Read the article

Mashable - How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph

Today, I had the opportunity to write about the Amazon-Facebook partnership on Mashable with a post titled How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph. This post is directly tied to my ongoing interest in consumer focused applications, which has led me into the online retail space (first at Amazon.com and now at RichRelevance) as well as into the world of social media at Pelago where I worked on Whhrl, a mobile social application.

By enabling personalization across applications, the Facebook-Amazon partnership demonstrates that the gap between the two worlds is quickly closing. Most importantly for online retailers, while Amazon’s move made headlines because of their market position, the fact is that any merchant can now build an app to allow Facebook users to share their interests.

Tweet This Post

The naming of Amazon.com as the top-performing brand in the US by market research firm Millward Brown is truly a watershed moment for e-commerce players who have neither the long standing history nor seeming reach of many traditional multi-channel retailers. This ranking applauds those who have toiled night and day to build a rich, rewarding and relevant experience for online shoppers and demonstrates how much power this relatively new channel has in not just supporting but creating brands.  What’s particularly interesting is that among the top ten performing brands in this study, six are products (e.g. Tide, Tylenol, … Continue Reading

Tweet This Post

Welcome to a new era of retail where the shopper is in charge. With competitors literally a click away, total transparency in the purchase experience and the ability to instantly price check from a mobile, today’s consumer is fully in command of the shopping experience. With this in mind, RichRelevance has launched a new campaign: Respect the Shopper. The purpose is to (with tongue in cheek) remind merchants who is really in charge and how we can meet the needs of the shopper throughout her retail shopping experience, across all channels.

… Continue Reading

Tweet This Post

Google’s quiet rollout of new personalization features

Google made quite a few significant announcements this year about its search—headlined by real-time search, a new animated homepage and a magazine layout for images in Universal Search. For retail, they launched product ads and an e-commerce site search. But, tucked midway into this week’s blog post on search is a brief announcement that deserves greater attention than such a limited mention would suggest.  Google introduced “Extended Personalized Search” which personalizes your Google search results to activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click—regardless of whether or … Continue Reading

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post