Partnership with Apptus integrates personalisation, intelligent search and recommendations to enhance the online shopping experience offered by e-commerce enterprises

London, UK 11th September 2012: EPiServer, an innovator in multichannel digital marketing and e-commerce software, today announced the availability of behavioural merchandising for EPiServer Commerce through a partnership with Apptus and the integration of Apptus behavioural merchandising. The add-on uses Apptus’ self-learning software to automatically generate product navigation, personalised recommendations and offers for individual visitors, helping online retailers increase customer satisfaction, conversion rates and order values.

The behavioural merchandising software features ‘plug and play’ integration with EPiServer Commerce, minimising implementation time and risk, and can be deployed easily on any number of pages using pre-built widgets. Utilising customer behavioural data in this way is a cost effective method for organisations to improve conversion rates without the need for additional resource.

The auto-generation of tailored content provided by behavourial merchandising removes the need for merchandisers to build and maintain multiple rules and settings in order to deliver a personalised, up to date experience. Therefore it is particularly suited to helping companies with large or complex product catalogues to present customers with the most relevant search results, offers and product recommendations.

The automatic recommendations are based on an array of data including past purchases, trending top sellers, shopping basket, and recent activity. Apptus’ technology is also the only existing solution that uses the same behavioural software engine to power both search/navigation and recommendation functions.

“Taking e-commerce to the next level means personalisation is an essential part of the online shopping experience, but providing a personalised visitor experience based on huge and complex product catalogues can be a real challenge," said Bob Egner, vice president of product management at EPiServer. “This new behavourial merchandising add-on will reduce the work required for our customers to personalise while providing a powerful tool that enables them to increase conversions and boost order values.”

Michael Mokhberi, CEO at Apptus said, "Creating relevance in sales-related interactions is a great challenge for online retailers. Choosing a combination of EPiServer Commerce and Apptus Behavioural Merchandising means a unified and easy-to-install solution for personalised search, navigation and recommendations. Until now, solutions with this level of advanced capabilities have only been available to large retailers with multi-million dollar budgets. The cooperation between Apptus and EPiServer enables unparalleled relevance for online retailers.”

For further information on Apptus behavioural merchandising for EPiServer Commerce, please visit: www.episerver.com/addons/apptus