BodySpace Official News Blog

As many of you may have noticed, our product pages and cart page looks a little different lately.  The Bodybuilding.com Commerce Sprint Team has been working at an insane pace to bring the first taste of personalization to Bodybuilding.com, with personalized product recommendations.

So what makes these product recommendations personalized?  The development team worked their query magic and mad SQL skills to identify for each product which other products were most commonly purchased with it over the last 90 days.  After analyzing ~300,000 orders, they came up with the product recommendations you can see on the site today (there are currently 4,800 products with cross-sells). Recommendations will be updated weekly, so they will change as new products are added to our store and as the product mix changes.

Product Recommendations on the Lipo6 Product Page:

Product Recommendations on the Cart Page:

So why are we doing all this personalization stuff?  Simple - to make it easier for every user of the site to reach his/her health and fitness goals, the same reason we do everything we do here at Bodybuilding.com.  The idea of personalization has been on Ryan’s mind for quite some time now, and the rest of the e-Commerce world is beginning to catch up.  In a recent issue of eMarketer daily, the following quote appeared as part of an article titled “Online Buyers Active but Practical:”

“As the pool of new online buyers begins to dry up, Web retailers will focus on strategies that help them retain customers, such as improving customer service, offering personalized product recommendations and incorporating user ratings and reviews,” said Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer.

Putting up what you see now is just step #1.  The big vision is to have a recommendation on every page of the site helping answer these types of questions:

• As a shopper, which products work well together (not just which products are purchased together) for people like me who are trying to lose weight?
• I just updated my goal from losing fat to gaining muscle; what are some recommendations for exercise programs which, given my body type, will help me achieve the results I want?
• As a new BodySpace member, who are some people who can help me reach my goal of losing ten pounds before Spring Break?  (These are starting to show up already)

So what’s coming next from the Commerce Team?  As you read this, the next new big feature of our site is in the works – a centralized source of product reviews and ratings, completely user-generated and search-engine optimized.  This, along with the company’s first-ever rollout of personalization and our unbeatable customer service and order fulfillment, will set us up to ensure that Bodybuilding.com remains the best online health and fitness site, in January 2009, January 2019, and every point in between and thereafter.

Stay tuned to find out what’s coming next!

Our web hosting company’s data center experienced two power outages beginning at approximately 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, 2008.  At approximately 4:00 p.m. MST, the data center made a switch to a generator.  The data center was able to transition to generator power but they experienced several minutes of downtime where the battery backup system did not fill in and the internal power grid went down during the transition.  The battery backup system did not fill in because one of its batteries exploded.

As of 8:00 p.m. Thursday evening, Idaho Power Company was still dealing with several outages across multiple grids.  The Bodybuilding.com team worked to bring everything back online as quickly as possible but due due to the power being cut while all services were running it effected most of our systems.

Many of the systems (databases) had to be validated, repaired and tested as well as many of the file systems scanned which to many hours.  Our store was the first back up at approximately 6:45 p.m. and all other systems (such as the SuperSite, forums, BodySpace, etc.) following that with the last becoming available at 2:45 a.m., Friday, November 21, 2008.  At 9:00 a.m. MST this morning, the data center was going to switch from generator to conditioned utility power.  As a precaution to keep our system from taking another power hit, we stopped all critical services for approximately 20 minutes during the transition.

Steps are being taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

P.S. it really sucked. 

Hot BodySpace couple RTX (the "Rudy & Tabi Xperience!") - consisting of "rlxmuscle” and The Original Plate Eating Chick “tabitha2686” - just announced that they’re engaged to be married!

Details are still in the planning stages, but Tabitha reports that “EVERYONE FROM BODYSPACE/BODYBUILDING.COM IS INVITED!!!!! We haven’t picked out a time or a date yet but it is in near future!!!! We might have our honeymoon at the Arnold!”

Here are some photos of the hot* and happy couple:

*(no homo)

Congrats, you two! 

BodySpace surpassed 225,000 active users tonight! 

Thanks and welcome to all of our new members!