ATG Committed to eCommerce Personalization

John Lovett | January 22, 2008, 09:39 AM

Ecommerce platform provider ATG announced today its intentions to acquire CleverSet, a Seattle based eCommerce personalization company, with some rather clever technology. The deal is expected to close in mid February for approximately $10M and will add to ATG’s already strong position on personalizing the online experience. The CleverSet technology is offered as Software as a Service and plans are to continue to sell the product as a stand-alone or as an integrated solution within the ATG commerce platform.

It’s no secret that ATG is bullish on personalization, which is currently delivered through its Adaptive Scenario Engine, available to every current customer as an inherent feature to the ATG platform. The core ATG personalization solution is designed to better understand the customer and build lifetime customer value. They accomplish this by capturing data from multiple sources to build a holistic customer view, which can be aggregated and used for affinity tactics. Additionally, the Scenario Engine uses customer profiles and segmentation to personalize attributes and continuously adapt to changing behavior and preferences.

CleverSet brings a statistical relationship model to the mix, designed to complement the Scenario Engine by improving average order values and increasing sales lift. The technology will access ATG’s Data Anywhere Architecture to incorporate both historical and real-time behavior, past purchase history, similar shoppers’ behavior and other merchandising considerations to drive relevant recommendations.

This confluence of technologies provides deep insight into the collective customers’ psyche, with the ability to highly personalize…if… Well, if that’s what a Web site operator sets out to do. Personalization has experienced a rough road in the past 10 years, with the promise of a customized Web and relevant experiences for all. Consumers flatly rejected the notion and sent early personalization pioneers back to the drawing board. Personalization often evokes privacy concerns and the “creepy” factor detracts consumers from revealing too much about themselves. However, to quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a’ changing” and many consumers willingly post personal information about themselves and their experiences across the social pages and ecommerce sites with reckless abandon. Behavioral targeting has become commonplace and the relevance of the Web is a desired function for some, rather than a violation. Perhaps the continued consolidation of personalization and behavioral targeting technologies, acquired by lager organizations such as ATG, will take the negative connotations out of personalization. And this time around…personalization will have its day.