Sears and other retailers use a company called richrelevance to help personalize product recommendations for their online customers. Richrelevance tracks customer preferences and Website habits, analyzes the data, and develops profiles on consumers so e-commerce sites can better target product and service recommendations for customers’ individual interests during visits to retail Websites.
by David Selinger
As retailers head into what looks to be one of the most challenging holiday seasons on record, many have high hopes that top sellers will drive sales. But promoting “mega trends” like the Tickle Me Elmo or iPod of past holiday seasons won’t necessarily be the best way to drive sales this year, as many cash-strapped consumers forgo big-ticket items for smaller, less expensive gifts. Instead, retailers should take advantage of the technology tools available to them to hone in on the “micro trends” of the season.
Ten years ago, the Internet was regarded by most major retailers as an e-channel that augmented brick-and-mortar stores. Now, the Internet is the centerpiece in most retailers’ stables.
A pre-holiday survey from November 2008’s Internet Retailer (published in print only) reports 81.1 percent of U.S. retailers expect their holiday Web sales to increase this year, despite a faltering economy. The magazine cites Jupiter Research’s director and senior research analyst Patti Freeman: “The Web has a certain degree of immunity from tough times. Consumer perception is you can get things cheaper online. And there’s a much more affluent consumer buying online.”
Product recommendations vendor richrelevance has hired former PayPal executive Tyler Hoffman as its new vice president of sales.
In his new post, Hoffman will direct richrelevance’s expanding team of sales representatives, engineers and account managers.
Call it a coincidence, but over the past few days I have spent a lot of time with folks who used to work for Amazon but are now out doing new things. It all started with Jason Kilar, the CEO of Hulu, who was a keynote speaker at our NewTeeVee Live conference. Then last night I met with Dave Schapell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, an e-marketplace for teachers. And this morning I had coffee with Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilo.
A data processing services firm said it boosted server performance significantly by replacing its servers’ internal disks with Intel X-25M solid-state drives (SSDs).
The company, which goes by the name richrelevance, serves personalized product recommendations for online retailers such as Sears, processing millions of requests each day over its five data centers. Each data center operates a farm of Dell and Hewlett-Packard servers with internal disks for parallel processing.