No company has tackled personalized recommendations on a larger scale than Amazon, which has a 100-person team devoted solely to suggesting other products its customers might like. So the small-but-influential world of personalization paid attention when Amazon's head of personalization from 2003-2004, David Selinger, left for Overstock, and learned to leverage impulse deal-buying as well as a big back catalog of products. After over a year at Overstock, Selinger left to co-found a company called RichRelevance in 2006, which would take what he had learned and turn it into an algorithmic tool he could sell.
The problem is that online customers are a particular and fickle bunch: even if you serve them up interesting product suggestions, you can still fail to get a good conversion rate if you don't present the suggestions in a palatable but unobtrusive way. Do it right, and you can increase sales by 25%, as Amazon did under Selinger. Do it wrong, and you can alienate people or even piss them off.
Source : FastCompany
