Capstone Projects

Amazon Personalize – Is it Worth the Cost?

Program: Data Science Master's
Host Company: The KrazyCouponLady
Location: Boise, Idaho (remote)
Student: Michael Whittlesey

My project is a client-based study for an app/website company called ‘The Krazy Coupon Lady’ (KCL). The purpose of the company is to notify their users of deals and coupons in order to maximize their savings.  

An email listing several deals is sent out on a daily basis to many of our users. The list of deals is chosen manually and is not personalized to the user. Therefore, this project consisted of an A/B/C test where an in-house recommendation system and recommendations from Amazon Personalize generated a list of posts for each user within the testing sample. After the testing period, the results of the recommendation systems were compared against each other and a control group.  

The foremost goal is to prove that recommendation systems make a real impact on user engagement. The secondary goal was to create an in-house recommendation system that is comparable to Amazon Personalize. If this is the case, then we can forgo the cost of using the service.