E-commerce platform provider Art Technology Group Inc. announced today a deal to acquire personalization technology company CleverSet for about $9 million.
CleverSet’s technology, developed by Oregon State University computer science professor Bruce D’Ambrosio, incorporates a customer’s current and past behavior, the behavior of other consumers, catalog information, a merchant’s merchandising strategy and such external factors as day of week and the weather to make product recommendation to web site visitors.
“It’s called statistical relational learning which nobody else uses,” says Cliff Conneighton, senior vice president of marketing at ATG. “It’s a way to look at the relationships of literally billions of points of data and coming up with the best possible offer or cross-sell or up-sell for the shopper.”
Seattle-based CleverSet has 85 customers including the auction portion of Overstock.com, No. 25 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and Wine Enthusiast. But Conneighton says most of its customers are either small e-retailers or larger companies that are testing the technology.
“What we bought here is a technology, not a large business,” he says. “What they needed to do to take the next step is add on the sales presence, put the oomph behind it to take it to market. That’s why we saw it as a really good opportunity for us, we have all the pieces they are missing.”
The CleverSet technology is a hosted system and Conneighton says it can work with any e-commerce platform. While ATG will offer it to its own clients, it will also market it to e-retailers using other e-commerce platforms or homegrown systems.
CleverSet’s 18 employees will join ATG, including founder D’Ambrosio and CEO Todd Humphrey. ATG says it will pay approximately $10 million in cash less $1 million in closing adjustments, for a net price of about $9 million. The deal is expected to close in the current quarter.
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