Big Data Can Be Hard for Retailers to Harness

Online retailing has existed for nearly 20 years, and product recommendations have been around for almost as long due to the pioneering work of Amazon.com, which applied for a patent on its collaborative filtering technology in 1998. Since then, a majority of retailers have adopted online product recommendations. Yet many of these implementations are still fairly primitive because they fail to understand an online shopper’s real-time product needs.