Otto
AI-Driven Personalization – Cookie-Free, Privacy-Compliant, Scalable
Industry: Retail & eCommerce
Otto is one of Europe’s largest e-commerce platforms, offering a wide range of products across fashion, lifestyle, home, and technology.
As part of its ongoing digital transformation, Otto is focused on creating even more personalized and seamless shopping experiences for millions of customers. Since relevant product recommendations are a key driver of both customer satisfaction and conversion in the highly competitive fashion segment, personalization plays a central role in Otto’s strategy. At the same time, the company remains fully committed to data privacy and transparency, which are essential pillars of its digital initiatives.
Therefore, to combine maximum personalization with full data sovereignty, Otto was looking for a solution that could enable customized shopping experiences – without cookies, without tracking, and without traditional user profiles.
Status quo
The existing recommendation systems relied on basic filters, static rules, or historical purchase data. These methods were not capable of capturing individual visual preferences or responding in real time.
This was particularly problematic in the fashion sector, where customer decisions are heavily influenced by subjective factors such as colors, cuts, patterns, or styles – all of which conventional systems failed to recognize.
At the same time, maintaining product recommendations required significant manual effort. Editorial teams had to continuously update categories, curate collections, and manually adapt to trends. Privacy-driven restrictions made tracking-based approaches increasingly problematic, with stricter regulations like the GDPR posing legal and operational risks.
The challenge
Otto’s key challenge was to implement a personalization technology that fully complies with the GDPR while delivering relevant results in real time.
The solution needed to operate without cookies or user profiles, yet still accurately derive visual preferences from live interactions, such as scrolling patterns or the time spent viewing specific product images. In addition to ensuring privacy compliance, the technology had to scale effortlessly in order to serve millions of users simultaneously, all without compromising performance.
Furthermore, seamless integration into Otto’s sophisticated, microservice-based shop architecture was another critical requirement. At the same time, the system needed to autonomously detect emerging fashion trends, dynamically adapt to assortment changes, and remain fully operational even without ongoing manual adjustments.
The solution
The implemented solution is powered by an AI engine that leverages advanced image recognition combined with real-time interaction analysis.
Through automatic detection of visual characteristics – such as color schemes, patterns, cuts, or styles – the system determines which elements resonate with each user. It captures non-verbal signals like scrolling behavior, time spent on product images, and navigation depth to build a dynamic preference profile within seconds. Instead of relying on cookies, IDs, or historical data, the engine delivers highly relevant product recommendations instantly and continuously refines them based on individual browsing behavior.
In addition, the AI learns from platform-wide interaction patterns, detects trends in real time, and optimizes the recommendation logic accordingly. Integration into Otto’s webshop was simple and efficient via a lightweight JavaScript snippet or API – with no major architectural changes required.
The result
With this AI-driven solution, Otto delivers a highly personalized shopping experience while maintaining full compliance with the GDPR. Customers receive recommendations that match their visual preferences in real time – without the need for tracking or data profiling.
This transformation directly impacts key business metrics, with significant improvements in conversion rates, average basket value, and time-on-site. At the same time, the workload for editorial teams has been substantially reduced, as the AI automatically handles tasks such as trend detection, assortment adaptation, and recommendation updates.
Otto not only meets the highest privacy standards but also reinforces its position as a digital pioneer, seamlessly combining technological innovation with uncompromising data sovereignty.
Technical
Highlights
Even complex projects can be summarised in clear technical terms. Key figures and distinctive features provide insight into the concrete implementation – measurable, tangible, and transparent.
- Seamless integration via JavaScript snippet or API
- Fully GDPR-compliant – no personal data required
- AI-based pattern recognition from user interactions
- Real-time analysis of interaction signals like scrolling and viewing behavior
- Self-learning engine with automatic trend detection and assortment adaptation
- No manual data maintenance required – automated attribute extraction
Fast implementation, efficient adjustments, and smooth operations – this system fully meets our expectations.
Martim Dos Reis, Department Head I Otto Special Shops
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