The temptation for any online retailer is to try and sell everything, what we call “the endless shelf” approach. Having an endless selection of products is seen as offering a better choice to customers.
Helping users navigate their way through this excess of choice is a science in itself. But Amazon’s recommendation service is built on a technological blunderbuss, of comparing what you have bought with what other users have bought, and then offering popular products they also bought.
At the end of the day, Amazon doesn’t care what you buy, as long as you buy something.
I get e-mails from Amazon saying things like:
“As someone who has purchased titles from the Literature & Fiction category at Amazon.com, you might like to discover some of this summer’s debut fiction favorites, including Jonathan Miles’s Dear American Airlines. Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert says, “Bring it to the airport with you next time you fly somewhere to change your life…”‘
That’s hardly a finely nuanced understanding of my tastes, is it? It might as well of said “As someone who has bought books from us, here are some new books”
In contrast, I also receive an e-mail each week from 14tracks.com. A venture by mail-order music specialists Boomkat, 14 tracks presents, as you might have guessed, 14 carefully selected songs, with each week a different theme.
Micro-recommendations are the future of online retailing. Instead of a scattershot approach, 14 tracks is like a sniper’s rifle aimed straight at my wallet. It reminds me of a retail concept called 25 records in Hamburg, Germany, a record shop that only sold, yep, 25 records, at any one time.
Such an approach can only work of course, if you value the taste of the people making such focussed recommendations.
Inbetween the ‘endless shelf’ of e-tailers like Amazon and the ‘single shelf’ of ventures like 14 tracks, a careful approach to merchandising allows online retailers to adopt a more boutique mentality, carefully selecting product ranges tailored to it’s target market. This is something that we have touched on before, and it’s the approach we are adopting at IncentiveDirect, continually updating our product range to match the desires of our customers, but also ensuring that we are only selling quality products by respected brands, and at a range of prices.
Selling products you believe in is the future of online retailing.