How Newegg is personalizing the ecommerce shopping experience

Ask how ecommerce shopping experiences will advance, and personalization is never far from the top of the list.

When seeking to make a sale, understanding what a person is seeking and being able to deliver it to them has the potential to bring powerful results. With a growing amount of data available and advances in the tools that can be embedded into a user experience, there is more possibility than ever to bring these features to marketplaces and online stores.

Yet it's still early days for this evolution. Often, we find ourselves asking, What do we mean by personalization? And what will this newly personalized shopping journey look like? Ask the consumer technology ecommerce platform Newegg, and the answer appears to be that it will involve gathering information from users, and the ability to provide recommendations based on what they've said. A series of recently launched features from Newegg indicate a personalized experience can be an interactive one.

This week, the platform debuted a tool called Laptop Finder within its marketplace. Arriving as college shopping season is getting underway, this helps customers explore the options available for selecting a Windows laptop.

Customers answer a series of prompts, based on three areas:

• Primary use in five categories: home/personal, gaming, work/business, content creation and education
• Features, such as recently released, thin and light, more than eight hours of battery life, touchscreen, backlit keyboard and whether a webcam is included.
• Budget

Once these answers are provided, Newegg scores available laptops compared with a user’s preferences, and provides recommendations.

“A large portion of customers need help understanding the various options to consider when shopping for a laptop,” said Oscar Wong, senior director of product management for Newegg. “Shoppers can spend hours scouring the Internet for research, so Laptop Finder is designed to provide personalized recommendations. Our new tool helps take the guesswork out of laptop buying.”

This follows the June release of Gaming PC Finder. Through this tool, customers provide their desired monitor resolution, four games they are likely to play and budget. Newegg then grades PC builds based on performance expectations. Users can also enter their current CPU and GPU, and Newegg then makes a comparison to other CPU and GPU. It shows details like frames per second to help customers understand the opportunity that comes with upgrading.

Along with offering tools on its own platform, Newegg created a standalone resource to provide personalization. In July, it launched JustGPU.com, a site that is fully dedicated to graphics cards, which are a particular area of focus for gaming.

The tool includes features to filter by price, manufacturer, type and memory size. They can also see specs like frame rates, CPUs, monitor resolution and physical size. A comparison tool in the site allows for a side-by-side comparison.

It’s a sign of how personalization can bring increasing specialization. Any selection made on JustGPU is completed at Newegg.com. But the tool offers a destination for those seeking a specific type of product.

Ecommerce has always specialized in offering choice. Newegg’s recent launches suggest that there’s opportunity to help customers hone in on the products from that voluminous selection that match what they’re seeking. Creating moments for interaction, such as selecting the games they love playing, can provide an entry point into the shopping experience. Showing a product that aligns with their specification, in turn, could go a long way toward making it feel like its already theirs.