Feature-richness in the ecommerce space has now become critical for today’s sophisticated shopper, who is presented with a multitude of sites that they can enter and abandon with mere clicks of a mouse. When an online shopper has a good first experience with a website, sixty percent of the time he/she will return to that website to buy more (“Trends in Online Shopping,” Global Nielsen Consumer Report, 2009). Amazon still leads the way in terms of product breadth, feature richness and depth of content available across eCommerce sites; consumers start at Amazon because they anticipate a positive experience at a good price.

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Of the available features on the market—ranging from customer reviews, product recommendations, dynamic carts, transactional mail and so on—those that use technology supported by advanced analytics can deliver the most rich and engaging user experience. Without a platform of intuitive technology many features on a site become rigid—non-adaptable to users on an individualized basis and unable even to reflect macro consumer trends.

In RichRelevance’s latest tech brief (part of our Speak Geek series), we take a look at how our core technology, “ensemble learning,” addresses shopping behavior—using live data to flexibly adjust within the context of a particular site to the needs of each shopper. The technology provides a single, highly versatile platform from which multiple recommendations-based features can be built—one that encourages shoppers to linger longer on a merchant’s site, enabling retailers to build loyalty …important because sixty percent of online shoppers mostly buy from a single site—demonstrating a unique level of loyalty that online retailers need to capitalize on.

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June 25, 2009 will be remembered in many memories as the day Michael Jackson died, but for those of us working the front lines of Internet infrastructure June 25, 2009 will be the day our servers and the patience of millions of users was tested with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. Here at richrelevance we were prepared, and easily managed increased traffic across several of our customers, including Sears.com and Walmart.com.

But many other sites were slow to load (if they loaded at all!) — and it wasn’t the first time web users have experienced the frustration of waiting … Continue Reading

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“Beginning at approximately 11:18 PM on July 2nd and continuing through the present time Fisher Plaza experienced a significant power event that required all power systems including street power, UPS, and Generator power to be completely shut down in Plaza East.”

So begins a message on the website of AdHost, an IT hosting provider which hosted in the same space as several Seattle based companies including Redfin, Authorize.net, and Bing Travel. What’s referred to above as a “power event” was actually a fire that ended up taking out these sites, as well as many others.  Though Redfin was able to get … Continue Reading

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When we launched richrelevance, we chose the tagline “next generation personalized recommendations” because the status quo solutions – all first generation products – were not delivering on the promise of a faster, easier, and more enjoyable shopping experience. Our new class of hyper relevant product recommendations was architected to address some of the fundamental issues that plague traditional approaches to product recommendations. I became familiar with the challenges of personalized recommendations while at Amazon where I ran the R&D team focused on personalization. Over the years at Amazon, and again at Overstock.com, I learned a few key lessons that would … Continue Reading

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Last quarter, we launched myrecs, a “zero-integration” product building on the data and integration of our richrecs and richmail products. The results are exciting thus far and are only getting better.

We have deployed myrecs on a few etail sites, and it appears that myrecs has found one of those product-development “Eureka” zones: an engaging shopping experience which achieves the objectives for the shopper and the retailer. For the shopper, myrecs is a convenient place to see personalized shopping recommendations based on … Continue Reading

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