E-commerce

Ecommerce personalization platforms: a buyer’s guide
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It’s no secret that personalizing online content has become a de facto requirement for ecommerce companies that want to get ahead, especially now that integration of AI and machine learning algorithms has put personalization on steroids. There’s a proven upside to automated, continual collection of visitor data, analyzing it to keep tabs on shopper preferences, and applying AI to presenting the exact-right content to each prospect at the right time.

Not surprisingly, our Site Search Trends (2024) report found that 70% of retail businesses globally said personalization would be an integral or large part of their ecommerce strategy over the next year. If you’re among the 30% of companies still considering whether to invest in a personalization tool — or you’d like an upgraded solution — you’re probably looking for tips on vendors that might be right for your website.

This blog post covers your options and offers guidance on how to assess your needs and come away with a short list of prospective ecommerce personalization providers.

What is an ecommerce personalization platform?

Ecommerce personalization software lets you customize marketing messaging for individual shoppers. You can personalize virtually any content on a website, from landing pages to product category pages to calls to action. You can also follow up on perceived interest when a prospective buyer leaves your site, such as by reiterating viewed offers as ads in social media feeds and following up with targeted email.

Personalization is a pervasive buzzword for retailers, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right approach for every company’s website. If you have a small or specialized online business that doesn’t get high traffic, investing in personalization to improve your shopper engagement may not have the kind of impact you’d envision. And of course, your budget is going to be key, as ongoing personalization, especially if it’s sophisticated, may come with a hefty price tag.

How can you know — definitively — whether your site is a candidate? Here are a few ways to assess whether adding a personalization solution is the right move:

Key considerations

  • Consider your target market: Do you have distinct customer segments—groups of shoppers with clearly different buying interests, preferences, and needs? Personalization would probably make sense.
  • Evaluate your inventory: Is your range of products relatively diverse or fairly narrow? Higher diversity is a vote for personalization.
  • Assess your metrics: Do you have high cart abandonment and high bounce rates? How’s your conversion? If it’s only so-so, ecommerce personalization may be a significant help.

Additional considerations

  • Assess your tech stack: If needed, are you prepared to invest in a new platform capable of supporting advanced personalization efforts?
  • Look at your data availability: Do you have the ability to collect, analyze, and put your data to use to create effective personalized experiences?
  • Check your competitors’ approaches: Are companies in your industry and of your size using personalization?
  • Survey your customers: You can ask shoppers for feedback about their experiences on your site. Are they wanting tailored recommendations and content that’s more personally relevant to their needs?

If your hunch is that personalization may indeed be a good fit for your website, the next step is to do a small-scale test. Consider running a pilot — such as a free trial offered by a prospective supplier — to see whether personalization has the potential to move the needle. If your test goes well and it’s obvious that professional-level ecommerce personalization is what you need, then you can move on to choosing the right personalization software.

Personalization platform features to prioritize

As you can see below, there are many reputable personalization tools on the market.

To speed up your research and narrow your choices down faster, we recommend first identifying which of your business needs are the highest priority in terms of personalization. Make a list of your five must-have features, such as AI-aided analytics, along with a second list of nice-to-haves.

These evaluation-centered questions can help you identify your key considerations ahead of getting in touch with promising-looking ecommerce personalization vendors.

Cost

You may not be able to easily find specific cost information from potential personalization suppliers without getting a demo, but you need this information fairly early in your evaluation process.

  • What’s your budget for personalization?
  • What’s the initial outlay?
  • What’s the estimated total cost of ownership (setup, customization, maintenance)?
  • Are there different payment options (e.g., subscription based, tiered)?

Features

  • Is the personalization technology powered by AI?
  • Can the platform provide high-quality customer segmentation?
  • Does the tool include real-time analytics? You want to be able to track and monitor your results in detail.
  • Can it do A/B testing so you can double-check the algorithm’s guidance for optimizing your conversion?
  • Can you create any kind of personalization campaign (e.g., both product recommendations and category page personalization)?
  • Can you personalize beyond your site, such as in mobile apps, email, and social media feeds? Having the ability to create a comprehensive, unified omnichannel experience is a big plus should you decide to expand your personalization efforts.
  • Does it keep your customers’ data secure?
  • Does it comply with regulations, for example, those related to your customers’ privacy?

Ease of use

  • Will the platform seamlessly integrate with your tech stack? Most ecommerce personalization is built to work with popular ecommerce platforms and content management systems, but it pays to double check.
  • Does the tool have an intuitive user interface?
  • Do you need to have technical expertise in order to set up advanced-level personalization?
  • Once it’s set up, can your marketing team take charge of managing it without needing developer help?
  • Is it scalable and adaptable in case your business needs to make a change in the future?

Onboarding and support

  • Do they supply white-glove (premium delivery) setup?
  • What’s involved in the onboarding process?
  • Does the vendor provide initial training for your team?
  • Do they provide ongoing support that’s easily accessible?

Reputation

  • How do current customers rate the supplier?
  • Judging by client success stories (such as Lacoste’s), are you likely to increase your conversion with the tool?
  • Has it won any awards?
  • Are any of your competitors successfully using it?

What personalization platforms are available?

These vendors provide personalization services ranging from simple search-focused recommendations for a small retail site to broad-ranging personalization that encompasses website design and automated email marketing for a large consumer brand or marketplace site.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Designed for “personalizing for millions in milliseconds”, Adobe Experience Cloud is an enterprise-level digital marketing suite hosted on Microsoft Azure. It includes analytics, targeting, and content management, plus incorporates generative AI and real-time insights. Marketo Engage facilitates segment setup and automated marketing.

Adobe Target

Adobe Target supplies real-time personalization that promotes dynamic content delivery curated for individual users, along with analytics and an intuitive user interface. You also get segmentation, A/B testing, and multivariate testing.

Algolia

Algolia, recently voted best overall AI search supplier, is a fast, AI-aided, API-first platform that enhances search, product discovery, and recommendations with personalization. Our new AI Personalization solution delivers personalization across searching, browsing, recommendations and other touchpoints, and automates the personalization algorithms to save your team time.

Algonomy

Algonony optimizes content, personalizing product recommendations and creating real-time offers.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach excels at deciphering user intent to enhance product discovery for websites with large product catalogs. In addition to search, you get headless content management, as well as help with building landing pages and doing search engine optimization (SEO).

Bluecore

In addition to websites, Bluecore’s personalization functionality encompasses ads and email, so it’s a viable option if you’re thinking about a multichannel solution. It comes with detailed analytics.

Clerk.io

Geared for improving conversion with smaller ecommerce sites, Clerk.io offers an affordable “trial” in that it’s free until you use a specified amount of services. Its AI “understands natural language just like a real sales clerk”. You get analytics for tracking results in real time, plus it integrates with a wide range of ecommerce platforms.

Constructor

Constructor offers a personalized shopping experience highlighted by AI-powered search and product discovery. They have a conversational tool that blends generative AI with user-level personalization: shoppers can pose detailed questions and engage in conversations to get recommendations tailored to their unique preferences.

Coveo

Coveo is a composable AI search platform that incorporates semantic search, AI recommendations, unified personalization, and generative-AI-aided answers to questions.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is a suite of real-time personalization tools that includes segmentation, personalized product recommendations, and automated A/B testing for experimenting with different approaches and optimizing. It matches content, products, and offers to customer preferences and uses AI to anticipate future behavior.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed RESTful search and analytics engine that provides lightning-fast search, strong relevancy, and powerful analytics.

Google Retail Discovery

Google Retail Discovery is an add-on to Google Cloud that’s targeted to tech-savvy customers for enterprise search.

Insider

Insider is an AI-aided tool for delivering relevant omnichannel customer experiences at scale. It’s also easy to integrate with a wide range of tech platforms.

Kibo

Tapping machine learning, Kibo’s digital merchandising functionality lets you set up omnichannel promotions, finely tune your site search, and manage pricing independently without technical know-how. You get personalization in real time, plus A/B and multivariate testing.

MoEngage

MoEngage supplies omnichannel, AI-driven personalization with a no-code visual builder that lets you personalize your website experience based on each shopper’s preferences. It includes location-based text-messaging with prospective customers who are physically near your brick-and-mortar store.

Nosto

Nosto creates personalized shopping experiences through supplying real-time segmentation and insight; A/B testing and optimization are included. Personalization can be applied to website content, recommendations, and email, and you can also create personalized pop-ups and bundles.

Optimizely

Optimizely is dedicated to creating winning customer experiences by combining customer data, powerful testing, and AI-rich optimization. It comes with analytics.

Optimonk

OptiMonk lets you create personalized messaging without needing to write code or consult developers. You can personalize layouts, visuals, messaging, and offers, plus potentially ward off cart abandonment with intent-related pop-ups.

Optinmonster

OptinMonster is a personalization platform that includes a dedicated WordPress plugin and Shopify app.

Oracle Marketing

Oracle Marketing is a cloud-based, AI-driven system designed to meet companies’  (B2C or B2B) sophisticated segmentation and personalization needs. This marketing suite has an intuitive interface for easily setting up multichannel campaigns.

Personyze

Personyze is an all-in-one solution for providing personalized recommendations and email, as well as dynamic landing pages, without writing code. It includes A/B testing for any content you create with the system.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is focused on personalizing ecommerce journeys for both B2C and B2B customers.

Searchspring

Searchspring is an AI-powered search, personalization, and merchandising solutions provider billed as the “all-in-one conversion platform designed for ecommerce.”

Segment

Twilio Segment uses real-time customer profiles and AI to anticipate shoppers’ needs and respond with personalized experiences. Without a need for technical support, you can identify which customers are ready to buy and which products they’re most interested in buying.

Segmentify

Segmentify is a smaller-scope, AI-aided ecommerce tool bolstered by real-time analytics that supports personalized search and product discovery. In addition, it covers product recommendations, targeted push notifications, and email marketing.

Syte

As “the world’s first product discovery platform”, Syte uses AI to create rewarding online experiences. Its specialties: visual search, automated product tagging, advanced personalized recommendations, and “shoppable social curation”.

WebEngage

WebEngage is a website personalization tool that offers a “rentention OS” aimed at improving companies’ ROI. It supports omnichannel campaigns (apps, SMS, email), includes analytics, and has an intuitive user interface.

Yieldify

To enhance the shopping experience, Yieldify offers an “all-in-one”, AI-aided solution encompassing a range of personalization methods, including recommendations, email marketing, social proof, device-optimized messaging, and promotions. It includes segmentation, site mapping, and testing.

Start with a free sight search audit

With so many ecommerce personalization providers on the market, one is bound to be exactly what your company needs. With a little research and a few product demos, you can start to get a clear picture of which possibilities look the most promising for your needs and then go from there.

If you’re a little unnerved by all the options and the fact that there’s so much information to be assimilated in your evaluation process, that’s understandable. These days, as with other business (and personal) decisions to be made, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Want a quick way to jump in and start gathering data points on personalization? We at Algolia would love to talk with you about how our AI-powered personalized search, discovery, and recommendations have led our clients to enjoy remarkably higher ROI. If that sounds intriguing, schedule a free sight search audit and let’s talk about some options.

About the authorCatherine Dee

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

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