Ideal Shopping Implements RichRelevance Recommendations to Provide a Personalised Shopping Experience

Retailer Experiences £1.1m in Attributable Sales and 18% Increase in Average Order Value for Orders Containing a Recommended Item within First Month of Implementation

Reading, UK — 14 July 2011 — RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced a partnership with Ideal Shopping to deliver personalised shopping experiences for customers on the Ideal World and Create and Craft websites. As a TV shopping company, Ideal Shopping customers typically come to the websites with the intention to purchase. With conversion rates already hitting Ideal Shopping’s high benchmarks, the company tasked RichRelevance with the challenge of increasing the average spend per customer through the introduction of relevant cross-sell, up-sell and personalised shopping strategies. Following a rapid four-week implementation, Ideal Shopping has experienced an increase in average order value of 18% for orders containing a recommended item, resulting in £1.1m of sales attributed to RichRelevance onsite placements.

For Ideal Shopping, personalised recommendations are a form of site navigation and content curation. Mark Russell, head of ecommerce for Ideal Shopping, said: “Home, as a category, means different things to different people. We turned to RichRelevance because we needed a way of surfacing more products in an algorithmic fashion to generate an increase in sales opportunities without expanding our merchandising team. I love the fact that customers can curate the site to create an experience that is unique to them, while constantly adding value to thousands of other customer journeys, all without any additional resource requirements from my team.”

By taking the wealth of information Ideal Shopping has on each customer, including personal preferences, shopping history and demographic details and combining it with data they hold on relationships between products or product categories and the behavioural patterns of similar shoppers, RichRelevance’s technology enables Ideal Shopping to provide recommendations that are highly relevant to each shopper. Shoppers on Ideal World and Create and Craft now receive personalised product recommendations that adjust in real-time as they browse. With the most relevant products curated and displayed for each unique visitor, nearly one in 10 shoppers clicks through to recommended products.

Ideal Shopping selected RichRelevance based on three criteria: scalability, ease of implementation and cultural fit. “We were looking for a partner with domain expertise in e-commerce personalisation that could implement a complete solution quickly without jeopardising our core systems,” said Russell. “With RichRelevance we were up and running within four weeks and seeing a significant increase in average orders immediately. Furthermore, we feel confident that the team and technology can grow with us as our business expands.”

The RichRelevance implementation marks the start of Ideal Shopping’s personalisation initiative. Over time, Ideal Shopping intends to build out its product catalogue from 10,000 to 30,000 SKUs and will use RichRelevance to dynamically merchandise products across all customer touch points, including email, online marketing campaigns and the contact centre.

“With the explosion in content across the web, consumers are naturally gravitating toward merchants and publishers than can offer a more relevant, personalised experience. As a result, retailers have a powerful opportunity to connect with their customers and create revenue-generating opportunities by making personalisation a priority,” said David Selinger, CEO, RichRelevance. “Ideal Shopping has demonstrated a genuine understanding of what their customers want and we’re excited to be helping them execute on their vision to deliver a personalised experience to their customers.”

About Ideal Shopping
Ideal Shopping Direct Ltd launched into the TV shopping market in 2000, and currently owns four TV home shopping channels: Ideal World, Create and Craft, Ideal Extra and Ideal & More. The first channel launched on Ideal World in 2000, with Create and Craft following in 2003. Ideal Shopping broadcasts to more than 23 million households in the UK.

About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.