These Days, Every Day is a Black Friday

Doubling of online grocery sales. 33% increase in ecommerce. As much as quadrupling of online sales in home entertainment, from streaming services to wine, beer and liquor.

Over the past 8 weeks, RichRelevance has witnessed a spike in traffic that mirrors the holiday shopping week around Thanksgiving. Said another way, it seems that now every day is Black Friday.

But can your real-time personalization provider handle this?

In the past few years, we have seen a number of startups that claim to do personalization. They range from simple recommendation engines to AB testing tools to search engines that claim “wisdom of the crowd” functionality. Besides the fragmentation of customer context, the less-obvious “feature” is their dependency on infrastructure from 3rd party cloud service providers. 

Unfortunately, in current circumstances, there’s a constant workload and demand for real-time personalization. Startups in this space do not have the ability to manage the exploding variable costs with their cloud providers. They sometimes resorting to underhanded techniques to limit their exposure.

An example of this: a leading competitor in our space was recently struggling so much with spiking costs from their cloud provider, they turned off personalization for over 50% of their customers!

Imagine for a second that you are their client…all of a sudden your shoppers start to see generic recommendation strategies at exactly the time when you need personalized strategies the most! Adding insult to injury, they will charge you a premium to do what they were hired for in the first place.

Passing those costs onto clients is the only way those software companies have to reconcile their costs month-to-month. Don’t get caught in that trap, or you may find just as your nascent ecommerce business is set for takeoff…rapidly rising costs ground it.

One of the most valuable facets of the RichRelevance platform is that it sits atop 13 geographically dispersed data centers, enabling server response times that are second-to-none in the industry. Further, it enables our IT and Ops teams to scale up and down as internet and shopping traffic ebb and flow. Over the past 12 years, we have responded to seasonal changes and provided 100% uptime during holiday and high traffic time periods.

Bottomline: Do your homework when negotiating or reviewing your software contracts, and be aware of variable costs that are subject to the new–and possibly accelerating–online buyer behaviors. When it comes to relying on your personalization provider during this unprecedented time, you can rest assured knowing that RichRelevance will always have your back.