Personalisation works effectively on a small and select group of sites. It works in large part because books are a hugely diverse group of products which embody peculiarly strong sets of preference information. Try to make make personalisation work outside the realm of books, CDs and auction sites and you run a far higher risk of doing your dough. Such was the fate of Levi Strauss, whose Stylefinder feature had consultants pointing excitedly to it right up to the moment when Levi's dumped it from their site. The oft-cited Amazon personalisation success is not a harbinger of Internet commerce's future, but an atypical example, to borrow a notion from Jakob Nielsen.
Traditional business likes the Internet personalisation story.
For the most part, this is a delusion. It is an idea that most Web sites should, for now, dismiss. Since at least 1997, systems that deliver a different mix of information and tools to each site user have been touted as the cure for Web sites' woes. But now site managers are hearing clear warnings about the financial dangers of personalisation. The first publicly available analysis of personalisation's real worth came in 1999 from Mainspring, a strategy firm with an unusually clear-eyed view of Web commerce.