Intelligent Cross-Sell at Office Depot

At work, we just released a case study that's a nice progress report for Intelligent Cross-Sell, my group's main product. The featured customer is Office Depot, which runs one of the largest e-commerce sites in the world at officedepot.com—it's currently ranked #3 in the Internet Retailer 500, the Fortune 500 of retail e-commerce.

Here's the main story:

In 2007, Office Depot deployed CNET Channel's Intelligent Cross-Sell solution to automate and optimize merchandising on its e-commerce site, www.officedepot.com. Doing so caused a doubling of online cross-sell revenue for the multi-channel global retailer. Cross-selling is an important tool that involves recommending accessories to products, such as a memory card with the sale of a digital camera.

One of the keys to success was utilizing Intelligent Cross-Sell's "guided automation," which combines merchandisers' knowledge with the automation and scalability of a recommendation engine. For example, Intelligent Cross-Sell's point-and-click interface allowed Office Depot merchandisers to target cross-sell opportunities by factors such as key selling features, popularity, compatibility, and brand affinity. Then, Intelligent Cross-Sell executed the rules across millions of possible product combinations. Compared to Office Depot's previous cross-selling functionality, the result was a significant increase in the number and relevance of accessories offered as cross-sell opportunities across the site. This combination of more and better cross-sells drove the increase of cross-sell revenue.

Needless to say, I'm pleased. In my line of work, results are measurable, and these are the kind of results we like to see.

The full case study is here.