Technology

The Recommendation Engine

The Avail Platform is built around a sophisticated recommendation engine, developed for more than 10 years based on advanced algorithmic and retail research. All algorithms have been designed for reliability, relevancy, and performance, and base their decisions on a wide range of behavioral data as input, e.g. products viewed, added to cart, and purchased.

Avail’s recommendation engine is able to recommend both products and users, e.g. matching shoppers with other shoppers with similar interests. Algorithms are available for all types of retail tactics, e.g. discovery, up-selling, cross-selling, and retention, as well as for advertising, e.g., last viewed products and products in cart.

The Avail Control Panel

The Avail Control Panel is an intuitive web-based user interface that leaves business users in control and able to design, execute, split-test, measure and report the success of their advertising and merchandising initiatives.

Avail offers unsurpassed control over the recommendation logic that determines which products are recommended. Users can select in natural language how the personalization is to take place – both what to recommend and what information to base it on. Recommendations can also be filtered by categories, price ranges, gross margin and any other attribute available.

Deployment & Integration

Deploying and integrating Avail is designed to be fast and easy. The integration process consists of two basic steps:

1. Set up a data feed to provide us with your product catalogue.
2. Deploy the tracking code and recommendation banners, e.g., onsite, in emails and as advertisements.

For each step, Avail provides all the necessary tools & personal support that you need, and online resources through our customer extranet.

Integration is even easier if you are a customer to one of our OEM partners, who offer Avail pre-integrated into their platforms.

Multi-channel Support

The Avail platform can power almost any channel: online and mobile stores, emails, advertisements, call center systems, coupons, and in-store displays.

For rendering the recommendations, Avail offers two options

1. Banner Designer – Enables you to design the complete recommendations in a visual designer tool inside the Avail Control Panel, and export the complete HTML to paste into a website, email, or ad placeholder. Fast and easy to update.
   
2. GetRecommendations API – Serves the recommendations programmatically, through Javascript or a web services API, giving you full freedom to render them in any format and system. Gives you full control over the visuals and can be used for alternative channels, e.g. coupons.

When using the Banner Designer, Avail offers pre-integrated support for the delivering recommendations using the leading email clients and advertising networks.

SaaS Delivery

Avail is delivered as Software-as-a-service (SaaS). It is a scalable, reliable and administration-free solution that enables customers to focus on their core business. Extensive, multi-layer performance monitoring and automatic capacity scaling are all included. Avail’s infrastructure is serving some of the world’s largest online retailers, such as Neckermann, La Redoute and Argos, from tier-1 data centers in the US, Ireland, and Singapore.

Avail has selected an international hosting partner in AWS, with redundant, low-latency Internet connectivity, physical access security, and redundant, physically separated data centres for immediate disaster recovery. The “cloud computing” technology used means all servers are deployed across several physical machines, providing redundancy and immediate scalability in step with demand.

Read the AWS security whitepaper or visit their web site for more information.