nFlate Personal Recommendation Engine for Shopify

Christmas is fast approaching, but it’s not too late for Shopify webstore users to get a final boost to their Christmas sales. nFlate, a new data-science based recommendation engine has launched just in time for the holiday season.

Although it’s early days, nFlate customers are already seeing 100%-200% uplift in conversion rates, using similar recommendation carousels to those you’ll be accustomed to seeing on sites such as Amazon.

Currently, just days after launch, nFlate are already seeing a 1%-5% increase revenue increases across their partner sites. Whilst this is relatively small we’d expect to see it increase in the future as retailers roll out additional carousels on their websites.

The recommendation engine options

nFlate currently offer seven different carousels. Of these, “Items You Recently Viewed” and “Recommendations Based on Your Interests” are definitely more applicable to larger merchants with an established frequently returning user base. Any site can make use of their “Currently Trending” (Site) and “Currently Trending” (by Collection) options.

The carousels that are perfect for webstores with lower traffic are “People That Viewed This Also Viewed”, “People That Bought This Also Bought” and “Frequently Bought Together” recommendations. These can highlight the broad range of the products you have to offer as well as encourage larger basket sizes from add-on sales.

Where do you put nFlate?

nFlate can sit practically anywhere you’d like it to on your Shopify webstore. Depending on the carousel you choose it could be your home page, a product page, a checkout page or even a thank you for your purchase page. You get to choose which (and how many) carousels to display and where you’d like them to appear.

The technical bits

Data Science is an expensive game, eBay spent millions to acquire companies such as Decide, Hunch and Positronic to buy in technology to help them recommend what you might want to buy… the jury is still out on how successful they’ve been. Now with nFlate you can have similar recommendations on your website and, although still complex, it’s relatively easier as you likely have a lot less products than eBay for a recommendation engine to sift through.

Small businesses often lack the technology of larger businesses and that’s what nFlate aim to address. Certainly you can find product carousels from a variety of providers, but nFlate have two killer advantages. Firstly nFlate’s solution is data science driven, they offer their recommendation algorithms to deliver product personalization in real-time to your site.

The second is a more practical aspect, taking only 60 seconds to install, nFlate provide perfect site-matching carousels that look like they were designed for your website. Even if you have a completely custom theme, nFlate can generally match your site’s look and feel within minutes. Of course with clever CSS you can skin practically any web app to your design, but how many small businesses have the inhouse expertise to do this and who would want to when nFlate does it on the fly?

Pricing and free 90 day trial

Good news, nFlate are a start up and currently offering a full 90 days free trial before they start charging customers for their service. Costs when they do kick in are expected to start at around $19.99 per month, but it’ll be towards the end of Q1 2016 before you’ll need to spend a penny on their service.

You can download the nFlate Shopify app for free and be up and running with your own personal recommendation engine on yours Shopify website before the weekend and capitalise on the final Christmas traffic and then the New Year sales, to maximise profits over the holiday period.