Personali, A Service That Works To Optimize Discounts Online, Raises $12M

Personali, an online service that retailers can use to adjust prices and discounts in real time, said it has raised $12 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners.

Retailers can integrate Personali code into their online commerce presence. When a customer visits a page, the retailer will check with the rules that Personali has created for a specific product, which is based on things like consumer behavior, inventory, shelf life and profit margin. If it determines if it can have a better chance at closing a sale, that customer will be offered some kind of an incentive like a discount.

That, in theory, leads to a greater number of sales for an online retailer while still retaining a healthy profit margin on a sale. CEO Noam Javits said if the margin is below 10%, then an incentive isn’t offered. But if it nears something like 20%, an incentive is applied as a fraction of that profit margin. If a 20% discount is offered on the product, that only removes 4 percentage points from the profit margin while helping ensure an additional sale, he said.

That process has led to about $200 million in incremental additional sales for the retailers Personali works with in the past year and a half, Javits said.

“The consumer is an active participant in naming their own price, selecting incentives, personalizing their budget,” Javits said. “It happens on the product page. We change the pricing element on the real time, and the customer satisfaction level is skyrocketing.”

The process is not entirely unheard of: retailers like Amazon are even experimenting with tools that let customers make their own bids on products instead of having to pay a direct list price, for example.

One of Personali’s partners is Sears, which despite being one of the oldest brands that seems to be less and less relevant every day to a younger generation still has around $5 billion in annual sales. Javits said the company has also brought on 6 of the top 50 e-commerce sites in the U.S., though he would not specify which ones.

The latest deal brings Personali, which is about three years old, to about $15 million in funding.

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