Top Deals, made personal

The problem

Every shopper saw the same deals in the same order. A gamer, a new homeowner and a My Best Buy Total member who had just bought a TV all got one list, whatever they owned, browsed or paid for.

What I saw

A deal only counts if you want the thing.

Best Buy knew a great deal about its members: what they bought, what they browsed, which membership they held. The deals page used none of it. The gap was between what Best Buy knew about a customer and what it showed them.

What I built

I led Personalization Services, the product team behind it.

• Top Deals for each member: on Google Cloud, we took in the deals, the members, their purchase history and their click behavior (screen views, add to carts, saves) and fed them to a machine learning model that ranked, ahead of time, the deals each member was most likely to want. It launched on the Best Buy app's home page in 2024; today the same kind of ranking shows up on bestbuy.com as "Top Deals for you, based on your activity and interests." The model retrained continuously, so every view, add to cart and save made the next ranking better.
• Deals in the app: a recommendation engine that put the most relevant deals in front of paid members.
• Better customer data first: personalization is only as good as the records behind it. Customer data enrichment filled the gaps, taking matched records from 81% to 89% of a database of more than 200 million.

The result

• In May 2024, Best Buy's CEO said it had gone live with an AI-powered personalized home screen in the app, rolled out to half of app users, that could include "the newest and hottest deals," shaped by each customer's location, shopping history and membership status. Customers who received it were engaging at higher rates than expected.
• In August 2024, she said testing showed customers receiving the personalized app homepage engaged with content, products and tools almost 70% more than customers who didn't, and that it had been rolled out to all app users.
• The app's deals engine lifted paid-member conversion 38% and app engagement more than 10%.
• Enrichment added about $20 million a year in gross profit; enriched customers generated about four times the revenue of the rest. In May 2024, Best Buy's CEO said it could attribute roughly 90% of its annual revenue to known customers.

What I learned

Personalization isn't showing more. It's showing fewer, better things. Shoppers don't want a bigger catalog; they want one that knows them.