Asos to make Amazon-style personal recommendations

Asos.com has become the latest retailer to make personalised recommendations for customers.

Instead of showing the same suggested products to every person, the fashion etailer will use a customer’s previous buying history, and the similar purchases of others, to generate more targeted suggestions for new purchases.

It’s the latest example of a trend that started with Amazon (and Tesco Clubcard in the offline world) and will see customer’s inboxes or online shopping baskets filling up with product suggestions made based on what they’ve bought before.

Asos.com hopes the tool will help customers navigate its 35,000 products, and make it easier for them to find things they like. “Personalised recommendations offer our customers a bespoke shopping experience,” says e-commerce director James Hart, who’s working with technology company Fredhopper.

Personalising product recommendations is a growing trend, especially among fashion retailers who can learn about a customer’s tastes from their past purchases or even from the products they’ve browsed. Increasingly advanced technology means more retailers can make use of the customer data they hold on their systems – if done properly it should yield higher sales, but etailers need to be careful they don’t scare customers off by being too insistent and making them feel they’re being stalked across the web.