Whether you choose bread with a few large holes, many small holes, or densely packed with no holes depends on how you plan to use it, as well as your habits and preferences. Your choice of personalization solution is a choice of the holes you’ll live with (or try to fill), as well as a choice of the functions that surround the holes.
I see current personalization offerings as tackling two different problem sets: marketing campaigns or online selling. These two problem sets have a lot of overlap, and it would certainly be wonderful to see one personalization solution address all the functions for all marketing departments: but you go to war with the bread you can get, not the bread you want. For now, you can have hole-bread, but not whole-bread.
Locayta’s offering address online selling, aiming to provide what merchants need to drive web and mobile sales. Locayta’s online merchandising platform (‘Freestyle Merchandising”) powers site search, navigation, recommendations, and behavior-driven merchandising, packaged as services that include:
Visual Merchandising. Site search, recommendations and behavioral merchandising
Locayta Search. Intelligent navigation, predictive type-ahead, and Locayta Balance Factor which enables retailers to adjust search results based on metrics such as margin, popularity, newness to site and stock availability
Locayta Shop Window. A click to buy widget to deploy on 3rd party sites
Locayta M-Commerce. A click-to-buy iPhone shopping application
Locayta Search Mobile. A full text search engine for Apple iOS
Locayta Gift-finder. A tool to help shoppers choose a gift via a series of questions
Locayta’s differentiator is the combination of recommendations, search and visual merchandising in a single software framework, with a rules engine providing merchandiser control. Plus selling widgets to help merchants deal with unfamiliar touchpoints – mobile and 3rd party sites.
Locayta offers solutions for personalizing merchandising, search and navigation. The company has approximately one hundred customers in North America, Europe and Asia. Locayta was incorporated in 2002, and is headquartered in London UK. Its first product, Locayta Search, was launched in 2003. Merchandising, recommendations and behavioral capabilities were launched in 2009. Customers include Oakley, Hallmark, Urban Outfitters, British Telecom, Tesco clothing, Boohoo.com, and Superdry.
On Target 