making the shopping experience more relevant,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “In these rocky economic times, retailers need to focus their efforts on technology implementations that drive a real, measurable increases in sales, conversion, and return visits – and personalized product recommendations from RichRelevance are one of the best ways for leaders like Burton to do that.”
In order to provide the right set of recommendations to online shoppers, RichRelevance analyzes dozens of shopping behaviors and data inputs in real-time, including previous purchases, key search terms, and specific product preferences. As shoppers navigate through a RichRecs enhanced web site, they are presented with the most relevant products that suit their needs, style, and purchase intent in each moment. With RichRecs, recommendations automatically adapt throughout the shopping experience based on a customer’s real-time behavior – not just their past purchases – driving measurable improvements in conversion and greatly enhancing the customer experience.
About RichRelevance RichRelevance is the market and technology leader in next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites, including Sears.com. Founded by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, the company’s products increase sales by 5-30% by personalizing the shopping experience through targeted merchandising. The RichRelevance recommendations platform outperforms popular collaborative filtering-based solutions through the use of over 20 different recommendation types, cross-placement optimization, and a closedfeedback loop. The SaaS-based offering is easily integrated, and empowers merchandisers through a robust, patent-pending suite of dashboard controls. The company is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California.
About Burton Snowboards In 1977, Jake Burton Carpenter founded Burton Snowboards out of his Vermont barn. Since then, Burton has fueled the growth of snowboarding worldwide through its groundbreaking product lines, its grassroots efforts to get the sport accepted at resorts and its team of top snowboarders. In 1996, Burton began growing its family of brands to include board sports equipment and apparel brands. Privately held and owned by Jake, Burton’s headquarters are in Burlington, Vermont with international offices in Innsbruck, Austria and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit burton.com.
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