Online designer eyeglasses retailer BestBuyEyeglasses.com boosted sales of one of its product lines – Dolce & Gabbana frames – by 21% over a recent four to six week test using a product recommendation strategy that blends personalized product suggestions with business rules, says site principal, Eyal Gutentag.
BestBuyEyeglasses.com uses the product recommendation engine of vendor Richrelevance, which allows the retailer to determine which items are most likely to appeal to a customer, and then adjust how those recommendations are presented according to what the retailer most wants a consumer to do.
Gutentag says his company has noticed a drop in average order value and so it is tweaking the Richrelevance recommendations program to promote more expensive brands. This change, he says, presents certain brands slightly more frequently than would otherwise be suggested by the raw data on customer behavior on the site.
Previously, he says, BestBuyEyeglasses would simply present to customers what seemed to be the most relevant products for that shopper, based on all the data it has mined about how shoppers browse and buy on its site.
Increasing by between 5% and 10% the frequency with which Dolce & Gabanna frames were displayed in personalized product recommendations to customers viewing a “customers who viewed this, also viewed this” feature was enough to drive the sales increase.
But, Gutentag says he’s careful not to tweak recommendations too much. “Say you had a product on which you’d built up a significant amount of inventory. You might look at over-representing it not by 5% to 10%, but 25% to 30% in the recommendations. But you have to be careful because if you skew too far in that direction, you lose relevance and you’ve shot yourself in the foot. It’s a fine balancing act,” he says.
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