NETTING IT OUT
Recommendation engines are a way for content owners—such as merchants,
marketers, and publishers—to present the most interesting content
to each customer at each step in the interaction. Recommendations were
popularized a decade ago by Amazon’s famous “other people who
looked at this bought that” style of recommendation. Today, recommendation
solutions are available from a variety of sources, including software-as-a-service
providers such as Avail.
If you are in retail or B2B ecommerce and are looking for a recommendation
solution or a means to personalize interactions, Avail should be on your
short list.
Avail’s focus is recommendations and personalization for retail ecommerce.
Customers include Neckermann, Bokus, Evans Cycles, Redcats, Game, Nokia Siemens
Networks, Splash Direct, and Wilkinson.
The key strengths of Avail Behavioral Merchandising are Avail Client Success,
which provides strategic advice from leading practitioners; its recommendation
algorithms, which support not only the recommendation types one would expect
but also support collaborative merchandising and syndicated merchandising;
the Avail Control Panel, which provides immediate previews and tests of changes;
and the Amazon Web Services hosting for Avail SaaS which ensures scalability
and disaster backup.
Illustration 1. At WilkinsonPlus.com, shoppers see two types of recommendations
on product pages. The first band of recommendations is based on the behavior
of other customers and their purchases after viewing this particular product.
Below this band of “customer recommendations” is a list of items
selected based on rules set by merchandisers, presented as “items you
may be interested in.”
OVERVIEW OF AVAIL
Avail
Avail Intelligence, founded in 2000, is based in Malm?, Sweden, with offices
in the US, UK, France, Italy and Germany. Avail Intelligence has approximately
100 customers that have deployed Avail Intelligence’s behavioral targeting
on more than 250 Web sites, spanning 25 countries and 18 languages. The company,
which is privately held by its founders, employees, and investors, claims
a compound growth rate of 80 percent for the past three years.
Avail Intelligence is focused exclusively on retail ecommerce. Its clients
typically see revenue increases ranging from 5 to 30 percent per visitor.
Avail Products
Avail Intelligence’s flagship product is called Avail Behavioral Merchandising.
Avail Intelligence envisions behavioral targeting and personalization across
the customer interaction cycle, and has developed Avail Behavioral Merchandising
to support not only shopping and buying, but customer acquisition, customer
re-engagement, and customer service and support. Avail Behavioral Merchandising
thus supports delivery of targeted content during search and browsing, as visitors
arrive from other sites or search engines, for contact center representatives,
and for email and mobile marketing packages.
Avail Behavioral Merchandising can be licensed either as SaaS or as on premise
software.
Avail has created four retail sector packages: sports and fashion, home and
furniture, media and entertainment, and consumer electronics. These packages
encapsulate Avail’s best practices for each of these sectors. Each
package contains training, tools, and partner products as well as algorithms
specific to the retail sector. Avail’s consumer retail research has
uncovered specific optimizations of its collaborative filtering algorithms
for various retail industry verticals and shopper behaviors.
Smaller online retailers can take advantage of Avail Express, an entry-level,
self-sell packaging of Avail Behavioral Merchandising. Express comes with
an Avail contact and 30 days free use.
EXAMPLE: WILKINSONPLUS.COM
Wilkinson is a UK-based retailer with 322 stores and four million visitors
per week. Wilkinsonplus.com, which was launched in 2004, offers more than
800,000 items. Wilkinson uses the Behavioral Merchandising module, supplied
by Avail Intelligence, that comes with their Venda e-commerce platform to
increase conversion rates and average order size. Wilkinson’s merchandisers
rely on Avail’s automation to select recommendations, setting few rules.
In this example, a single rule in the product detail template ensures that
three recommendations will be made from the same category as the product
being viewed, presented as “other items you may be interested in.” The “customer
recommendations” are selected based on what other customers bought
after looking at this item.
SUMMARIZING THE RECOMMENDATIONS EVALUATION FRAMEWORK
Recommendations are hot, solving problems from order size to search to personalization.
My guess is that recommendations will be ubiquitous within the next three
to four years. I’m always optimistic on these guesses, but since recommendations
are widely available as a service, rollout can be very swift. Through customer
interviews and research, we have identified the requirements and evaluation
criteria. These criteria are set forth in our evaluation
framework,1 which
we will be using in 2010 to analyze a handful of the leading recommendation
solutions, culminating in a detailed comparison.
The framework describes requirements in seven categories: guidance and advice,
recommendation structure, managing recommendations, integration, operations,
vendor’s development and maintenance, and product and company viability.
The evaluation requirements are presented in Table B.
AVAIL PERFORMANCE AGAINST CRITERIA
Bottom Line
If you are in retail ecommerce, Avail should be on your short list. Table A
summarizes our evaluation of Avail Intelligence Behavioral Merchandising
in each of our evaluation categories.
Strengths
Avail Behavioral Merchandising is strong in all areas of our evaluation. There
are a few differentiators to call out: Avail Behavioral Merchandising support
collaborative merchandising among merchants in its network (you sell safaris,
I’ll cross-sell the clothes); it supports syndicated merchandising
(let’s team up to sell plane tickets, guides, clothes, and hotel rooms);
it packages optimized offerings for four retail sectors; the Avail Control
Panel provides previews of the impact of rules, and tests for searches and
recommendations; and it supports SNMP alerts to network management consoles.
All of these differentiators are also strengths.
Additional strengths of Avail Behavioral Merchandising are the support provided
by its Client Success Team, which provides very active and ongoing support
in optimizing and trouble shooting, and also offers strategic advice from
leading practitioners; Amazon Web Services hosting for Avail SaaS which ensures
scalability and disaster backup; and encryption of daily file uploads. Avail’s
integration and technical support are further demonstrated by the fact that
Avail technology is OEM’d in five third-party solutions.
Weaknesses
There is nothing weak about Avail Behavioral Merchandising. However, it does
fail to match up to our exacting evaluation criteria in a few areas. Like
its peers, Avail does not yet provide e-learning or self-study for its customers;
and it lacks workflow and check-in/check-out to control changes.
More importantly, to Avail Intelligence and to its customers, there is not
yet a third party developer ecosystem of any magnitude. Avail is certainly
attractive to other developers—it has already achieved a handful of
OEM agreements. But it is early for the developer network to blossom, given
Avail’s reach and the market’s immaturity.
Summary Evaluation
Please download the PDF to see the
table.
Table A. This table presents our summary of Avail’s performance in each
of our evaluation categories.
Recommendation Platform Evaluation
Avail Behavioral Merchandising Recommendation Solution Capabilities
Please download the PDF to see the
table.
Table B. This table presents our recommendation evaluation criteria, and the
performance of Avail Intelligence against those criteria.
Contact Info:
Avail Intelligence
Pontus Kristiansson, CEO
Email: pontus.kristiansson@avail.net
Internet: http://www.avail.net