Archive for month: May, 2011

Mobile commerce is really hitting its stride.  It seems like every day I see new mobile commerce articles on Internet Retailer.  Check back soon for an EasyAsk customer success story on mobile commerce with EasyAsk.

One of the big issues with mobile commerce is optimizing the user experience.  EasyAsk’s partner in mobile commerce, Unbound Commerce, has tremendous experience with mobile user experience and has contributed greatly to EasyAsk eCommerce Mobile. 

I was talking with the team from Unbound Commerce last week and told them of an experience I had with a mobile travel site (I’ll leave the site name out).  The navigation on the mobile travel site made it so difficult to narrow my flight choices and find what I was looking for, that I became frustrated and gave up. 

The Unbound Commerce team told me that navigation can often be overlooked in the mobile world.  In some cases, navigation can be more important than search.  That was a revelation to me.  But in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

The screen real estate on a mobile browser is vastly smaller than that on a PC or Mac.  This says that excellent search is critical.  You need pinpoint search results because wading through pages of results in a mobile browser would frustrate a user and cause them to abandon.

But excellent navigation is also important due to the screen real estate constraints.  Using richer, dynamic search criteria in the navigation, such as product attributes, rather than just the static categories, allows visitors to refine their choices faster and easier.  More importantly, this allows visitors to find products in 1 to 2 clicks, rather than plowing through pages of categories – increasing the chances of conversion.

So, something to keep in mind when exploring mobile commerce solutions: you want to offer pinpoint search and rich, dynamic navigational attributes.

E-Commerce sales for EasyAsk customer the Gap were up a robust 18% according to Internet Retailer:

“E-commerce sales rose year over year 18% to $348.0 million from $295.0 million”

“the web accounted for 10.6% of total sales compared with 8.9% in the first quarter of 2010.”

The Gap has been a long time user of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition in the main Gap.com e-commerce site and many of the company’s other brand sites such as Old Navy, Banana Republic, Piperlime.

EasyAsk and OEM partner Infor Corporation ran a webinar earlier this week titled EasyAsk Commerce Studio for Infor Storefront Customers.  The webinar has a great interview of an Infor – EasyAsk customer, Tenaquip, and provides a great demonstration of EasyAsk Commerce Studio functionality.

The EasyAsk Search and Navigation engine is built into Infor Storefront to deliver rich, natural language search.  Infor Storefront customers can separately purchase the EasyAsk Commerce Studio to take advantage of this easy-to-use tool to tune and manage the e-commerce search environment and create compelling, timely merchandising offers and promotions inside Infor Storefront.

Click here to watch the webinar.

We released a story this morning about one of our first NetSuite e-commerce search customers, InkJetSuperstore.com.  Click here to read the press release.

InkJetSuperstore.com is a long time NetSuite customer and an early adopter of the NetSuite Ecommerce platform.  When you walk along the hallowed halls of NetSuite and whisper “InkJetSuperstore”, it is like the old E.F. Hutton commercials – everyone stops and listens! InkJetSuperstore is that important to NetSuite!

E-commerce is InkJetSupertore’s ENTIRE business. Thus, e-commerce is their mission critical, “bet your business” software. Search is an essential part of this.

Nearly one-third of all InkJetSuperstore.com visitors immediately go to the search box, making search a critical tool for customer conversion. Adding to the complexity is the cryptic set of printer and cartridge model numbers visitors will search for, and the complex relationships between printer models and various after-market cartridges.

Two of our competitors tried to implement their e-commerce search solutions for InkJetSuperstore prior to EasyAsk.  BOTH FAILED.  We not only implemented EasyAsk on the first try, but did so quickly and efficiently.

InkJetSuperstore is also a testimate to superior engineering.  Among other things, EasyAsk has developed a unique integration with NetSuite Ecommerce that maintains superior Search Engine Optimization than other 3rd party solutions. In addition, we done some automated integration with the NetSuite item catalog via web services, and taken EasyAsk unique features like our SKU processing and mapped these directly to NetSuite (in this case Matrix items).

As we talk with more NetSuite customers, we are discovering the SEO issues is a REALLY BIG DEAL. A number of NetSuite customers have seen their SEO drop off dramatically when using 3rd party search solutions. And now, they are talking to us!

And the timing is great with NetSuite SuiteWorld coming up next week in San Francisco. NetSuite Ecommerce customers, stop by and we will show you how we solve the 3rd party search SEO issue.

Congradulations to InkJetSuperstore and thanks for being a great customer.  Expect to see many more customer announcements in the near future.