Great news… Selloscope just got some great news coverage by Haydn Shaughnessy over on the Forbes Re: Thinking Innovation blog! We’ve had a great day and received some fantastic press. On behalf of Selloscope, I want to extend a sincere thanks to our Facebook and Twitter friends, old and new, who helped us get the word out. Thanks for all your support!
Remember the Netflix Prize? I do. It completely changed how I think about recommendation technology and collaborative filtering and inspired me to create something better. Something that just works. Now, Selloscope is about to change the way recommendations, personalization, and upsell work on the Web — by making recommendation technology available to everyone.
Recommender systems have received so much business interest because they can be used to drive revenue and conversion in so many ways. Social networking sites like Facebook and Match.com use recommendation technology to help users find each other; content sites like Digg help users find stories; retail sites like Amazon drive upsell and cross-sell by telling you that “people who liked that also liked this”. Media sites like Netflix help users find relevant choices from among a huge inventory, and Apple’s Genius makes constant music recommendations to many of us Apple enthusiasts. Less well-known is that direct marketers have been using these types of systems for years: Citibank only mails out credit card offers that recipients are very likely to accept. And if you’re a local business, even yellow pages sales representatives know which products and rates you’re most likely to buy.
However, most of us aren’t Match.com, or Apple, or Citibank. We’re small or mid-size retailers with stretched-thin budgets. We’re content sites that don’t have plans to hire a research scientist any time soon. We’re email marketing managers and CRM managers who could make a big difference with just a little help, product managers who need a proof-of-concept ASAP, and independent app developers with big ideas who want to get something working — tonight. We’re merchandisers with limited resources besides a lot of elbow grease and an outdated copy of Excel.
How does Selloscope put recommendation technology within the reach of smaller sites, email marketers, and app developers?
Selloscope makes recommendations plug-and-play. Small business owners and merchandisers have better things to do than implement and tune their own proprietary predictive models.
Selloscope makes it affordable. Selloscope is a monthly subscription-based service. Specific prices will be announced at launch. But rest assured that if you’re an independent app developer or a hard-working merchandiser and want to give Selloscope a try, we’ll cost you less than a few visits to Starbucks. If you use a lot of recommendations, you’ll pay a little more. And everyone will be able to take advantage of our 30-day free trial.
Selloscope minimizes or eliminates integration and development costs. Most recommendation services require complex data and product catalog integration. You can integrate Selloscope at a level that makes sense for your needs. Fuel Selloscope in one of three ways: Send data via our API, drop our JavaScript plug-in on your page, or (for all you merchandisers and email marketers out there!) you can just upload a spreadsheet. Sometimes simplicity can be revolutionary.
Selloscope makes it easy to receive recommendations. Get recommendations from Selloscope in any of three ways: Receive one or more recommendations via our API or a JavaScript call, or simply download a list of top recommendations for each user. You can even upload your email list and Selloscope will append the top recommendation(s) for each user. Awesome? Check.
No purchase or behavioral history? No problem. Just follow our guide (available at launch) to rank your products or content in the order you’d prefer to sell them (rank by profitability) or in the order you think they’ll be most popular (rank by your favorites). Just begin sending behavioral data to Selloscope when you can (again, through the API, through JavaScript, or keep Selloscope updated by uploading spreadsheet data.)
Will Selloscope work with my site? In a word: Yes. Selloscope is built to work with your site because it accepts any string as an item it can work from. Internal ProductIDs? Great. Text descriptions? No problem. Full URLs? Heck yeah. Links to different products and content all over the Internet? Now you’re talking!
Selloscope is a fundamental building block for your business and for the Internet. You can use Selloscope for merchandising, upsell, and cross-sell. You can use it to improve conversion and ROI on-site and through email marketing. But you can also use it to build a movie recommendation app that outperforms Netflix. You can build a YouTube video channel that people can’t stop watching. You can build an iPhone app recommender that really works. You can even build an app that tells people what to buy their girlfriend on her birthday. Who’s going to be first? Will it be you?
Selloscope.com comes online and begins accepting pre-registrations the first week of August 2010. Full site functionality will be available in early September 2010.
