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STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: richrelevance
20 word description: richrelevance powers next-generation merchandising and personalized recommendations on eCommerce sites, optimizing every stage of the shopping experience from homepage to follow-up emails.
CEO’s 100 word description: richrelevance offers a platform powering personal product recommendations for eCommerce sites. The technology evaluates thousands of consumer behavior variables to offer the most relevant recommendations to online shoppers. Based on ‘ensemble learning,’ the system identifies which recommendations are performing well and which aren’t, making real-time adjustments accordingly. This is a substantial difference from engines found on other eCommerce sites, outperforming the old technology in real world tests by 10-15% margins.
Founder David Selinger formerly led consumer behavior research at Amazon and Overstock.com, and other team members bring experience from MySpace, eBay and Pay Pal.
Since it’s Software-as-a-Service, integration is lightweight making it easy to get up and running quickly. Pricing is entirely performance based.
Mashable’s Take: Recommendations are big business for the retail industry, and for online markets it’s a bit easier to provide such recommendations. richrelevance is a turnkey solution for ecommerce retailers to install recommendations into their sites based on customer activity.
Similar to the recommendation process instilled on Amazon, richrelevance looks at your retail behavior and compares it to global and similar customers. From there, richrelevance builds out a working “profile” of you, which is likely to fall into one of richrelevance’s 15 categories. Based on things like your purchase information, abandoned shopping carts and site navigation, richrelevance suggests other items you may like.
To the consumer, this may appear to be no different than recommendation systems already experienced across a number of retail sites in this day and age, but for the retailers, the act of adding richrelevance is in an effort to increase profits. The process for richrelevance’s recommendation is an ongoing one, modifying itself with each action the customer takes on the retailer’s site.
In order to offer effective recommendations, however, richrelevance builds its own relationship map of a retailers inventory, so that there’s a model to work from when it’s time to make a product suggestion to a customer.
There’s no social media involved with richrelevance’s system, and it doesn’t appear that users can take their recommendations with them and apply them to other retailers’ sites–richrelevance seems to be built on the established form of merchandise recommendations. With founder David Selinger being the former head of consumer behavior research at Amazon and OverStock, this isn’t entirely surprising. Though richrelevance was pretty under wraps until its recent launch, it has raised $4.2 million and has landed Sears as a client.
Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
