Book People

I’m Mark Carlock. I’m the head of analytics at the Book People. I am responsible for all analytics and optimization of the website. We have diverse demographic of customers visiting our website on different devices. We have a huge range of books and gifts from different genres. Personalization key in our business to ensure we help match up the customer to the product that we liked buy. Working with RichRelevance(Now Algonomy) and their AI were able to put the right product in front of the customer at the right time. One of the things that enticed me to work with BookPeople was deep integration with RichRelevance(Now Algonomy).

I’m Richard stone, I’m the online merchandising team leader here at BookPeople. Myself and my team look after product categories, product recommendations, setting up product and marketing content, and running multivariate tests across the website. Personalization allows us to create shortcuts for customers to customers aren’t having to crawl through categories and searching the website applying lots of filters, and instead we can use the artificial intelligence to recommend products to these customers. This also contributes to improving the user experience. And when the user experience is improved, we’re more likely to have that customer returned to us in the future. Last year we could see positive results. Average order value had increased by 20%. And items per order had increased by 22%. And this was just from customers who had interrupted product recommendations served by RichRelevance(Now Algonomy).

As a book retailer, I think everyone’s well aware of our competition out there in the marketplace. Personalization we feel really enables us to compete with the likes that we do.

We were very impressed with RichRelevance(Now Algonomy) is product management, and the implementation of RichRelevance(Now Algonomy) features on our website. And over the years, they’ve been great partners and good to work with. We use RichRelevance(Now Algonomy) in many different areas. In our website, we use on the homepage, department page, category listing page, wishlist page, product page. Depending on whether the customer is browsing on desktop, mobile or tablet, we have a completely different setup for each of them. We have to do this because customers behave very differently depending on what device they’re on. In recent times, we’ve seen a monumental shift of customers moving from desktop to mobile, customers who do browse on mobile, they want to have a seamless and easy experience and they want to find the products they’re looking for fast. RichRelevance(Now Algonomy) plays an essential role in this by using real time data and trends to deliver product recommendations to the customer at almost instantaneous speeds. They were the experts in the field of personalization algorithms. Their strategy rules were both effective and varied. And we knew that technology would bring in all sorts of benefits, such as increasing revenue, average order value, items per order, increase the length of customer sessions on our website, better user experience and higher engagement with our products.

One of the things excites me the most about the future is working closely with retailers to see how we can improve the customer experience.