Personalized Web Merchandising

Explains Vahe Katros, director of retail applications at Blue Martini, a San Mateo, CA-based company that creates Web merchandising software:

There’s two issues to versioning catalogs: how many different merchandise assortments you can have, and how many items you can have in a given assortment. With print catalogs, the number of assortments is limited by printing and database technologies. The size of assortment is limited by paper and mailing costs in terms of how much you can afford to send to customers. There is no limit to the size or number of the assortments that one can deliver on an Internet commerce site. A million different people could have their own unique assortment with a million items each.