How we built near real-time “X for you” recommender systems at Bol
At Bol, we have observed a significant increase in engagement and conversion rates since implementing a personalized product feed, prominently featured on customers' homepages as "Top deals for you". Building on this success, we have extended the feed to also include "Top picks for you," and "New for you". These personalized feed systems curate the most relevant items for each customer's homepage using a combination of their recent and historical item interactions.
Navigating the Future: An Overview of Forecasting at bol
In today's fast-paced business landscape, accurate forecasting is crucial for informed decision-making. In this article, we'll take a high-level view of forecasting at bol, shedding light on the intricacies of our approach. Join us as we explain how we, as Team Forecasting, streamline the decision making process for various business teams. In particular, we will explain how we subdivided our team based on the aggregation level of the forecasts that we are working on.
In the beginning of August, data science teams at bol.com came together for a dynamic two-day datathon. Collaborating with different teams from different disciplines, their mission was to re-imagine how we discover similar products. This innovative approach involved combining the insights of text (titles/descriptions) and images. To achieve this, they converted both text and image data into vectors and then find similar products by for example using a Faiss index and other.
At bol.com we believe Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the best way to balance product innovation and reliability. In essence it’s a particular set of standards, tools and practices that govern how you balance Dev and Ops in a DevOps software engineering team. But when should SRE teams be happy?
DBT – Data Build Tool. A development framework that combines modular SQL with software engineering best practices to make data transformation reliable, fast, and fun.
Forecasting demand at bol.com during the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people around the world and in very different ways. While governments and health organisations seek to find solutions to this global humanitarian crisis, online retailers have been put to the test of how well they can serve their customers’ needs during these challenging times. Being part of bol.com’s Forecasting Team brought these challenges closer to home, and not only because of the working from home situation.
In a series of videos, we would like to showcase how Data Science is helping us at bol, our partners, and our customers.
Hear the way the DS craft is utilized within the company in various parts of the company by the corresponding product teams/owner themselves!
They know best the impact and the improvements of incorporating the discipline in their own products.
Spaces Summit is our annual internal bol. com conference for IT, by IT, and friends: Two fun days of inspiration, knowledge sharing, bragging, and community. This year we had our first digital version of the summit.
Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn't been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more.
