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MarkCoyle View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote MarkCoyle Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Recommended Products
    Posted: 30-July-2006 at 1:07pm
Hi all

I would love to see recommendations appear on screen at the home page if a customer is logged in based on the categories of their previous purchases.

cheers
Mark
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mullins View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote mullins Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-July-2006 at 12:39pm
way too difficult for some stores I would have thought.

Some product assortments are very wide so what would you recommend?

What  other people bought?  Hey I'm an individual!

How about this red dress? Check my profile I only EVER buy  mens black shoes and have been doing so fro 6 years now.

For you wife perhaps? I'm gay.

At the music store...

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote MarkCoyle Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-July-2006 at 1:38pm

E-commerce stores do this all the time without problem.   The biggest in the world - Amazon, makes a substantial part of its revenue this way on precisely the product types you mention.   I have used it many times and it is very good indeed.  For example in music it picks by genre and artist, it's not complicated but it works.  The reason it works is that customers will follow leads they are given so long as its a matter of their own choice and exploration.

Not everyone would have to use it - like best sellers or specials selections.  Stores have choice.  However, recommended selections is an industry standard that people understand.

Nobody expects it to be perfect.  There are all kinds of simple ways of profiling the data that goes in.  It's our job to help customers find the products they like.

Some other software stores already have this feature.   EarlyImpact are an innovator, especially at the pricepoint of the software so I like to offer practical suggestions either I can use or I have already seen in action. 

cheers

Mark



Edited by MarkCoyle - 31-July-2006 at 1:41pm
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mullins View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote mullins Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-July-2006 at 5:13pm
OK Mark maybe that was too subtle for you and from your patronising tone it seems you thought I was attacking you. Let me try it another way...

Customers dont want rubbish pushed at them like some cheap supermarket, not in retail and not in ecommerce stores. Unless your recs are spot on, and I mean spot on then they are useless in my opinion and look like the desperate attempt to push any old  tat  onto the customer.  Cross selling in productcart is simple and perfect for targetted addon sale opportunities and could, done right, be like having a trained salesman in front of the customer. My staff are about spend a lot of time with cross selling, honing our offer, crafting a very tight, focussed selling proposition to our customers.

I've bought around 60 CDs from amazon over a 12 month period, different genres. The one type of music I won't listen to is House/Dance. Amazon recs just now? Euphoria mixed by Lisa Lashes and Ibiza Hard House. Do they care about me as a customer or are they trying to push new releases? They have proved their recs to be flawed so why should I trust the ones they give me in books? or dvds?

My company is just about to start moving all our stores to productcart after an initial test lasting over a year. We love it. If I wanted an  Amazon or an  Ebay or a PC world clone we would have looked for that.

But if you really want to be Amazon Mark don't forget to wipe 3 billion from your company value this weekend and get JN to sl*g you off in the national press. The backlash starts here.

For many years, that one thing in e-commerce design was
"Do like Amazon." No more. Amazon has recently changed so much that the average e-commerce site will reduce its usability by emulating its design too closely. Paradoxically, Amazon's design may work well for Amazon itself. The company is simply so different from other e-commerce sites that what's good for Amazon is not good for normal sites.
                                                                   - Jakob Nielsen 2006

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MarkCoyle View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote MarkCoyle Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-July-2006 at 5:34pm

This area of the forum is for posting suggestions for additions to ProductCart - that's what I'm doing.

It's not right for you, fair enough.  But without ideas and dialogue it's hard to evolve a product.  It might be right for others.  The use of ProductCart is varied and ranges from small few product stores to bigger ones with thousands.  I wasn't even concerned if it was relevant to my store, I was thinking of it as a generic tool to feed into consideration of future ProductCart evolution.

I was using Amazon as an example not as a definitive source.  I know its first generation e-commerce style won't fit with the more communal approach going forward that is emerging.   Your experience of their recommendations is clearly poor, but I have found it works far better for me.  

However there are all kinds of ways to do recommendations - not just a crass version, ignorant of customer choices.

I genuinely wasn't trying to be patronising, you never know the knowledge base or experience of who is posting and giving an illustration is often helpful.

I agree that cross selling in PC is powerful - I use it myself in a sensible and careful way and have found my sales have gone up significantly, particularly when combined with a simple reward scheme.

A big factor for me around cross selling, recommendations and similar is in building and keeping trust over time with customers. 

cheers

Mark



Edited by MarkCoyle - 31-July-2006 at 5:48pm
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote ProductCart Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-July-2006 at 6:01pm

Showing recommendations based on previous purchases might indeed be a difficult feature to implement. But if it's just a list of best sellers from the same category, than it would be fairly simple to add and a good ASP programmer could tackle it in a limited amount of time (www.earlyimpact.com/cpd).

We don't plan to add such a feature in the short term. If we ever do, we would definitely make it an option that the customer can turn off. That way you don't upset customers that believe the feature is not useful and/or annoying. They would simply turn it off.

The ProductCart Team

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