Retail personalization, in plain English.
Ideas from the merchandising floor and the data pipeline.
Purchase Signals vs Click Signals: What Your Shopper Data Is Actually Telling You
Clicks tell you what caught someone's eye. Purchases tell you what they actually needed.
How Mid-Size Retailers Can Compete on Personalization Without Amazon's Data
Amazon personalizes because it has billions of purchases. You have thousands. That is actually enough, if you use them right.
The Merchandiser's Algorithm: What AI Should Actually Learn from Your Buying Team
Your best merchandisers make decisions based on what customers have bought before, what they returned, and what they keep coming back for. That is exactly what a good personalization model should learn too.
Cart Abandonment Is Not a Checkout Problem, It's a Discovery Problem
Most abandoned carts happen before the checkout page. The shopper left because the products on the category page were not relevant to them. Fixing your checkout flow will not solve that.
What We Learned Building Personalized Storefronts for Seven Retailers
Our first cohort of early-access merchants came from four different retail verticals. Here is what the data patterns had in common and where they diverged.
The Hidden Revenue in How You Sort Product Category Pages
Default alphabetical sort is a placeholder, not a strategy. Sorting by purchase likelihood per shopper segment can shift add-to-cart rates.
One Store Per Shopper: A Framework for Thinking About Retail Personalization
The end state for personalization is not a slightly better homepage. It is a different storefront for every visitor.
Why Purchase History Outperforms Browse Data for Product Recommendations
Browse data is noisy. A shopper might click on ten items out of curiosity and buy one. Training a model on clicks trains it on distraction. Purchase data trains it on intent.
The Merchandiser's Toolkit in the Age of AI: What Changes and What Stays the Same
AI does not replace merchandising judgment. It amplifies it, if the model is designed to encode the right inputs from the start. Here is what that actually looks like in practice.
Session Depth and Conversion Depth: Why They Move Together
Shoppers who browse deeper buy more. But depth only happens when the products on each page feel worth exploring. Relevance drives depth, depth drives conversion.
Running Our First Retailer Pilot: What We Got Right and What We Had to Rebuild
Our first pilot was a home goods retailer with a strong repeat-buyer base and a storefront that showed the same top-20 products to everyone. What we found in the data surprised us.