Welcome to the RichRelevance forum

Innovation in ecommerce is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Whereas the last sweep of tools and technologies available to etailers came nearly a decade ago and more or less simply facilitated getting products online, today’s entrepreneurs are delivering everything from ratings and review widgets to deep analytics to personalization. Welcome, everyone, to the next-generation of ecommerce.

We’ve created this forum for you to read about and respond to experts who are working with the cutting edge tools being deployed in the ecommerce space; industry insiders will share with you what they’re doing while expert outsiders will share what they’re seeing.  I’m excited to see the innovative thinking that will be shared on this forum.

The idea to create this site was prompted by my own experiences as a retailer. After building ecommerce tools from scratch as head of the R&D division of Amazon’s Personalization team, I joined Overstock.  As part of my job I worked with recommendations vendors to optimize our site for conversion. I realized, what was considered “best of breed” in the market wasn’t close to what it should have been — and needed to be. Vendors were promising results, but not delivering — or worse, were negatively impacting the user experience.  Two years ago I pulled together a core team of engineers to build a platform that truly realized the potential of ecommerce, beginning with personalization, recommendations, and merchandising.  Today, we’re called RichRelevance.

In order to realize the potential of this wave of innovation we will host a lively discussion amongst folks in the field—across fields and from a variety of expertise. Over the next several weeks you’ll see guest posts from industry pioneers, leading merchants, and innovative vendors, all of whom will relate not only high level trends but also the real data and stories that support them.  Consider this forum your guide to the future of ecommerce, the one that will allow you to embrace its potential.

And, because this blog is not your typical corporate blog, please check out our company ‘about’ page or contact us to learn more about our company and how we’re changing personalized recommendation technology

Warm Regards,

David Selinger
CEO & Founder, RichRelevance