How Genius Books beats Amazon at their own game to influence 21.9% of all sales with personalized recommendations … on Shopify!

The Genius Book Publishing story

Genius Book Publishing has its origins in a sincere and fervent love of books of its founders Leya and Steven Booth.

In 2011 a friend (they’re looking at you, Harry Shannon!) discovered Steven was “technical” and asked him to make an ebook for him. When that worked out, Harry sent more business their way.

Then Steven and Harry wrote the first Sheriff Penny Miller novel, The Hungry, together, and they were considering shopping it around to publishers or self-publishing. The decision was made to create a publishing company for the book, and Genius Book Publishing was born. The Hungry became a seven book series, and was a massive success (at least in terms of the early days of self-publishing). Since then, Genius Books has published over 60 titles in genres ranging from horror to mystery-thrillers to true crime to coffee table books about music, photography, and history.

 

Before

Steven, Genius Books‘ founder, desired a way to invigorate product discovery on his Shopify store. Attracting buyers to his site was no problem. His problem was visiting audiences weren’t connecting with the incredible stable of authors and genre literature he was merchandising. Shopify growth was stagnant.

By his own admission, when he came across Obviyo in the Shopify app store – he couldn’t believe his eyes. Having built his publishing business on the back on Amazon’s marketplace, he always knew about the power of how Amazon was always able to get his products in front of a captive, ready to buy audience. From his point of view, the act of product discovery is the business of publishing.

Learning Obviyo had partnered with Amazon to bring their product recommendation AI to Shopify, he jumped at the chance try it. He subsequently told us having this app installed was like having access to “Amazon’s battle plans”.

After

Steven and his team quickly got their hands dirty with the app, and deployed a dozen Growth Bots – ready to go personalized product recommendations – effectively reimagining the entire homepage as a living, breathing personalized recommender. Within the first few days, 16.7% of all sales could be attributed to Obviyo’s personalized recommendations. That is to say, each individual visitor now coming from their marketing campaigns saw a much broader, tailored curation of authors and titles.

Visitors weren’t just engaging more, more visitors were buying.

Results

Time period: 30 days