California Apparel News

Closing the sale is one of the oldest games in retail. E-tailers have their own tech-driven ways to get consumers to buy an item and buy extras. There are widely used collaborative filtering programs, or programs that pre-determine what a consumer will be seeking. Amazon.com wields a collaborative filtering tool when it offers shoppers product recommendations based on what they have purchased from the site in the past.

A San Diego–headquartered technology company, Certona, recently announced a patent for a targeted-marketing program that goes a few steps beyond collaborative filtering, said Meyar Sheik, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. Sheik said the program will increase a retailer’s average online orders 25 percent to 50 percent, and it can anticipate what products and content will resonate with a shopper after a few clicks.

The program currently uses the unwieldy moniker of U.S. Patent 8566256, “universal system and method for representing and predicting human behavior.” It looks to boost sales with one of the largest and hardest-to-predict groups of shoppers browsing e-tailing stores. These are the consumers who don’t register on e-commerce sites and anonymously spend a few minutes on the site before leaving.

“We sit there like a good sales associate and observe what interests or doesn’t interest everyone,” Sheik said. Certona has worked with retailers such as Sports Chalet, Puma and Frederick’s of Hollywood.

But Sheik stresses that his program will watch without being invasive. Certona’s patented program avoids the controversial issue of collecting personal information from people browsing e-commerce sites—information such as names, Social Security numbers or credit-card numbers—a company statement said. Certona’s program strips away shoppers’ personal information before it starts tracking where they go on the site. “It’s not invasive,” Sheik said. “[The patented system] is a combination of art and science. With art, we have an easy-to-use Web-based interface where retailers can create rules and experiences to curate the experience for consumers. The science is the [system’s] algorithms.”

The data processing of the algorithm can deduce information from a consumer’s IP address, or where the shopper’s computer or device is located. It could help in personalizing the e-shopping experience for the consumer. For example, if an IP address is based in Los Angeles and there’s a heat wave in the city, the system’s personalization technique can direct the shopper to warm-weather clothes.

Judah Phillips, an author on data-processing policy and founder of Boston-area analytics consulting firm SmartCurrent, believed that Certona’s patent was unique and the market was going to grow.

“[Market intelligence firm] IDC predicts the digital universe to double in size by 2020; thus we can expect big data [and analytics for retailers] will become increasingly more important to retailers beyond the bigger retailers later this decade and next. And that’s good for companies like Certona, which differentiates with patented data science-based approaches to personalization.”