33% of revenue: ExpressRex recommendation engine recommended

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

June 16, 2010 [1096 views]

In today’s earlier post I discussed work this week looking at Google Analytics traffic source data. One type of referrer I failed to mention were those marked in the reports as coming from ExpressRex.

In case anyone is keeping tabs, I did remove these "referrals" from the earlier figures and rescale the remaining numbers.

Three months ago I installed the ExpressRex app into my ecommerce store. I described the process here: Shopify recommendation engine.

The recommendation engine provides the “people who bought X also bought Y” functionality through a series of API calls and some Javascript. This means that the recommendations themselves are served by ExpressRex and appear as referrers in my reports.

What astounded me was how many of my customers (not just visitors) clicked on recommendations. Indeed the ExpressRex referrer is responsible for a full third (33%) of my revenue in the last quarter and has a 36% conversion rate.

I expected that some of my customers would be interested in what others bought but this is amazing.

Has anyone else tried this or similar hosted recommendation system? With what results?

What do you think?

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