Shop Direct – Product Recommendations

Hi I’m Catherine Jones I’m search and navigation manager for Shop Direct. My team is responsible for getting the customer to the product that they’re looking for, whether that’s through search, navigation, or product recommendations. Shop Direct is UK’s second largest pure play etailer with brands including very very exclusive little words and little island. With sales of almost 1.9 billion. We exist to make good things easily accessible to more people. And to explain that it’s the good things are 1300 famous brands that we sell. Easily accessible means the seamless user journey we create, and more people can access our products through different ways to spread the cost. We’ve been working with RichRelevance(now Algonomy) since last winter 2014. So just over two and a half years now. At the time, we were aware of the importance of product recommendations and wanted a forward thinking technology partner who could understand the needs of the customer, and could also provide personalized recommendations or parts of our journey. Our current partner at the time wasn’t moving at the same pace, which is why we made the transition over to RichRelevance(now Algonomy), which accounts for just over 6% of our sales, product recommendations sit with an ecommerce search and navigation team and covers all aspects of findability. I have two product recommendations analyst to manage the relationship with all key stakeholders, including buying merchandise and selling teams to really understand the products we sell, how they complement each other products that are compatible, and which are simply to enhance the browsing journey.

Hi, I’m Isabelle Gerrard. I’m one of the product recommendations analyst for Shop Direct. My area of responsibility is to ensure product recommendations optimized for all our brands. We’re using RichRelevance(now Algonomy). To solve a customer and business problems at product category level. One of the first problems we identified was that it was difficult for our customer to find matching items in our furniture ranges easily. To tackle this, we use RichRelevance(now Algonomy) to display matching items together. As a result we saw license for ordering these ranges increased by 11%. After the rules live. We’ve also used RichRelevance(now Algonomy) as merchandising rules to replace historical manual roles. And I looked through fashion brand very exclusive, where previously we were displaying manual fixed recommendations. We replaced these with algorithm driven outfit cross sells which have resulted in participation of recommendations sales and very exclusive stepping up by 150%.

Our future plans to provide even more data to RichRelevance(now Algonomy) to help their algorithms make smarter decisions. You will be optimizing the UX and UI of all placements for miss very to increase interactions and make it easier for her to shop. We’ll be working with our data scientists to review the build your own strategy functionality to see what exciting opportunities that can bring. And we’ll be looking at new areas to expand the recommendations into email and social media. Our customers don’t want to feel like one other crap. They expect a unique experience, but they’re impatient. We’ve only got seconds to grab their attention and only a five inch screen to do it. That’s why mobile first personalization is critical to our business. It’s what we give our customers before during and after they shop with us. Now we plan to use the power of artificial intelligence to take personalization to the next level.