Providing a personalised shopping experience is now a vital element of online retail and proven to have a direct impact on sales. A recent YouGov poll found that 35 per cent of consumers would spend more online if retailers offered better customer care or advice. This has been the case for Pharmacy2U and customers are already responding to the tailored experience offered on the site. The retailer has seen average order values increase by 12 per cent.

“It was a straightforward choice to make when it came to choosing a merchandising solution that could deliver,” said Daniel Lee, managing director at Pharmacy2U. “Avail’s on-demand model provides us with the scalability we need to cope with the peaks and troughs we typically see and places no constraints on our hardware set-up. When we coupled that with the company’s proven heritage in online retail, we realised we had found the perfect partner for our needs.”

“Customers are coming to expect convenience in every aspect of their lives, especially when it comes to shopping online, which is fundamentally built on this trait,” said Pontus Kristiansson, CEO and co-founder of Avail Intelligence.

“Many retailers perceive product recommendations as most valuable for selling one-off items that consumers want rather than need,” he added. “But Pharmacy2U understands the importance of treating the customer as an individual when it comes to the everyday items they use.”

About Pharmacy2U
Pharmacy2U, the UK’s first internet pharmacy, was established in 1999. It is now the country’s largest dedicated internet and mail order pharmacy, allowing prescriptions, over the counter medicines and personal care products to be delivered direct to the doorstep.

Avail Intelligence and the Patricia Seybold Group are teaming up for this free, informative webinar on how to maximize your returns from e-commerce personalization in time for the Holiday season.

Regardless if you are still doing manual product recommendations, or already have a personalization platform in place, this is a webinar that will inspire you to do more, and make more.

You’ll learn:

• All the ways to boost customer satisfaction & sales with personalization
• How to structure your project in time for this year’s Holiday season
• Gotchas to look out for as you embark on your own project
• 3 essential merchandising tactics to boost conversion rates and sales using personalized product recommendations.

View the webinar

Palo Alto, California, August 10, 2010 – Avail Intelligence (http://www.avail.net), today released a step-by-step plan for how online merchandisers can deploy a behavioral merchandising strategy for the Holiday season.

“If your company doesn’t have a personalization strategy in place for the holidays, now is the time to act,” says Susan Aldrich, senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group. “It is essential for retailers looking to engage Holiday shoppers visiting their site, and to stimulate spending with highly relevant, personalized offers. Online buyers expect retailers to personalize the customer experience with targeted merchandising, promoting the right products at the right time to each shopper. Moreover, the automated optimization of recommendations can be a life saver during the peak season, when everyone is strapped for time.”

The Avail Holiday Launch Plan provides a detailed step-by-step plan to quickly launch a Behavioral Merchandising program on any eCommerce site, in time for the typical Holiday season “lockdown”. Based on Avail’s experience from over 100 successful deployments at online and multi-channel retailers, it addresses what resources are required and how to structure the deployment project.

All in all, it only requires 10 man-days or less of effort for an online merchandising team to develop and implement a marketing strategy that will increase Holiday sales by 15% or more.

“The Holiday season is a highly competitive period, as competitors launch their most attractive offers and ramp up advertising,” says Pontus Kristiansson, CEO of Avail Intelligence.“At Avail, we are preparing clients to make the most of every customer visit, and to be exceptionally effective in pulling customers back to their sites.”

On August 25th, 2010, Avail and the Patricia Seybold Group are presenting a free webinar on how to launch and master e-commerce personalization in time for the Holiday season.

Webinar registration
Sign up at http://www.avail.net/time-to-get-personal.

For a retailer with no or negative prior experience, the task of launching a new solution that is able to automate and optimize their entire merchandising across channels, currencies, and sites may seem complex and challenging. This whitepaper documents how to launch and achieve results in 30 days – using just 10 man-days of effort for your team – in a structured process, fully managed and supported by experienced Avail staff.

This detailed project model was developed based on experiences and best practices drawn by from over 100 successful launches of Avail Behavioral Merchandising™ at online and multi-channel retailers, and addresses:

• What resources are required
• How to structure the deployment project step-by-step

Why Product Personalization is becoming the most powerful eCommerce Strategy Palo Alto, California, July 27, 2010 – A Patricia Seybold Group worldwide survey shows that within the next 18 months, a majority of retailers plan to launch e-commerce personalization programs. Perhaps inspired by the success at companies such as NetFlix and Amazon, online merchandisers are now using product recommendations for web and mobile eCommerce upselling, content personalization, improving search results and personalizing ads.

“If your company doesn’t have a personalization strategy, now’s the time to act. You don’t want to fall behind—not when it has such an impact on conversion, order size and SEO,” says Susan Aldrich, senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group. “Also, personalization is a key factor in successful mobile interaction. You need to ramp up your personalization skills and tactics to be prepared for successful mobile commerce when the time comes.”

To give e-commerce executives and CIOs looking to get ahead of the competition a solid foundation, Avail Intelligence (http://www.avail.net) and the Patricia Seybold Group are teaming up in a free, informative webinar on how to launch and master e-commerce personalization in time for the Holiday season.

The live webinar will take place August 25, 2010 at 11 am PDT (2 pm EDT). Registration and more information is available at http://www.avail.net/time-to-get-personal

In this webinar, Susan Aldrich, well known speaker and senior consultant with Patricia Seybold Group, will share her experience on:

• All the ways to use personalization to boost customer satisfaction and sales, whether via Web, mobile or contact center interaction
• How to structure your project to deploy and master personalization in time for the holidays
• Using recommendation technology to optimize which products head the list of search results; critical for keeping visitors engaged
• Learning from your peers – things to look out for before embarking on your own project

She will be joined by Markus Schilling, director of Client Success at Avail Intelligence and former merchandising expert with multi-billion dollar European etailer Neckermann, who will provide three essential merchandising tactics to boost conversion rates and sales using personalized product recommendations.

About Patricia Seybold Group

Patricia Seybold Group is a business/technology consulting firm that has been in business for over 25 years. For the past 15 years the company has developed a wealth of experience working with companies that are committed to becoming customer-centric.

Fragrance Direct is an online seller of famous brands of perfume and colognes at heavily discounted prices. The site offers fragrances, cosmetics, skincare, bath and body items, hair care and products for the home.

More than a third (35 per cent) of Britons would spend more online if offered better customer care or advice, indicating that retailers are missing out on valuable sales, according to a new survey released today.

Findings from the research carried out online for Avail Intelligence, pioneers in behavioural merchandising, show that retailers should be worried that poor customer care coupled with a lack of quality guidance could be driving online shoppers away.

According to the research, conducted by YouGov, one in three (30 per cent) still prefer shopping on the high street. When asked why, better customer care (47 per cent) and access to advice and support (35 per cent) were the most popular reasons cited.

Furthermore it is apparent that some retailers are not as joined up cross-channel as they should be. Only five per cent stated they found product pricing better on the high street, far lower than online (61 per cent).

Additionally, 51 per cent of respondents cited that the range of products stocked by retailers online was better than the high street with only 13 per cent claiming the opposite was true. Only 14 per cent stated that they thought the ability to find what they wanted was better in a store than online.

According to the survey, here is an overview of the areas online where retailers can make improvements that would encourage most consumers to spend more:

• Customer care – 22 per cent
• Pricing – 14 per cent
• Advice and support – 12 per cent
• Product information – 10 per cent
• Navigation – 9 per cent
• Range of products – 5 per cent

“Its clear that shoppers would spend more online, if they had access to the recommendations and advice they currently get when visiting a physical store,” said Pontus Kristiansson, CEO and co-founder, Avail Intelligence. “The challenge for retailers is offering that without impacting its cost base so much so that it takes away the benefit consumers see in terms of lower prices online.”

Kristiansson goes on to say: “The findings also suggest that retailers should be doing more to create a consistent shopping experience cross-channel for its customers. For example, the range and volume of products stocked by a store is determined by floor space. The simple addition of a web-enabled kiosk could link instore and online and provide shoppers with access to a wide range of products increasing the chance they’ll make a purchase with you and not a competitor.”

About The Poll

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2107 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 29th June – 1st July 2010. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

Frankfurt, July 6, 2010: Quickly ordering a birthday gift during your lunch break, or reserving your cinema tickets while on your way to work – so-called “mobile commerce” makes it all possible.

New research from e-commerce experts Avail Intelligence conducted among German consumers reveals 17% of respondents use their smartphone to make purchases online. The products most often bought by mobile phone span from entertainment products such as music, books and videos (53%) to electronics (24%) to ordering railway, airplane and concert tickets (23%). The only product category not being bought by mobile in the survey was apparel.

83% percent of the respondents did not make purchases with their mobile phone. The most common reason (41% of respondents) given was the complexity and cost of making a purchase. 30% did not have a web-enabled mobile phone, with which they could shop online. Another 17% preferred to make purchases in stores, and the remaining 12% said that they didn’t trust making payments with their mobile phone.

Nearly half of respondents (42%) found browsing online stores on the small displays of mobile phones cumbersome, and wanted interfaces more suitable for the smaller screen. 28% percent also thought that it needs to be easier to find the right products on their mobile. Often the consumer has to fight through an “online jungle” until they are able to reach the desired product, which can be frustrating when using a mobile phone and a small display. Functions such as personalized product recommendations or landing pages would also speed up the search process when shopping online by mobile.

“The number of mobile shoppers continues to rise”, says Pontus Kristiansson, CEO of Avail Intelligence. “That makes it increasingly important to develop mobile online shops that correspond to customer requirements. Interfaces that are easy to use on small displays, reliable payment options, and product recommendations are essential for mobile stores.”

Avail Intelligence, a leading European provider of merchandising solutions for online retailers, and Altima, the interactive agency, has announced a partnership, under which the two companies will work together to provide online merchandising and personalization solutions based on Avail Behavioral Merchandising™ to French retailers. Earlier this year, Altima recently became the first certified provider of Avail integration services for the French market.

“The Avail Partner Program is an essential element of our corporate strategy, which focuses on maximizing sales and return on investment for customers,”, said Sam Amar, Commercial Director for France at Avail Intelligence. “Altima is part of a strong network of local Avail partners that are able to offer retailers certified integration services to reduce the costs and time-to-market for deploying Avail Behavioral Merchandising™ solutions”.

With this partnership, which follows a successful collaboration between two companies in launching Avail’s technology at Camaïeu, Altima is determined to continue offer its clients a new way to optimize their e-commerce. As a result, a knowledge transfer between Avail’s and Altima’s teams has been conducted in Sweden.

“We discovered Avail Intelligence through one of our established clients, Camaieu. We were retained to integrate the solution into their e-commerce platform,” said Jerome Calais, Open Source Technical Expert at Altima.“We realized that we should establish a partnership with Avail, because some customers had already expressed the desire to automate their merchandising. With Avail Intelligence we have exceeded their expectations.”

France is one of the most important European markets for Avail Intelligence because it includes many leading e-commerce companies. The company, whose clients include French reference clients such as La Redoute, Camaieu and Telemarket, receives valuable knowledge on Internet navigation, and real-time consumer purchase and interaction patterns, from the French market.

Avail Behavioral Merchandising allows online retailers to optimize their merchandising – automatically offering the right product at the right time to each visitor. The product recommendations delivered creates a personalized shopping experience for each site visitor. It helps consumers find the products they are shopping for, and complementary offers stimulate them to buy more, resulting in a significant and immediate increase in sales and customer satisfaction for the online retailer.

Altima leverages their technical expertise and general Internet experience to market and integrate the solution.“We saw an opportunity for our customers to activate a new lever to increase sales and lower customer acquisition costs,” said Jerome Calais.“In line with our strategy of supporting all the online activities of our clients, we wanted to act quickly to become the leading integrator of this innovative solution in our market.”

Customers benefit from the partnership as they are able to maximize their total sales revenues, by increasing their relevancy in customer communications for a variety of channels, driving incremental sales. Altima envisions establishing a long-term, complementary offering around Avail’s solutions, where they will analyze results and adjust merchandising business rules to achieve maximum performance for clients.

E-Commerce Expo is the industry event for the UK and, increasingly, Europe. It ranks as one of the largest gatherings of E Commerce professionals in Europe and boasts over 140 exhibiting companies plus a comprehensive conference programme.

Sponsor of the Customer Conversion Theatre

Seminar session:

Online merchandising expert Markus Schilling explains how retailers can address this phenomenon and increase the relevancy of their merchandising, to raise conversion rates across all pages, and all stages of the customer interaction cycle.
By Markus Schilling, Director of Product Management & Client Success at Avail Intelligence

Date / Time: Will be announced shortly
Theatre: Customer Conversion and Retention