Buying gifts for people revolve around 3 processes: knowing what they want (wish lists or gift registries), knowing what they might want (based on hints from them or friends) and taking risks to think they may want an item you’ve come across. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could use a relevancy engine such as CRITEO to come up with gifts for friends and relatives at Christmas-time or birthdays and anniversaries? Imagine taking two married users and letting the prediction engine show what BOTH might want or need.

Right now we have individual wish lists available at many online retailers as well as big retail chains. The Target Corporation allows anyone to create a wishlist that anyone else can print and fulfill at any location. But these are very one-dimensional, only based on what the actual wish-list creator produced. What keeps these retailers from entering into an agreement to use a prediction engine? For now, it is definitely a chicken-and-egg situation!

A retailer won’t use the engine until they can enter user data. Users won’t know about the prediction ability until the retailer utilizes the product. Yet most retailers, even small-sized ones, can easily produce a history of past purchases. Retailers can track purchases based on credit card numbers used (last 4 digits plus date), or on acquired phone numbers. Retailers can even create group-users based on zip codes or other acquired information. By providing this information to a prediction engine (through an API), the retailer can immediately start offering predictions on relevancy for others to use to make gift-buying decisions. Buying gifts are one of the hardest things to do — we never know if someone wants something we’ll buy them. Yet gift receipts are commonplace now, for this very reason. If a retailer can use returned gifts as a resource for provider better relevancy for future predictions, the gift-giving market could blossom and the retailer could get a real return-on-investment: better predictions mean less returns AND happier customers. A retailer can put themselves ahead of the competition by offering this sagely advice.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under Possible Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.