IP Sidekick

IP Sidekick is an API that returns information about an IP address. You can use it to customize your content based on the visitor’s location or display their country.

Read this first

Checklist for Personalisation for e-commerce sites

Here’s a checklist of things you can personalise for your users if you run an e-commerce site:

  • Mention user’s name
  • Have a wish list
  • Recommend products based on previous purchases by user
  • Recommend products to new users based on previous purchases by users from the same country/city
  • Check if you ship to the user’s location
  • Show shipping rate for the user based on their location
  • Switch the user interface to the user’s language. Remember to make the option to switch language obvious. If you show them a language they don’t understand, you want them to be able to override it or risk user frustration
  • Send non-transactional emails to users at the end of the day
  • Target promotions based on user location and special events. Your site probably runs a 4th of Jul sale for the U.S, but do you give out coupons to users from smaller countries like Singapore or Malaysia for special holidays?

Continue reading →


Personalisation

Personalisation of your content, user interface and how your service interacts with users can improve your product dramatically.

Instead of sending every email to your users immediately, you can send lower priority emails only when it is day time, and continue to send transaction emails — such as orders — immediately. Services that send digest emails — a summary of activity — can send those near the end of the day.

E-commerce sites can check if they ship to the user’s location and inform users of rates accordingly.

You might show a different version of your web site with the appropriate language if it is already localized.

The nice thing about personalisation is there are lots of low hanging fruits and you can support personalisation progressively.

The simplest way to start supporting personalisation like this is to use a geolocation such as IP Sidekick to retrieve physical location...

Continue reading →