Personalization: the e-commerce buzz word that makes it all about you. Leena Rao of TechCrunch believes personalized shopping experiences will represent the next great wave of growth for e-commerce. Although this has already been happening to some extent, Rao points out that the innovation has been underwhelming. Aside from Amazon, which has been excelling in this area for the past decade, other retailers have yet to truly take advantage of the massive amounts of data available to them.
That’s about to change. David Selinger, CEO and co-founder of RichRelevance, says that “personalization will be the differentiating factor in e-commerce and digital commerce going forward, especially for multichannel retailers and new entrants online.” Personalization on sites like Amazon and Netflix is so seamless that most of the time you don’t even realize you’re using it, yet it plays a huge role in the decisions you make.
One of the biggest obstacles e-retailers face is the inability to collect enough data to actually add value to the shopping experience. Sites like Amazon and Netflix see high volumes of traffic from individual consumers each month, whereas other sites may only experience infrequent visits. This means that retailers will look to social media and other outlets to corral enough data to make enhanced shopping experiences possible.
As long as consumers are willing to relinquish this data, and e-commerce sites are able to make sense of it all, online shopping will be taking a massive shift toward making the experience all about you.
Read more at techcrunch.com.
