Advice on deeply targeted ad engine

[rgraner]

I'm the webmaster for our grocery store and our loyalty card customers are able to login, make orders, pick them up and build shopping carts so we know what they've purchased and we know the shopping lists they build while browsing our site.

We want to start up-selling other products in our store by showing relevant/complimentary ads based on our customers ordering history and current shopping list inventory.

i.e. if a user adds a turkey to their shopping list, then we want to show an advertisement for cranberries or any product that we sell in our stores that we deem as complimentary.

We only want to promote our store products so I can't see us using adsense, text link ads or category based affiliate programs because that's too general. Also, please know that I have all the data for our entire inventory on a weekly basis.

QUESTION, HELP & ADVICE:
Is there any off the shelf product to make this happen?

Is this a custom ad engine that I will have to code myself? and If so, where would you recommend I start?

Thanks

PS I love this forum!

 

[Stanley]

I'm not sure if a custom ad engine exists, but how comprehensive is your knowledge of database design and coding?

 

[rgraner]

I've got good coding skills but wasn't really looking to build this from scratch. It appears that because of the depth of our products to customers I may have to.

 

[Insomniac]

Sounds like some pretty simple statistical analysis. People who buy bread also buy butter 40%of the time, jelly 30% of the time and toilet paper 10% of the time. Cycle through the top matches for their current shopping cart and you have yourself a pretty simple and effective system. Should be no more than a days worth of coding.