| > Target, macy’s, walmart, jet, etc all face this challenge. I've been buying more household items from Jet recently because their smaller category is easier to navigate. Plus there's no third-party sellers and no pricing confusion like there is with Amazon vs. Amazon Fresh vs. Amazon Pantry. > among them search result personalization Agree 100%. Retailers need to consider the sometimes overlapping contexts of browsing history, purchases, and importantly the current browsing session (with weighting given to cart contents). Somebody currently browsing for food items should see food items when searching for "turkey", not dog food. My favorite search example that fails without context is "dress". Does it mean "dress", "dress socks", or "dress shirts"? Even if it means "dress", are we talking about women's or girl's dresses? I did an experiment a few years ago and found that it was possible to improve search relevancy dramatically by keeping track of items looked at and purchased, bucketing by category/sub-category, with an exponential decay and using this to boost popular categories in results. It's terribly low tech, but it gives a lot better results than no personalization. There's a bunch of retailers that I visit frequently (and purchase from) that force me to search, the filter by men's, and do this for _every_ search. It would be great if they could just learn this coarse-grained level of personalization. > The fact that Amazon fails to personalize search results is evidence of the difficulty & opportunity here The opportunity for Amazon is massive. They don't seem to consider my purchase history at all when ranking products, for example if I search for "olive oil", the 31st item is the one that I've purchased three times in the last couple of years and the _only_ olive oil I've purchased. I've spent a big chunk of the last decade trying to improve ecommerce search and it's a very neglected area across the board. |