RichRelevance Recommendations

Dynamic, Automated Optimization of 40 Recommendation Strategies

February 4, 2010

Recommendations can improve customer experience, improve search results, and boost Web site KPIs. RichRelevance’s RichRecs stacks up very well against our evaluation criteria. If you are in retail ecommerce, RichRelevance’s RichRecs should be on your short list. Its automated optimization of its myriad recommendation strategies gets retailers closer to their specific goals, with the least possible manual effort. RichRelevance’s service delivery gets very high marks from us as well.

NETTING IT OUT

Recommendation engines are a way for content owners—such as merchants, marketers, and publishers—to present the most interesting content to each customer at each step in the interaction. Recommendations were popularized a decade ago by Amazon’s famous “other people who looked at this bought that” style of recommendation. Today, recommendation solutions are available from a variety of sources, including software-as-a-service providers such as RichRelevance.

If you are in retail ecommerce and looking for a recommendation solution, or a means to personalize interactions, RichRelevance should be on your short list.

RichRelevance’s focus is recommendations and personalization for retail ecommerce. It serves more than 200 million recommendations per day to its 40 or so clients, all of which are in retail ecommerce in North America. Customers include Walmart, Sears, Kmart, The Vitamin Shoppe, Burton, Bass Pro Shops, and Wine.com.

RichRelevance is successful in part due to its retail roots: its founders include David Selinger, who led R+D for Amazon’s recommendation technology, and Tyler Kohn, Overstock.com’s VP of Technology and Analytics. The key strengths of RichRecs (the engine for delivering recommendations on a merchant’s Web site) span technology, customer relationships, and operations.

Illustration 1. RichRelevance’s product family shares a common set of services which RichRelevance calls the enRICH personalization platform. The products, which are all SaaS offerings, address multiple touchpoints. By providing services that bring customers to a site, and that support the call center, RichRelevance is expanding its customer lifecycle coverage past Select and Buy phases.

OVERVIEW OF RICHRELEVANCE

RichRelevance

RichRelevance was founded in 2006. It is based in San Francisco, California, and has 54 employees. David Selinger, its CEO, was formerly head of Amazon’s personalization R&D. RichRelevance serves more than 200 million recommendations per day to its 40 or so clients, all of which are in retail ecommerce. RichRelevance claims that its clients experience a sales increase of 5-15 percent upon implementing RichRecs, the engine for delivering recommendations on a merchant’s Web site. RichRelevance’s market has been North America; it has plans to expand to Europe in 2010. Customers include Walmart, Sears, Kmart, The Vitamin Shoppe, Burton, Bass Pro Shops, and Wine.com.

RichRelevance is in the services business. It delivers its technology as software services and accompanies the software services with comprehensive professional services. RichRelevance clients get ongoing support, monthly site reviews, and quarterly business reviews to improve their business results and their merchandising skills.

RichRelevance Product Family

In the two years since it released its enRICH recommendation engine (November 2007), RichRelevance has produced a family of products to address the customer lifecycle and the key customer touchpoints. See Illustration 1. The product family is comprised of these software as a service (SaaS) offerings...