What is the difference between customization and personalization of an
eCommerce website' To understand the distinction, one must first
understand the definitional difference between these two terms in the land
of eCommerce. To enable a consumer to customize his or her product, a
customer is able to, with a fair amount of speed and ease, render, change,
or utilize the product in such a fashion so that it may uniquely speak to
his or her needs. To engender a website that is personalized, however,
merely means that that the virtual space has a quality of friendliness or
specificity that is not necessarily specifically tailored to the individual
customer, in the customer's hands, but merely creates a kind of
personalized ambiance or ease of use to all customers.
Consider the website Amazon.com. One of the website's unique features
is that it enables a customer to customize his or her personal settings,
when surfing the site. For instance, the customer can arrange to receive
periodic updates when his or her favorite authors have just produced a
particular piece of writing. Customers can create lists that do not
necessarily serve the vending purposes of the author of the website. For
instance, in marketing a particularly unusual book, a customer who was
taken by Gravity's Rainbow can list other such postmodern fiction upon a
list that can be accessed by other users of the website, seeking to buy
Ultimately, the Amazon.com customer profits from the website because
he or she can scan such customized lists, meet people online whom have
similar literary interests, and also put his or her own interests on a mass
marketed website in such a fashion that his or her own erudition is exposed
in a public forum, much like a diary. The website owner benefits from such
customized lists because individuals are encouraged to buy books of a
similar type, when they see them listed ...