eBay is set to launch an Enterprise Commerce Marketing Platform, which integrates multiple platforms, in a strategic partnership with FICO.
FICO is a prominent analytics software enterprise, enabling businesses in more than 90 countries to make informed decisions to increase levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. eBay’s new platform integrates various others, including those that it picked up through its 2011 acquisition of GSI Commerce.
The platform will enable clients to put together third-party data and information from eBay with their own proprietary data for use in areas like website optimization.
It comprises a customer engagement engine that syndicates e-mail and a customer database to deliver tailored content to customers across all selling channels.
eBay will make the platform available in the first quarter of next year.
Mark Kirschner, Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, eBay Enterprise, participated in an engaging Q&A with Loyalty360 to talk about the platform.
What factors prompted eBay to launch an Enterprise Commerce Marketing Platform?
Successful commerce marketers are continually looking for ways to better predict consumer behavior, optimize ROI of campaigns, and address the needs of individual customers. In order to meet these needs, eBay Enterprise identified an opportunity to engage in a strategic partnership with FICO to create a platform that combines the commerce insights, demand generation delivery technologies and intellectual property of eBay Enterprise with FICO’s analytics technologies to directly address these pain points and optimize the value of each individual customer’s purchasing journey.
What impact do you believe this will have on the Customer Experience and Customer Engagement?
The Commerce Marketing Platform will allow marketers to better predict consumer behavior, optimize ROI throughout the life of campaigns and relevantly address individual consumer needs. This is done by utilizing the growing amount of product and social information available about consumers’ purchasing journeys. With the Commerce Marketing Platform, marketers will possess the ability to quickly analyze and act on large amounts of data from multiple sources to spot a consumer’s intent, predict behavior and present the best offer available – giving retailers a clear competitive advantage.
What will make this unique to the marketplace?
The Commerce Marketing Platform is the coming together of a powerful mix of analytics and planning tools that integrate the best of eBay Enterprise and FICO technologies, which is otherwise unmatched in the industry. By utilizing the strengths of both companies, the Commerce Marketing Platform will allow retailers to unlock the power of data and deliver the most effective content to customers through the best combination of channels.
Commerce marketers will also be able to gain greater contextual insights into consumer engagements with eBay Enterprise’s Audience Insights Engine, a data management platform that ingests, aggregates, and analyzes data from their own customer databases, third-party data from external sources and anonymized consumer behavior personas. With the Commerce Marketing Platform, it’s fundamentally simpler to utilize multiple data sources to paint a holistic perspective of consumer engagement, creating a competitive differentiation by predicting behaviors and optimizing offers, channel selection and individual customer engagement without the need for technical data scientists.