PriceMinister – Rakuten launches new personalisation initiative for improved customer experiences
RichRelevance introduces ‘Hill Climbing’ initiatives with data analytics and consumer group testing to boost PriceMinister.com’s competitive advantage
San Francisco, CA — 13 October 2014 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalisation, today announced a 1-year consulting engagement with PriceMinister – Rakuten, intended to further leverage the RichRecs solution that has been live for over two years on PriceMinister.com.
As one of the leading retail sites in France, PriceMinister.com offers over 200 million products to customers, including a wide selection of books, consumer electronics, household items and clothing.
Using RichRelevance’s Big Data solution, PriceMinister-Rakuten offers product recommendations to shoppers they browse through website, mobile app and email. The recommendations are personalized in real time based on traffic patterns and consumer purchases, allowing shoppers to quickly and easily find the products they want. The RichRelevance Big Data infrastructure which supports these solutions is the 7th largest global Hadoop instance, an essential element for supporting the volume of traffic for a site like PriceMinister.com
This year, PriceMinister.com will invest further in its personalisation objectives by executing a year-long optimization roadmap in partnership with RichRelevance. Based on a test and learn methodology called ‘Hill Climbing’, this initiative aims at driving continuous, incremental impact through personalisation by testing different aspects of the customer journey (from design to pricing to marketing programmes) against a control group. By consolidating all information onto one single platform, RichRelevance will help PriceMinister formulate clearer, more targeted strategies to deliver highly personalised campaigns for individual customers while maximising business growth.
“Our customers have shown a strong appetite for personalised recommendations when browsing on our website, mobile app and promotional emails,” said Olivier Mathiot, CEO at PriceMinister – Rakuten. “We expect this initiative to further improve the way shoppers engage with our product offering, and to present a unique competitive advantage for PriceMinister over other major retail brands in the long term.”
“One of the core benefits in using RichRelevance solutions is the automation of data analytics and personalisation. This engagement will free up time for our IT and ecommerce teams, as they no longer need to mine through massive volumes of customer data in search of vital business insights that can improve the bottom line,” said Mathiot.
“We are delighted to deepen our partnership with PriceMinister – Rakuten as they continue evolving their personalisation strategy and vision,” said Nicklas Larsson, EMEA Managing Director of RichRelevance. “Leveraging customer data to drive incremental improvements will reap benefits that translate to huge wins not only for an exceptional online shopping experience, but also for resource optimisation and business growth.”
