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You're Gonna Love This
April 2000
An Excerpt
 The more accurate your product recommendations, the more likely you are to capture add-on sales. With collaborative filtering tools, you can drive personalization to the next level.
The concept behind collaborative filtering parallels what direct marketers have been doing for years, says Jim Hathaway, Director of Business Development for GráficaGroup, an advertising and marketing firm in Chester, NJ. "You're taking snapshots of customers and seeing similar patterns among groups to predict what people will be interested in buying."
Just one tool in the box
Despite the success marketers have had with collaborative filtering, the technology isn't a cure-all. For one, the software may not realize when someone is buying a gift. If the application relies on that purchase to make a recommendation, the recommendation is likely to be irrelevant. Retailers can work around this by offering buyers free gift cards or wrapping. Presumably, customers who accept the offer will be buying for someone else, says Gráfica's Hathaway. The application can then make note of that.
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