Bodybuilding.com to match visitors and shoppers with content and friends
Many e-retailers present customers with product recommendations, a cross-selling tactic that suggests products similar or complementary to a product placed in a shopping cart or purchased. Many e-retailers also offer shoppers plenty of content, information on their brand and subject matter in the form of text, audio or video that educates or entertains. Few, however, have combined the two.
Bodybuilding.com LLC is moving in this direction, setting up a system to be launched later this year that studies the on-site browsing behavior and product purchases of customers and presents them with recommendations of articles, videos and even social network members that may be of interest from its vast library of information and BodySpace social network.
“I’m super pumped up about it and I think it is the key to our future growth,” says CEO Ryan DeLuca.
The e-retailer, No. 152 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, has hired data analysts to review the mounds of information it has gathered on its customers and social network members to create what it calls a content recommendation engine. Once rolled out, the engine—based on what pages shoppers and site content users visit, what they buy, their BodySpace friends and more—will recommend articles, BodySpace friends, forum threads, products, workouts and more.
“If your goal is to look like Rocky Balboa but you look more like Glass Joe from Nintendo’s Mike Tyson’s Punchout, we will know it and can recommend the programs for you automatically as you navigate around our site,” DeLuca explains. “For example, this person might need a serious bulking workout program, a high calorie nutrition plan, some weight gainer powder, and some specific BodySpace friends who can help and motivate.”
The goal of the new system, he adds, is to help people reach their health, fitness and appearance goals, and the best way for the e-retailer to do so is on a one-on-one basis. “That’s tough on the Internet,” DeLuca says, “but we can do it using software that gets to know them. We aren’t just doing this to try to extract more money from them, we are doing it so they can sort through our huge site and all of our resources and find what will work for them. Then we hope they will choose to purchase their supplements and accessories from us in exchange.”
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