Alibris Plugs in Simularity to Power On-Site and Email Recommendations

EMERYVILLE, Calif., Dec. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Alibris, a division of Monsoon Commerce and the premier online marketplace for new and used books, textbooks, music, and movies, and Simularity, the best-in-class provider of similarity analytics for big data, announced today that Alibris is using the Simularity technology platform to bring shoppers the joy of discovering products that are destined to become new favorites.

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"We have an extremely broad and diverse inventory, so helping customers find relevant products with a more personalized shopping experience is both challenging and essential," said Casey Carey, vice president of marketing for Monsoon Commerce and general manager for Alibris Marketplace Services. "Simularity's recommendations proved to drive significant, incremental revenue in our on-site testing and marketing emails. Customer engagement has increased, integration was fast and easy, and we now generate better recommendations, much faster. It's a win all around."

"Alibris had a problem: with millions of customers and more than 150 million products in their inventory, their data was vast, but sparse. In this situation, conventional machine learning models don't work because a training subset can't cover all the products," said Liz Derr, CEO of Simularity.  "We took a different approach. Simularity's technology is specifically designed to determine similarities on a large scale, so we are able to use all of Alibris's data. With Simularity, Alibris can now make recommendations based on hundreds of millions of data points, in real time, on a single commodity server."  

Simularity's proven ability to identify similarities between products helps Alibris make better recommendations for new shoppers. Once a shopper takes an action, Alibris can personalize the shopping experience based on actions of similar shoppers. With Simularity's powerful filtering and faceting capabilities, Alibris was able to easily add customized business rules to tailor recommendations based on the location of the recommendation, type of product, available inventory, price, and product metadata such as category and author.

"The unique capabilities of Simularity give us an edge other recommendation services just can't offer: Better and faster recommendations, powered by all our data, on commodity hardware," said Carey.  

About Simularity
Simularity offers best-in-class similarity analytics for big data. Simularity's technology platform can perform both streaming and historical Big Data Analytics in a single system that scales to trillions of data points. Simularity helps innovative companies in a variety of industries – including technology, insurance, retail, healthcare, and financial services – make the most of their data. To put Simularity's technology to work for you, try Simularity's Facebook app to get personalized recommendations based on your Facebook likes.

About Alibris and Monsoon Commerce
Alibris, the retail division of Monsoon Commerce, is the premier online marketplace for independent sellers of new and used books, textbooks, music, and movies, as well as rare and out-of-print titles.  Monsoon Commerce is an e-commerce solutions company powering the online success of mid-sized merchants and multi-channel retailers. Our integrated solutions allow you to easily manage inventory, orders, and fulfillment; sell more products in more places; and intelligently price products across channels. Our more than 17,000 customers, including 2,500 online merchants and multi-channel retailers, commonly experience a level of success that is both impactful and enduring—at times, even transformational. We call it the Monsoon Effect. Learn more at monsooncommerce.com. 

SOURCE Alibris