Merchants looking to emulate Amazon's incredibly successful -- and complex -- behavioral recommendation algorithms now have some reprieve in freshly financed MyBuys, one of a few startups seeking to solve the problem of online retailing relevance.
Getting past reviews (which are known to increase conversions), MyBuys seeks to give consumers exactly what they want once they hit your site. They claim to be so good at it that they'll increase "revenue per interaction" by 300%.
The company has a multi-channel approach, driving recommendations to customers through a merchant's site,
email and RSS feeds. It does so by building "deep behavioral profiles on each and every consumer...(modeling) actionable consumer desires from transaction history, explicit interactions with consumers and analysis of their actions while shopping."
MyBuys touts their ability to customize everything from browsing behavior, search results, checkout and follow-up emails.
The company is about to launch with Ritz Camera, and partnered with PowerReviews. Competitors include Baynote, Aggregate Knowledge, MyBuys, and GlobalRoads, according to StartupSquad.
Written by Scott Hurff
Also have seen a less behavioural, more "multivariate" merchandising method by Mercado (http://www.mercado.com/).
Their claim seeems to be that the merchant's rules should supercede the buyer's wants and, in many ways, dictate the site visitor's behaviour as he goes from "shopper" to "buyer." Seems flawed in principle to me, but also tickles the mid-market merchants' time-management bone, as they'd in effect be managing product data, a set of rules and ranking preferences instead of building a well-stocked and ever-evolving CRM.
*Painfully absent is a "reviews" module, or mention on the site of any partner to fill this gap. Are these guys new here or what?
Posted by: Mike Searles | Oct 10, 2007 at 01:21 PM
And too, this suite of products seem to be more in line with the "wisdom of crowds" methodology.
Avail Intelligence (http://www.avail.net/) has been making some waves in the mid-market here in Europe with the high profile GAME retailer and a few other web-side high-street clients.
I'm taken in by the "Inject the collective wisdom into..." tagline used for all of their products.
And REVIEWS, added almost as a "Duh, of course we facilitate that on our site."
Posted by: Mike Searles | Oct 10, 2007 at 01:27 PM