Experimentation-powered personalization comes full circle
So far, over two years, FARFETCH has onboarded multiple teams all using one single framework for experimentation. This means the platform can innovate at every stage of the customer journey, both on its B2C front in its marketplace and on the B2B side with its partners. Through the standardization of experimentation tools and best practices across teams, FARFETCH has been able to adapt products for its users at an incredible rate, in turn helping accelerate the business’ growth.
One of FARFETCH’s biggest successes has been its creation of Inspire, its internal recommendations engine. Like most e-commerce companies, FARFETCH initially used an external solution that helped the platform generate a personalized experience for users, helping them find products on the marketplace. But FARFETCH wanted to take its personalization to a higher level, with the ambition of always offering a truly luxury 1:1, personalized experience that could be scalable.
This resulted in FARFETCH building its in-house solution, Inspire, that is today an essential part of its offering, both to consumers and to its partners. This product uses continuous experimentation on digital experiences as well as in the business logic and algorithms, to better tailor each specific touchpoint of the user journey. Each experiment results in new learnings, which inform the premise of the next test. Experimentation program learnings are shared with the entire company to help identify and define better digital products, and ultimately brought the experimentation process on a full circle journey at FARFETCH. This approach really taught the team that failed experiments were just as valuable, if not better, than successful ones to learn and improve the experience.