RichRelevance Marks 1st Anniversary of Public Launch with Unmatched Client Growth & Product Expansion

One year after publicly launching with Sears.com as its first enterprise-class customer, RichRelevance is serving over 100 million recommendations a day across over 30 retail websites including Walmart.com

San Francisco – June 22, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that is has achieved unmatched growth over the past year. The company, which emerged from stealth with a public launch announcing Sears.com as its first enterprise-class customer in June 2008, has now served more than 20 billion recommendations on over 30 sites, and currently serves more than 100 million recommendations each day. This has translated into channeling hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for its customers through its enterprise-class enRICH™ personalization platform. The company announced Walmart.com as a client earlier this month, and is now the only personalization provider to successfully serve two of the top 10 online retailers.

“RichRelevance was built from the ground up by eCommerce experts to deliver real results for the world’s largest retailers,” said RichRelevance founder and CEO David Selinger, who formerly led personalization R&D at Amazon.com. “Over the past year, we’ve rapidly grown our company and added innovative new products to make sure we continue to raise the bar in personalization. At a time when every purchase counts, our growth is a testament to the strength of our personalization technology to meet the needs of shoppers, and drive real sales growth for retailers.”

JupiterResearch found that nearly half of all online shoppers (48%) plan to spend less this year, but a majority of those reluctant to make certain purchases (61%) can be positively influenced by online shopping resources like personalized recommendations. In the last year, over 30 retailers including large retailers such as Sears and brand-name niche retailers such as VitaminShoppe and Burton Snowboards have implemented RichRelevance technology. RichRelevance recently launched an Xtreme Personalization™ campaign to help retailers realize the benefits of higher engagement, increased conversion and customer loyalty with truly next generation personalization tools created by retail experts from Amazon.

Justin Olson, head of eCommerce for Burton Snowboards, has seen how personalized recommendations powered by the enRICH platform make a dramatic impact on sales. In a recent Forbes article, Olson said using RichRecs™ on-site recommendations from RichRelevance to steer customers toward relevant Burton merchandise from previous seasons doubled sales for the fall and winter product line. What’s more, Olson reports that overall sites sales jumped 73% year-on-year after implementing RichRecs.

Over the past year, RichRelevance has rapidly expanded its team, technology and infrastructure to best support its retail partners. Highlights include:

Expanded Product Suite
Over the past 12 months, RichRelevance has built out an enterprise-grade SaaS product suite based on the enRICH platform that delivers rich, relevant customer experiences and increased profits for retailers. Products include:

• RichRecs: Personalized product recommendations for product, category, cart, purchase complete, home and search pages
• RichMail™: Personalized product recommendations in email
• MyRecs™:  Individual, personalized page of relevant product recommendations

enRICH is the only personalization platform on the market that leverages multiple recommendation approaches including collaborative filtering, personalization, analysis of current and past individual and “crowd” shopping behaviors, cross-placement optimization and a closed feedback loop to deliver the most relevant recommendations for each shopper at every moment. Automatic “competition” among the different strategies ensures the most accurate product recommendations are delivered in real time throughout the entire online shopping lifecycle. The groundbreaking enRICH platform also includes state-of-the art merchandising tools to help retailers fine-tune their product merchandising strategies.

Investment in Ironclad Infrastructure
In just one year, RichRelevance launched several new data centers, bringing the total to five fully-redundant and geographically-distributed data centers across the US. RichRelevance delivered 100% uptime during the holiday 2008 season, and the average response times for page loads is under 0.1 second.

Team Expansion
During the last year, RichRelevance more than tripled its staff, attracting top talent with experience at leading Internet and eCommerce companies such as Amazon.com, CleverSet, Microsoft, CVS.com and Redfin.com. Key hires include Tyler Hoffman as Vice President of Sales, who previously spent seven years building and running PayPal’s enterprise sales team; Todd Pearson, former Vice President of Sales at PayPal, as Chief Customer Officer; Darren Vengroff, former Principal Engineer at Amazon.com, as Chief Scientist.  In May, RichRelevance was voted the #1 “Best Place to Work” in the 25 – 50 employee category by the San Francisco Business Times.

About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 30 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.