Etailers attempt to personalize customer’s shopping experiences

While customers were lured by the hordes with deep discounts last year, etailers are latching on to the personalization aspect this year to attract them. The recent discussions on Myntra’s and Flipkart’s efforts to provide a social network kind of experience on their platforms one such feature to strike the personalized chord with customers.

Etailers have always tried to understand customer preferences by tracking their purchase and search history. But now with fragmented usage across different portals, they get only limited insights into user preferences. In effect, out of the ten product recommendations given to customer, only 4-5 may be what he actually wants.

So now etailers have begun to look into the surroundings of customers.

Flipkart’s data analytics

“Our analytical solutions not only leverage our data-driven understanding about customer preferences, but also various societal and demographic trends that are driving these preferences,” said Ravi Vijayaraghavan, vicepresident of analytics at Flipkart.

Flipkart’s analysis about purchasing power of cities shows that purchasing power changes gradually in Bangalore while purchasing patterns vary drastically between areas in Mumbai.

“The larger idea is, if we understand something like this, we are able to personalise our offering for our product for people of that particular area,” said Vivek Mehta, a data scientist at Flipkart.

Flipkart got some other interesting insights as well from their experiments. With regard to women’s affinity for heels geography wise, it seems women from Kerala have least inclination for it while women from northeastern states and Andaman & Nicobar islands are most inclined to it. Maharashtra prefers reading business books, while Bihar and West Bengal prefer competitive exams books.

So Flipkart has chosen the targeted advertising approach to stand out with a seamless user experience and thus grab customer’s attention.

“Our research shows that customers look at 2-4 websites before they make a transaction. There is no brand loyalty, even though there is a high brand recall of the top three players,”said Arvind Singhal, chairman of advisory firm Technopak.”I don’t think any of these companies have enough data to personalize for me.”

Snapdeal’s personalization

Meanwhile, Snapdeal has a team of people working on mobile and desktop personalization for its customers. They feel that replying solely on user data and browsing history is not enough due to the transaction volumes now.