Community-Guided Solution Nets Revenue

Baynote, Inc., today launched a new on-demand service, Community-Guided eCommerce, that automatically delivers dynamic product and content recommendations based on the "collective wisdom" of other like-minded shoppers, thereby increasing conversion rates, according to Jack Jia, the company CEO.

Baynote product and content recommendations have already garnered some Web shop owners a 20-percent net revenue increase, said Jia. "We did A/B split testing and screened out for seasonality," he said, "so we're sure it's our service that is generating the revenue."

Chris Walshe, chief marketing officer for Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety, agrees. "By uncovering the hidden purchasing behavior of our current shoppers, we're converting more browsers into buyers by reducing the number of clicks it takes them to find what they're looking for," said Walshe in a written statement. "This benefit, coupled with the cross-sell and up-sell capabilities, has resulted in a sustained revenue increase of more than 20 percent."

Baynote focuses on the "long tail" search concept, and lets e-tailers sell a more diverse set of high-margin products that are not profitable for brick-and-mortar stores to keep in stock. By identifying like-minded shoppers and automatically recommending products for particular tastes, online retailers can address the needs of these niche shoppers, selling far more products at lower costs than traditional retailers with limited shelf space. The technology used to determine who are the like-minded shoppers measures 20 shopping behaviors of site visitors, such as page-view time, point of entry and so on.

"We observe that behavior and send the info to our Affinity Engine, it's like a human brain, it learns over time to recognize patterns, so if you're requesting information on a product or service, it shows you the same content built from those other shoppers with similar needs," said Jia.

Baynote analyzes aggregated visitor behavior to produce a "UseRank," which dynamically ranks results based on their usefulness to the community. So, for example, rather than having to click through many categories and model numbers, a shopper will see a list of categories such as "most popular," "people also compared" and "people also considered" that is based on real-time shopping behavior.

For instance, Jia said, if you are shopping for a "side-by-side" refrigerator at an appliance Web shop using the service, you are "connected with a focused community wanting to purchase the same thing, not the entire appliance community." Shoppers will be shown several product recommendation lists when they land at the Web site, featuring models that others considered, the most popular sellers and even what colors are most popular, as opposed to keyword matches to dozens and dozens of models or links to brands.

The Community-Guided eCommerce solution includes the following features:

Peer-Driven Recommendations — automatically identifies small and large segments of shoppers based on consumers' Web site behavior, and recommends specific products based on what peer-shoppers have considered and purchased.
Seasonality and Fad Detection — recognizes shifts in visitor interests that happen over hours or months, and automatically adjusts which products are recommended to continually optimize conversion rates.
Product Gaps — identifies products that shoppers are looking for but are not currently offered.
Dynamic Landing Page Optimization — recognizes site visitors who come from natural or organic Web search results, and displays visitor-specific recommendations that maximize the conversion potential for all traffic generated by search engines.
Implicit Folksonomy — utilizes shoppers' normal searching, browsing and purchase behavior to automatically tag all products on the site, significantly increasing traffic.
Built-in A/B Measurement — automatically performs visitor split testing, giving e-tailers reports to see precisely how much revenue is generated by Baynote.

Baynote product recommendations work with any e-commerce store front, merchandising rules or e-commerce search engine. The hosted service is configured using the latest Web 2.0 conventions, including Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (definition AJAX) and Representational State Transfer (definition REST).

"Unlike other recommendation technologies, Baynote has a clear understanding of what products shoppers actually consider versus where they click, and matches that wisdom against a visitor's true intent," said Jia. He said this resulted in one site having half of all its purchases coming Community Guided eCommerce product recommendations.

Community Guided eCommerce is available now and offered under both subscription and pay-for-performance models. "We know it will make people money, so we've set up a revenue-share model, so it's easier for small businesses, because it's basically free until they start making more of a profit," said Jia. "And then we'll just take our cut." For more information, visit the company Web site.

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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