Step 2 - Informed Customers - Page 9

The next step in this personalization scheme is building collaborative personalization. Since ACME already keeps records of everything everyone has ever bought, this one should be simple to implement.

This method involves deciding what and where you want to put the collaborative info. One good start would be to place customer recommendations, or "Customers that bought this lawnmower also bought..." type suggestions. Providing a comparison model would also be very helpful.

For example, let's look at a typical customer visit. A customer comes along who needs a new lawnmower — but has no idea which model or features he needs. The customer navigates their way to a particular product page. Along with the description and price information, the page also displays a list of things other customers bought. Since most people don't buy more than one lawnmower at a time, this list will most likely be things like "lawnmower blades" or "fertilizer," so this feature isn't very helpful for this user.

Next the customer sees an "Add this to my Comparison cart." This feature would add products to a session object, for instance. The user could then be provided a link that lists the features side- by-side of all items in the comparison cart. This is very simple to build, and adds enormous customer benefits, especially if you combine this feature with customer recommendations.

The customer is still not sure, however, so let's provide one more collaborative feature. Let's examine the items in the shopping and comparison carts. If we notice any similarities between the products, then we can provide the user a descriptor comparison feature. This could be a link from the comparison page (or could be incorporated into that page), that simply provides descriptions for major or common features along with comparisons, i.e. "This model has 10 horsepower vs 5 for the other model, but horsepower above 7 is really not necessary."

Note: The author claims no knowledge of lawnmowers, so please forgive him if he quotes inaccurate numbers. In no way should my advice be heeded for buying lawnmowers!

Now the customer is more informed and is more confident adding one item to their shopping cart, and proceeding through checkout. Let's move to the last step.

Step 1 - Making Customers Happy - Page 8
Everything you Need to Know About Personalization: Part 2 - Page 6
Step 3 - Checkout - Page 10