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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As we welcome 2010 I ask what will be the next step in the ongoing evolution of the online shopping experience—as it advances beyond a transaction-only focused environment to a rich experience that provokes product discovery and engagement. Retailers worked hard in 2009 to improve the online experience, and shoppers rewarded us accordingly. A new survey of shoppers at popular Web sites revealed increases in satisfaction—up 7% to 79 on a 100-point scale—with every leading retailer, the highest it has been in its five-year history.* So while increases in online shopping might be partially attributed to tough … 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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