The State of Ecommerce Technology 2023

Here’s another set of compelling figures that demonstrate the importance of personalisation for online brands: 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop at sites that provide relevant offers and recommendations, and 47% say they would subsequently use Amazon when brand websites provide irrelevant recommendations.

The takeaway is clear: online retailers have to put serious effort into getting their personalisation strategies right. For those that do, the payoffs can be significant. Attraqt clients report that as much as 80% of their site turnover is generated from 20% of products with recommendations applied.

AI is key to achieving this. Self-learning algorithms, for example, can work seamlessly in the background to analyse data and recommend items based on the proven preferences of similar user profiles.

And because the algorithms are self-learning, they make light work of merchandising strategies by constantly testing, deploying and refining the most effective strategies.

AI—specifically computer vision—is also the power behind image-based recommendation engines that can search vast inventories of product photography to serve up recommendations of visually similar items.

This is good for shoppers, who receive a carefully curated selection of products to complete their chosen outfit or interior design scheme and also good for merchandisers, who no longer have to laboriously categorise inventories semantically using keywords.

Intelligent Content—The Future of Product Recommendations

Showing shoppers a collection of appealing items at strategic touch points throughout their journey is one thing—serving them fully personalised content and following up with bespoke offers by email is another.

Dynamic content makes this concept a reality by allowing merchandisers to automate the customisation of every element of site pages to appeal to varying audience segments – or even tailored to the individual.

Dynamic content could be as simple as delivery and currency information or seasonal product banners that change according to the user’s location.

But with the right tools, merchandisers and marketers can also use dynamic content generation to display entire web pages with custom banners and search results based on users’ favourite brands, preferred styles, budgetary constraints and more. But even further than this, it can even eliminate irrelevant products and content.

And they can take personalised product recommendations off-site, curating consistent omnichannel messaging across social media, email and into brick-and-mortar stores.