Home shopping retailer Ideal Shopping Direct has outlined plans to develop personalised offers across web and phone channels, after it generated £1.1m of web sales using a recommendation engine in a month.

Ideal, which was sold earlier this year in a £78.3m deal to private equity firm Inflexion, said the average order value of orders containing a recommended product grew by 18% compared with the previous month, and sales totalled £1.1m.

Head of ecommerce Mark Russell said a good proportion of the sales generated were due to recommendation software. The company is using the software to collect data on customer journeys, including where they browse and what they purchase.

Russell said there are plans to develop the use of personalisation across the company. The next step will be producing individual recommendations tailored for each recognised customer. It is also planning to allow customers to produce their own recommendation lists and share these via social networks.

“The software hit our sales target very quickly – we have just scraped the surface of what personalisation can do for us,” Russell said.

The RichRelevance software was rolled out in April, and Russell said the use of personalisation will develop over the coming months.

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