Many e-commerce, blog and CMS systems offer so-called recommendations. These recommendations for systems like Magento, Shopware, WooCommerce, WordPress, PrestaShop or Spryker are manual recommendations.
You can e.g. use category based recommendations or simple upselling logics for your cart.
But are manual recommendations enough and can they really be compared to real automated and personalized recommendations? Not at all!
The Difference
There are three main differences between manual and individual recommendations:
- Manual recommendations are static or attribute based. Personal recommendations are user behaviour based.
- Manual recommendations look the same for every website visitor. Individual recommendations show the suggestions based on personal user profiles.
- Manual recommendations require lots of maintenance effort. Individual recommendations use machine learning technologies and learn automatically to generate perfect matching recommendations.
Feature Comparison
In the following table you can find a comparison of the features of a real recommendation engine like Recolize with manual recommendations.
| Feature | wdt_ID | Recolize | Manual Recommendations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual Recommendations | 1 | ||
| Cross-Sells based on Attributes (e.g. Category) | 2 | ||
| Basic Upselling | 3 | ||
| Advanced Personalized Upselling | 4 | ||
| Personalized Individual Recommendations | 5 | ||
| Automated Personalized Cross-Sells | 6 | ||
| Enhanced Filter Rules | 7 | ||
| Realtime Dashboard | 8 | ||
| URL-based Rules | 9 | ||
| Integration on Every Page Type | 10 |
Performance
One main aspect we have to discuss with nearly every customer: how to guarantee, that the automated individual recommendations perform better than manual one?
Of course there’s no guarantee and no general receipt for all kinds of products and use-cases. But we can rely on a huge experience in the personalization market:
www.demandgenreport.com/resources/infographics/2016-trends-in-personalization
As you can see: conversion rates and customer experience are hugely improved by real personalization.
Results
Compared to manual recommendations, individual recommendations deliver much better results. The logics behind personalized individual recommendations are complex and makes it possible to really suggest individual content. And individual content completely outperformes manual content. But let the numbers speak:
If you compare the revenue share of manual recommendations with the one of automated individual recommendations, you can see, that the recommendation revenue share is positively influenced 3 times as high with personalized recommendations.
Also the click rate is doubled with individual recommendations. Many websites use both: manual and individual recommendations. Very often the manual recommendations are displayed at first, because the website owners are not sure regarding the performance of individual recommendations. This even influences the click rate of individual recommendations negatively, so we’re talking of more the 3 %.
Choose the Right Recommendation Engine
Individual content is a very important topic nowadays. But lots of tools out there are only working with a huge amount of traffic, have high setup costs or are complex to integrate.
Not Recolize: we want to convince you by performance. Usable for every website or online shop of any size, with no setup costs and a 2-click integration. And premium support for free.
Yes, you can start with personalization today, give us the chance to outperform your manual logics without any integration effort for you.
