The fourth scenario or business use case for Customer Data Platform (CDP) technology is Ecommerce Recommendations & Optimization. (The other three scenarios are described here: Scenario 1, Scenario 2, Scenario 3.)

Similar But Different...

In some respects, this scenario is similar to CDP Scenario 3: "Online Personalization & Experience Optimization. Similar to content recommendations in that scenario, this scenario deals with product recommendations. These recommendations can be based on specific attributes, user behavior, or some other criteria.

So while the concepts of personalization and recommender engines apply here, the platform focuses on commerce use cases. Capabilities such as collaborative filtering and recommendations using product attributes (ecommerce products can have huge number of attributes) become important.

Some advanced CDPs offer specific modules that bring additional capabilities to target ecommerce scenarios. These include support for features to handle shopping cart abandonment, repeat purchases, next best offers, commerce campaigns, and so forth. These platforms typically feature tighter integration with common ecommerce environments, as well as heavier reliance on machine learning-based techniques for product recommendations.

Next Steps

RSG can help you with your analysis. If you are a subscriber, you can customize our RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator to find out which CDP vendors excel at this scenario. RSG's famously hard-hitting vendor evaluations also call out specific capabilities for this scenario for each player.