Shop Direct uses Hortonworks and SAS analytics to personalise customers' shopping experience

If you're shopping in the sports section and like Nike and white, the first thing you'll see is a white Nike product, says group CIO Andy Wolfe

Shop Direct, the UK firm that owns the likes of Littlewoods and Very.co.uk, has run a "personalised sort order" trial in which customers are targeted with products that fit their history and preferences, according to its group CIO, Andy Wolfe.

The firm, which recently announced profits of £71.7m, is using a combination of Hadoop, for which it uses the Hortonworks distribution, and SAS analytics, to analyse a customer's previous transactions and preferences and use them to show specific products to consumers first in the hope of making more sales, and increasing customer satisfaction.

"The essence of the trial was to look at the [customer] data, look at the browsing history and what you've been interested in before. So if you're a customer who seems to like Nike and the colour white, and you were shopping for sports [products] on our site, then we'd show you Nike products, and white products - and a combination of the two - on our site first," Wolfe told Computing at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week.

"So we're using some of the data to connect the dots, to increase conversion," he said.

But how can Shop Direct ensure that using data doesn't become intrusive?

"You have to have the customer at the heart of what you're doing; being transparent with what you're holding; giving the customer the ability to control that data," Wolfe said.

"It's about making sure that you're ultimately creating digital confidence with something that consumers feel they are getting value from, and a richer experience from us connecting the dots," he added.

Big data is unsurprisingly a huge part of Shop Direct's strategy, and the firm is investing significantly in big data technologies. Wolfe finished by adding that one of the biggest challenges is finding the data scientists that understand those big data products as they're in short supply.