Wal-mart`s cross-sell lesson: When relying on technology, test a lot
Walmart.com gave the e-retailing industry a lesson in relying on automated cross-selling yesterday when its movie cross-selling system linked a DVD of “Planet of the Apes” to movies with African-American themes. Walmart.com probably was the victim of a flawed automated rules structure, says Christian Donner, senior consultant and technical architect with Molecular Inc. In a statement issued yesterday, Walmart.com said the system “does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles.”
The incident, which was reported yesterday on a blog by a consumer offended by the apparently racist connotations and rapidly picked up by the mainstream press, led Wal-Mart to shut down the system until it can correct the problem. Walmart.com said it was “heartsick” over the incident.
The people who categorized the movie “Planet of the Apes” and the movies with African-American themes probably used the same category or keyword and the rule ended up linking them, Donner says. “The movie ‘Planet of the Apes’ is not a movie about apes; it’s a movie about people and society,” Donner says. Seen in that light, the association with movies such as “Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream/Assassination of MLK” may not have been that far off, he says.
Donner cited another case in which an Austrian newspaper inadvertently put a link to ads for sex toys on eBay at the end of a story on a child molester.
“What makes it so hard to avoid is that you have to have a really good understanding of what rules are in place at any given time, and you have to know how the two different products are categorized,” he says. “Often, different people do that work on the rules and a third person creates the categories, so it’s almost impossible to avoid.”
The only way to prevent unintentional connections is to do the process manually. “This is not a practical approach for sites with a large inventory and a wide variety of products such as Walmart.com, however,” Donner says.
Wal-Mart, No. 12 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, said the “bizarre nature” of the problem could be seen in the fact that the system also linked “Home Alone” and “Powder Puff Girls” to African-American themed DVDs.
“Wal-Mart actually had a more widespread problem of recommended products not being related to the product shown,” Donner says. “This indicates that the product categorization/nomenclature in use was not detailed enough, or that the rules for associating products based on categories or keywords were not working properly. This could have been detected by testing the recommendation engine more thoroughly.”
Back...
