Did Wine.com have a recommendation function before RichRelevance?
We had a homegrown tool built by our IT team. It was better than no tool at all but it was limited in what it could do. It made recommendations based on a limited set of information and was not dynamically following the customer’s browse path or purchase history. It wasn’t a strong performer. We contracted RichRelevance, a personalization and recommendations provider company, to manage our recommendation engine. Why is a recommendation tool particularly important to Wine.com? A lot of wine is bought day-of for that evening, so we’re competing with a brick and mortar store that has a wine expert. Recommendations are the answer to that online. In addition, in a wine store customers are getting the advice of a single person, whereas RichRelevance takes into account your purchase history as well as that of people who buy items like you, and aggregates all that data into the recommendations. The tool expands people’s horizons and puts different products in front of them they might not have
