As businesses seek to thrive in the modern age of the internet they must adapt to the changing landscape or risk falling by the wayside. One of the most influential strategies for succeeding today is by using available technology to compile important customer data and use that data to improve one’s business model.
With e-commerce personalization, data is collected about a customer’s personal preferences and used to better cater to their shopping experience. This means increasing the efficiency of data collection and utilization to keep pace with an ever-changing marketplace.
By compiling customer’s choices, browsing behavior, purchasing history, and other demographics, offers can be better tailored to meet the customer’s needs. Even information such as the type of device being used, the time of day they access a website, the location they are when they use it, and other small details can amount to a massive wealth of helpful information if you know how to use it.
Here is a list of brands that are using e-commerce personalization the best to improve both the customer’s experience and build their own success. It’s no surprise that these companies are some of the largest in the world, as they realized the power of e-commerce personalization early and made it a core part of their business online.
Amazon
If you need to order something online, the first place most people go is Amazon. Jeff Bezos has built a company that led to him becoming the richest man in the world and the success of Amazon is largely due to their innovative use of e-commerce personalization.
Amazon is perhaps the best example of this strategy of using predictive analytics, historical data, and real-time data to figure out how to best cater to a customer’s needs and desires. By analyzing products that customers view and purchase, Amazon can then take those products into account and find products with similar characteristics to show customers items they are more likely to buy.
Amazon has also created a streamlined purchasing process, a virtual cart, and customization settings that result in higher user engagement and more purchases. Even Amazon’s homepage offers a highly customized experience for customers that greets them by name, offers personalized recommendations, and the ability to reorder products quickly.
When a customer visits Amazon, they are met with videos, products, books, and music that are based on their previous viewing history. This is a perfect example of e-commerce Personalization because its primary model draws directly from the wealth of data available to them.
Steam
The most successful video game store on PC has by far been Steam. Even if you aren’t familiar with this online marketplace for games, you can still learn from their highly personalized platform.
Steam acts a third party mediator between game developers and the people seeking to play their games. In return for building the online marketplace and the community surrounding it, game developers share a portion of the proceeds with Steam.
When people create an account on Steam, it isn’t just about being able to purchase and download a game. Steam has taken personalization to another level and built an entire ecosystem and community around its marketplace by creating a unique experience for each customer based on their gaming activity.
Steam offers customers the ability to earn badges based on the length of time they have had the account, the number of games they have purchased, and the way they conduct themselves in the community.
E-commerce personalization is what allows Steam to offer a constantly evolving plethora of recommendations that is different for each customer. By using the data garnered from previous purchases, Steam can target customers with special offers for the games they are most likely to purchase.
Steam takes it a step further by even offering recommended lists based on the preferences of one of their friends. This sophisticated example of e-commerce personalization even allows customers to see products that are trending among their friends.
Everything about the platform is built around creating a community based on e-commerce personalization, and it has earned Steam a fortune.
Regardless of whether you have a positive or negative opinion of Facebook, there is no denying the success they have had by refining e-commerce personalization to an incredible level of accuracy using robust algorithms.
Facebook has developed such advanced profiles on its users it can offer advertisers a plethora of demographics that are so fine-tuned that they can even sell advertising blocks to users with a particular ideology. The company even came under fire for one of the categories of users it had compiled when it offered advertisers the ability to target people who strongly disliked a certain religious group.
These small niches may seem insignificant in the big picture but it is exactly these highly concentrated groups of users who have turned Facebook into one of the largest e-commerce platforms on the internet. By collecting data points based on users interests, ideas, and even beliefs, Facebook has fine-tuned its e-commerce personalization pipeline with incredible success.
E-commerce personalization doesn’t just apply to companies seeking to sell a product; it is also utilized to the advantage of the tools people use to sell products. In the case of Google, it isn’t directly selling a product to the majority of its users; rather it offers the technology that connects customers to those products.
E-commerce personalization plays a huge role in the way Google tailors users’ experiences. Whether it is saving payment methods or populating shopping carts and other forms with personal information, or collecting data on the videos that you watch and the ads you click, Google has been at the forefront of capitalizing on data collection.
Much like the way Facebook connects advertisers with niche groups and demographics, Google collects details that range from technical information such as IP addresses and cookies to user’s preferences and purchasing habits in order to make ads more relevant to the people who are most likely to view them. On the consumer end of its offerings, Google also runs its own shopping platform that directly connects customers to their favorite products. So all of the information and search terms you enter on a daily basis are used to suggest products that you are most likely to buy. Data plays an important role in Google’s business model and is still one of the leading companies in E-commerce Personalization.
Add E-Commerce Personalization to Your Business
With DataCue, e-commerce personalization can be the cornerstone to your company’s success. Head to our home page to find out how you can start personalizing what each customer sees on your website.
