Recos, Cross/Up-Sell, Widgets & GlobalRoads

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 03:24 pm ET         

GlobalRoads has hit just the right set of buzzwords as to what they deliver- “Enterprise 2.0 Sales Automation”. Lot’s of depth in the words and the product the small team of 10 is building out there for the past almost 2 years. Core concept behind GlobalRoads’s product is to drive personalized recommendations at consumer websites. Think BestBuy or Wirefly or 1800Flowers.com or Amazon. Yeah, similar direction taken by Aggregate Knowledge, Baynote and few more. But GlobalRoad’s comes with much more.

While most the startups are hitting the not so easy recommendation path, GlobalRoads does not only that, but also delivers better customization of orders, ability to offer dynamic bundling, add cross/up sells, and smart promotions and discounting to attract more visitors. That’s not only 3 times more than what other startups are offering, but also lot of number crunching delivered all via the On-Demand service.

As for the actual gains from deploying the system, customers will have easier reach to related products and for retailers, increased sales. If you have difficulty abstracting how the product would eventually look, imagine you are out there looking to buy a LCD TV on Bestbuy.com. While that decision in itself is tough given the myriad of options, you can end up wasting more time on searching the perfect TV stand for the smaller dimensions. GlobalRoads recommendations widgets will enable easier combination offers at the site for these situations, resulting in ease of shopping for you, and higher sales of high margin accessories and parts for the retailer.

Currently the GlobalRoads program is in private beta with few retails customers signed up for the service. The service will be free for retail customers to signup and start using. From it’s end, GlobalRoads will provide support, documentation, API, rule based engine, and more to get it’s customers started quickly.

Subscription fees for the service will kick in after 1 month of being in the program and customers will pay only if improvements in sales are visible are clearly evident in the monthly revenue statement. On it’s end, GlobalRoads has built an intelligent analytics engine that tracks performance of it’s recommendations and resulting impact on earnings.

Earlier last year, GlobalRoads had shown the strength of it’s recommendation service when it participated in the competition organized by Netflix to improve recommendation accuracy of the Netflix Cinematch(SM) system. While the goal is to better the system by 10% to win the $1 million prize, GlobalRoads did better it by 5.2%.