Advantages of Using a Recommendation Engine

It is vital to understand that to grow an online business, one needs to adapt to the ever-changing innovations and technology pertaining to the same industry. A recommendation engine is one such advancement that has been in the industry for nearly two decades. However, enterprises realized the recommendation engine’s true potential back in 2012 when Amazon made revenue of 34.4 Billion USD; according to McKinsey & Company, over 35 percent of this revenue came from Amazon’s recommendation engine. Clearly, a recommendation engine increases a company’s revenue if used in the right way. 

Here are five advantages of using a recommendation engine.

1. Personalized Recommendation

Customers tend to go back to the shop where they are greeted graciously, and find everything they want with a quick turnaround time. When doing online browsing or shopping, customers get happy when they experience the same. With the recommendation engine’s different filtering techniques and algorithms, creating a personalized homepage for each customer is possible. Needless to say, the customers will get what they want and visit again.

2. New Product Discovery

When a product is introduced on a website, chances are people won’t know anything about it unless it’s a product like an i-phone or a movie like Avengers. This means that the companies will have to invest in the marketing of the products. However, with a recommendation engine, it is relatively more straightforward. When a new product is added to a website, they are categorised under their respective product portfolios. These new products are then recommended to customers under the category of ‘Frequently Bought Together’ or ‘Recently Added Products’. These recommendations are usually a win-win situation for both customers and website owners, as the customers might get what they want, and the owners can budget on their marketing efforts.

3. Increase Website Traffic

What happens when you are about to turn off your phone but come across a piece of exciting news? You might end up scrolling through your phone for another 4 to 5 hours. This is exactly what happens on the website, the only difference is that instead of news, customers on your website will explore different products. For example, when you are on an OTT platform watching any series, you end up binge watching it, or start the next season. Hence, the traffic to your website will increase. 

4. Provide Insightful Reports

A recommendation engine’s job is to generate recommendations and provide the admin with sufficient data about each user. The data is generated in a timed manner with insights on the products and website, for instance, it can tell you how many people visited which product and its pathway. These Reports allow companies to analyse these insights and based on those analytics, they can choose whether to change a product’s price or not or variations of which product should they include on their website. Additionally, some SaaS products like Alie offer customization options to give you the liberty to create your own tracking algorithms. So, after an analytics report is generated,   the admin  can make changes to their inventory or product pricings, and change algorithms.

5. Increase in Revenue 

With Netflix and Amazon’s recommendation engine’s success, it is needless to say that giving recommendations to your customers can increase your business’s revenue. All the four points mentioned above lead to two things: greater user experience and higher customer retention, which leads to an increase in revenue. 

Wrapping Up,

A website with a recommendation engine has the potential to increase time being spent on the website and more revenue. It is up to you to decide which way you want to take your company. Success? Then start researching how to build or buy a recommendation engine. If you plan to build one for yourself, keep in mind your budget, time constraints, and the resources you would need to build one; if you are short of all these things, buying a recommendation engine would be an ideal solution. While the several options available in the market may daunt you, it’s always useful to take the free trial before finalizing on any recommendation engine. Either that, or you can opt for the world leader. Alie is an AI based recommendation engine that has been designed to integrate with any website or app and provide your users with the best possible outcomes based on their behaviour.

Start today with our 14-day free trial of Alie and take advantage of the liberty to add your customs algorithms and even track all real-time recommendations provided to your customers.