E-commerce AI Leader Fanplayr Says Businesses Must Adapt to New Privacy Restrictions for Holiday Season

Anonymized user identification will allow businesses to overcome data challenges caused by tracking changes in 2021

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Sep 30, 2021, 09:00 ET

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fanplayr, the global leader for e-commerce intelligence solutions, including a patent for Segmentation as a Service, urges businesses to prepare now for tech changes that will impact holiday sales during this pivotal year particularly with Deloitte forecasting an 11 to 15% increase in 2021 holiday e-commerce sales.

Several changes have led to the proverbial perfect storm leading up to this year's holiday sales period. First, the dramatic shift to online commerce in a short period of time, in large due part to the global COVID-19 pandemic, has forced businesses of all sizes to expand their online presence as a percentage of sales in order to survive.

Second, Google has begun making changes in tracking to initiate the process of eliminating third-party cookies by 2023. This has resulted in businesses having less intelligent data about their customers' online buying behaviors and therefore having less ability to respond with relevant offers and information to encourage sales.

Finally, according to Gartner's annual CMO survey, marketing budgets are projected to be down in 2021 (from 11% to 6.4% of revenues) despite businesses trying to regain momentum after 2020. Meaning every dollar counts, and highly-targeted, more tailored data will be required in order to increase companies' ROI, attract and convert high-quality leads, and retain current customers throughout this holiday season.

According to Simon Yencken, CEO and co-founder of Fanplayr, companies unprepared to mitigate these challenges in user identification and adjust for digital growth will miss out on critically important holiday sales. "With a positive projection in holiday sales, companies must deliver relevant offers and information to customers at key points in the decision making process," says Yencken. "Without those data-driven interactions, businesses are at risk of falling short on sales goals during the holiday season."

Fanplayr's recently announced solution, PrivacyID, protects user data by assigning user identifiers and anonymizing the information collected, allowing customers to access user information and share it with third-party providers without breaking privacy regulations or compromising user security.

Other attempts at privacy-sensitive data collection -- most notably Google's FLoC -- are less useful to companies because they aggregate users into large groups. Advertisers can target the groups but not the individual which gives Google more control and companies less personalization and ability to connect with individual users.

"With PrivacyID, data is collected continuously any time a user interacts with a customer's website or any of their third-party services such as SMS and email providers," added Yencken. "This is critically important because the platform allows customers to have a clear picture of the user experience thereby helping sales conversions, especially during the critical holiday period, while maintaining the utmost integrity of the user data,"

Fanplayr has been granted provisional patent protection on the PrivacyID technology and has begun providing the product to customers in preparation for the holiday season.

About Fanplayr

Fanplayr is a global leader in e-commerce behavioral data, using machine learning and AI to enable businesses to increase conversion rates and revenue, collect more leads, and retarget visitors with personalized recommendations during and after the shopping experience. Fanplayr is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with offices in New York, Buenos Aires, Brazil, Mexico, Milan, London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Hamburg, Melbourne and Tokyo. https://fanplayr.com/