Shop Direct introduces personalised homepages
Shop Direct has announced that it can now give customers a fully personalised homepage at its flagship brand Very.co.uk.
The company said the move is a major step towards its goal of “building the world’s most personalised digital stores” as it estimates that personalisation initiatives will add over £20 million in sales in Shop Direct’s current financial year.
Visitors to Very.co.uk can now be met with homepages designed specifically for them. This means that customers can find their favourite brands ‘front of shop’ and view relevant offers.
Shop Direct said it can serve 1.2 million versions of the website to its customers, based on which of Very.co.uk’s suite of promotional messages are used and in what position. The company expects this to rise to 3.5 million by the end of the year.
The company’s team of data scientists has developed a suite of complex algorithms to predict customer behaviour and optimise the homepage with targeted products and offers. The algorithm produces 200 million promotion affinity scores, which rank the relevance of offers for each customer.
Tailored homepages are just one part of Shop Direct’s major push into personalisation, which forms a key part of its growth strategy.
Shop Direct has already introduced personalised website navigation across all of its websites, using browsing behaviour and purchase history to order the department store categories based on their relevance. In addition, Shop Direct’s suite of algorithms recommend department categories that the customer is likely to be interested in based on the behaviour of similar shoppers.
Shop Direct group chief executive Alex Baldock said: “We know that relevance wins in retail and right now customers are drowning in a sea of irrelevant choices.
“We’re making it easier for them to shop by tailoring our websites for them. This is the digital equivalent of Selfridges laying out their Oxford Street store for each shopper.
“We’ve set ourselves an ambitious target to build the world’s best personalised shopping experience – this is a major step towards that goal.”
