In a great article regarding the future of merchandising, Joe Lichtman gives a view of the future of eCommerce. At the end of the rainbow, we’ll get microsites for everyone. Sounds familiar? It should: it’s the Amazon model. Lichtman explains that the reason the site is so compelling is because every single experience is built on top of understanding you. The social aspect of all of this includes features such as Listmania, you might also like, and people like you also bought. It is an essential part of the buying process and has become more-and-more expected on-line. So if you’re a retailer out there, can you afford not to offer personalized merchandising? Lichtman says no and introduces the terms searchandising and personalized merchandising to show how search makes it all happen:

Can You Be Like Amazon?

Two fifths of U.S. consumers now expect retailers to offer them personalized promotions, according to research from Gartner. Yet only 16 percent of retailers are using personalized recommendations tools, according to Forrester. Now is the time to get personal before your competition does.

Like Amazon, you should be focused on building a personalized online shopping experience that is based on personalized search, navigation and recommendations. What’s important, though, is that you look at personalized merchandising as a cohesive strategy. The personalization piece parts — your search engine, navigation engine and recommendations engine — must work together as one. Only then can you ensure true personalization and have a single point of management.

While a dynamic, personalized storefront will automate some aspects of the online merchandising process, the role of the online merchandiser will become even more critical. There will always be a need to overlay the right set of business rules to align personalization with the key needs of the retailer. The benefit of the personalized storefront is that it allows you to merchandise for future conditions instead of reacting to past trends and data.

The concept of a personalization and recommendation engine is critical not just to retailers but also to Enterprises whose knwoledge workers benefit from being able to serendipitously discover what others like that they might also like, what others have found that they may also find useful, what others have created that they might also be able to monetize. Paula in her post and JP in his fifth of a series allude to this very thread that what we like is more important than what we see.