E-commerce project leaders will be dismayed to read the results of the latest report from US company Jupiter Research. According to the report, only 14 per cent of consumers said personalised offers convinced them to buy more often.
'Most Web site personalisation projects fail to deliver real business benefits,' said Jupiter research director Matthew Berk. 'The (Web development) industry has always assumed that a personalised Web site was a better one, both for the visitor and the site operator. Our research has found this is not the case.'
The report finds that building personalised content into a Web site can quadruple the overall cost, but the chances of getting a return on that investment are low.
It recommends that e-commerce initiatives concentrate more on site navigation and search-engine design.
More than half of the consumers that took part in the study said better navigation would entice them to buy online or visit a particular Web site more often.
UK pundits agreed that the concept of personalisation has been diluted. Forrester Research senior analyst Rebecca Jennings said: 'Often we find that personalisation doesn't live up to the hype. Consumers are lead to believe that the offers they are getting have been individually tailored. Generally speaking, none of that is true. Often, they are just having products pushed at them.'
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