Strands Blog

We are excited to announce that specialty retailer Metropark has chosen Strands Recommender to power their intelligent up/cross-sells and personalization. As a fast growing specialty retailer Metropark was looking to automate their merchandising process and boost sales during the holiday season.

After looking at numerous recommendation providers, Metropark chose Strands due to our quick implementation, easy to use merchandising interface, detailed reporting and also our reasonable pricing.

Currently Metropark is utilizing Strands Recommender on it’s product detail under “May We Suggest” and will be adding email recommendations and shopping cart up-sells soon:

Metropark is one of the many retailers who have taken advantage of our Standard Pricing plans, which start at $249/month and provide a similar feature set to our premium customers at an affordable price. It’s a great way to improve your merchandising, sales and learn more about your customers buying behaviors. As your revenue grows, you can always upgrade to our premium service.

We’re happy to announce, that as of today, we’re working with the fast growing start-up Kedin.es to offer personalized recommendations for their great service. Kedin is similar to US based Upcoming.org and Going.com as it provides users with a rundown of the latest concerts, art exhibitions, athletic races and interesting events in their cities.

To continue their growth, Kedin was looking for new forms of differentiation and personalization was key to their strategy. Kedin was impressed with Strands ability to drive increased engagement and customer loyalty on similar sites such as 11870.com and Blip.tv. With these goals in mind, Kedin was able to implement Strands in two functional areas of their site:

1.) Personalized Events Page: Once a user creates a profile, Strand’s automatically begins learning about their tastes and preferences and makes relevant suggestions.

2.) Related Events: Strands learns from all visitor’s behavior on the site and suggests related events in their area.

If you’re visiting Spain or already live there and are looking to bring out your inner socialite visit Kedin.es. Also visit our website for more information on how recommendations can dial up your social media site.

There are just a few more hours left for shopping today on Black Friday. A quick look over at google trends indicates the top online searches today revolved around Tiger Wood’s car accident, football, and yummie tummie slimming garments. Specific consumer goods in the top 40 search terms includes Ugg boots and Tom Toms. So does this mean everyone was shopping in the stores or online from the links emailed to them?

The results aren’t quite in yet, but ShopperTrack will release their Black Friday report Saturday morning and we’ll share our ideas soon after. For the economy’s sake, we hope the weekend numbers are high.

Here are a few links to our Strands Recommender clients and the great holiday promotions they are running:

• Free Gift Wrapping at TravelSmith
• 5 days of deals at SkyMall
• Free 3 day shipping on all orders over $200 at Footwear etc
• Free shipping on orders over $49 at Luggage Point

Winner Outstanding Website, WebAward 2009

Brian Walker, @BKWalker, of Forrester Research, recently shared the B2B eConference Trends and Solutions Market Overview. The presentation highlights the growth drivers and range of models in B2B ecommerce plus the evolving B2B site. Check out the full details at the above link. Since many of our clients are preparing for 2010, we thought we’d share Brian’s 5 Key takeaways (with our Strands spin on it).

1. Design your site for the customer.

Consider the end user who needs your product, information or service. Identify their values and search path on your site. Think of Amazon or Apple and follow their website schema when designing your own.

2. Don’t design your site for the sales manager.

Allow your site to sell the end product that relates to the end user. The sales manager will understand the value in your product when seeing the value it serves to their customers. Think of it like this: they are focused on sales, so show them (indirectly) that you are too.

3. Employ familiar UI principles from online retail.

Keep your website structure, simplicity and visibility in mind, but also position your site as a one-stop-shop. Allow someone to easily navigate and identify all the possible things they can purchase. Artistic navigation schemes will decrease time spent on your site and increase the bounce rate.

4. Focus on marketing and merchandising tactics.

There is no better way to cross-sell and up-sell than with Strands Recommender. By showing what other items people have purchased and what items they might be interested in, you will increase your average cart total by 20%. Shamelessly, we’d like you to find more information about the Strands Recommender by clicking here or below, or to the right…

Strands Recommender

5. Don’t let internal business processes, systems, and sacred cows drive the online experience.

What processes can you streamline to make it easier for a customer? It doesn’t matter how it’s always been done, what matters is how it’s currently being done in your customers opinion. Innovation and modernization is key.

For further discussion of key trends or assistance with recommendations, please feel free to contact the Strands Recommender Team.

We are proud to announce that Team Strands is now accepting applications for athlete sponsorship for the 2010 calendar year.  Interested athletes should submit a running resume along with a one-page sponsorship proposal.

The resume should include, but is not limited to:

• Running Background
• Personal Bests
• Race Highlights
• Tentative 2010 Race Schedule

The proposal should highlight why you believe you would be a good brand advocate for Strands.com.  It would be helpful to include information about your level of involvement in the running community, and your “reach” online with social networking sites and blogs.  Preference will be given to athletes willing to relocate to Corvallis, Oregon, and your sponsorship proposal should indicate whether you would be willing to relocate as part of your sponsorship.

You must be willing to share your training and interact with the Strands.com community.  So, familiarity with Strands.com is a must.  If you would like to apply for sponsorship and have not yet set up a profile, please do so at Strands.com before applying.

When you have completed your application, please send an email with both documents attached to teamstrands@strands.com by December 15, 2009. We will begin notifying athletes starting January 1, 2010.

Presented by Dr. Francisco Martin, Founder and CEO of Strands, the first keynote at the 3rd annual ACM Conference on Recommender Systems was delivered this morning and has been generating some buzz on Twitter.

The number of online services providing users with real-time recommendations has increased exponentially over the last few years. Recommender Systems that were originally only accessible to a limited number of high-tech companies are now widely available through a growing number of both technical choices and vendors. The acceptance, however, of automatically delivered recommendations by users depends on numerous factors that go far beyond the algorithms that constitute the major focus of researchers.

Over the past 10 years, Strands has been creating and operating recommender systems in a multitude of domains, ranging from digital music to fitness plans and personal finance management, and in a multitude of business settings ranging from lightweight integrations to highly-coupled integrations within secure bank environments.

As summarized by Neal Lathia of MobBlog, below are the top 10 lessons we’ve learned developing, deploying, and operating real-world recommender systems:

• Lesson 1. Make sure a recommender is really needed! Do you have lots of recommendable items? Many diverse customers?… also think Return-on-Invesment… a more sophisticated recommender may not deliver a better ROI.
• Lesson 2. Make sure the recommendations make strategic sense. Is the best recommendation for the customer also the best for the business? What is the difference between a good and useful recommendation? Good recommendations vs useful recs; obvious recommendations may not be useful; risky recs may deliver better long-term value.
• Lesson 3. Choose the right partner! Select the right rec vendor vs hire some #recsys09 students. If you are a big company the best thing you can do is organize a contest.
• Lesson 4. Forget about cold-start problems (!) …. just be creative. The internet has all the data that you need (somewhere…).
• Lesson 5. Get the right balance between data and algorithms. 70% of the success of a recommendation system is in the data, the other 30% in the algorithm.
• Lesson 6. Finding correlated items is easy but deciding what, how, and when to present them to the user is hard… or don’t just recommend for the sake of it. Remember, user attention is a scarce and valuable resource. Use it wisely! … dont make a recommendations to a customer who is just about to pay for items at the checkout! User interface should get at least 50% of your attention.
• Lesson 7 Don’t waste time computing nearest neighbours (use social connections)… just mine the social graph. Might miss useful connections?
• Lesson 8 Don’t wait to scale!
• Lesson 9: Choose the right feedback mechanism. Stars vs thumbs …. the YouTube problem. More research on implicit and other feedback mechanisms is needed. The perfect rating system is no rating system! … focus on the interface.
• Lesson 10 Measure Everything! … business control and analytics is a big opportunity here.

Keynote Takeaway

Think about application context; Focus on interface as much as algs; be creative with startup data. … the UI needs to get the lion’s share of the effort (50%) compared to algorithms (5%), knowledge (20%), analytics (25%).

Strands.com will host the inaugural edition of the Strands 5k in Corvallis on October 24th. The race will feature a community 5k, a children’s race, post-race party and a prize purse totaling $13,000. Supporting sponsors of the race include Emery & Sons Construction, Eufora, and Marrakesh Salon.

All race proceeds benefit Childhelp, an organization dedicated to helping victims of child abuse and neglect. Childhelp’s mission is to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of abused, neglected and at-risk children through advocacy, prevention, treatment, and community outreach. Find more ways to get involved or information on how to donate directly through the Childhelp.org website.

Prize money is only available to U.S. Citizens and will be distributed as follows for the men’s and women’s open field:

• 1st place–$3,000
• 2nd place–$1,500
• 3rd place–$750
• 4th place–$600
• 5th place–$400
• 6th place–$250

The 5k race will begin at 9:00 a.m. PST on October 24. The children’s race will begin at 10:00 a.m., followed by an awards ceremony and post-race party outside Strands headquarters at Central Park in Corvallis.

Online registration is $15.00 and race day registration is $20.00. For more information and a race registration link, visit the race website at Strands5k.com, call the race hotline at (541) 740-5306, or email us at strands5k@strands.com.