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Gartner E-Commerce Search Best Practices Part 2

In my last blog post, I discussed the recent Gartner report “Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce.” One of the most important e-commerce search best practices that analysts Whit Andrews and Gene Alvarez emphasize is the ability to “Offer effective definition-matching and handling of ambiguity in Query terms.” Let’s take a closer look at what this means, and how it applies to your search environment.

Effective Definition Matching

The Gartner reports talks about how a truly effective e-commerce search environment must understand the “language variations that are specific to what’s being sold and the audience to whom it’s being sold.” This really boils down to two items a search engine must be able to do:

  1. For each term in a search string, understand what that value represents – an attribute, product name, product category, etc. – and allow each column to have different relevancies.
  2. The ability to process search strings of different complexities as entire entities and understand how the individual terms relate in order to return the most accurate results.

This is the essence of natural language.  A natural language engine will process a complete search phrase, break it down linguistically and understand the full meaning of the request – NOT just what individual terms mean.  In this way, a natural language engine such as EasyAsk can fully support the specific “language of the site” and allow visitors to “speak” to the site in that language via the search engine.

With natural language processing, you can be assured that not only will simple searches – “blue shirts” – be processed effective, but so will complex ones – “women’s blue short sleeve shirts under $50.”  You can fulfill this e-commerce search best practice with the most effective definition matching possible.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity can come in many different forms.  It can come from mistakes or typos.  It can come from simple language variations such as different tenses.  Or it can come from a visitor’s lack of knowledge of the products – asking for “purple blouses” when none are available on the site.  To help you fulfill this aspect of the Gartner best practices, your search engine needs to give you the following:

  • Spell correction – your search engine needs to provide automatic spell correction.  Anticipating and pre-coding every potential misspelling of each term on your Website is a time consuming task. Who wants to do that?
  • Stemming – Your search engine needs to automatically support the different tenses, plurals and other variances of terms.  Once again, why should you need to have the time consuming task of entering every potential variance of each term?
  • Relaxation – this concept allows the search engine to drop part of a search term if no specific products exist in order to make sure some products are returned.  Seeing some products is always better than seeing NO products.  With relaxation, a search for “black levi jeans” will still return Levi jeans, even if there are none in black.  You search engine needs to have automatic support for this capability.

All of these characteristics will help you virtually eliminate the dreaded “no results” page and dramatically enhance the customer experience by always returning products to the visitor, even when there is some degree of ambiguity.

Further Flexibility

What if your “site language” is more complex than standard terms?  What if your site has a number of acronyms and industry terms?  What if you have cryptic model numbers that customers need to use to find parts or products?

To fulfill this last requirement, your search engine needs to make it easy to add synonyms, custom search terms and rules.  Once again this is where natural language engines help you implement best practices.

With natural language, you easily specify additional search terms and rules in – well, natural language.  You simply type in terms of any level of complexity and associate those with the existing terms or products in your catalog by simply pointing and clicking.

Learn More

To read more on these capabilities, please download our white paper, “The ABCs of E-Commerce Search: A Guide to Essential E-Commerce Search Features.”  In Part 3 of our blog post series, we’ll look at best practices in Search Analytics and Merchandising.

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ECommerce Shopping Experience Download

Thank you for registering with us. We hope our premium content is useful in your efforts to deliver richer shopping experiences for your customers and increasing your e-commerce revenue.

 

Free chapter of Greg Nundelman’s Book, “Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success”

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EasyAsk Best Practices White Paper, “The ABCs of E-Commerce Search.”

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Gartner Best Practices in E-Commerce Search – Part 1

July is “Best Practices” month here at EasyAsk – where we describe good search, navigation and merchandising techniques that can help you convert more customers.  As you and your teams ramp up for busy back-to-school and holiday seasons, we want to help you convert more visitors into sales.  Over the course of this month, our team will show different best practices in search, navigation and merchandising and how they can impact customer experience.

While EasyAsk has many lessons to share, we always like to recognize best practices from independent firms, especially when they align with our vision. Gartner, a preeminent research firm, recently released a report called “Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce“, written by Whit Andrews and Gene Alvarez – two of the brightest minds in e-commerce and search.

Among the findings in this report, the Gartner analysts clearly stated the value of search, navigation and merchandising to an e-commerce environment:

  • Search is the means by which shoppers most nakedly reveal their needs and wants (as they themselves perceive them) to sellers.
  • Search is, therefore, a particularly powerful way to promote, relate and reveal products in a shopping experience.

The analysts went on from there to lay out two very important best practices in e-commerce search:

  1. Offer Effective Definition-Matching and Handling of Ambiguity in Query Terms
  2. Use Search and Content Analytics to Fulfill Shoppers’ Desires Through Merchandise, Related and Suggested Offers, and Advertising

These two best practices highlight the unique advantages natural language technology delivers in an e-commerce search environment.  Since natural language understands both the intent of the search and the content being searched, visitor searches are more accurately matched and the search engine seamlessly deals with ambiguity – misspellings, tenses, stemming and when to relax terms.  Natural language also understands the relationship between terms in a search to derive contextual meaning and further eliminates ambiguity.

In addition, the actionable analytics and natural language business rules in EasyAsk make it easy for your business people to better merchandise your site with context-driven offers, promotions and ads.

In the next two blog posts of this series, I will drill down into each of the two Gartner best practices we discussed above.  I will examine the best practices, detail how natural language fulfills the promise of these best practices and show customer sites where these practices are applied.

The most valuable best practices typically come from experts that have visibility into the widest spectrum of implementations – learning how smart people across the industry approach problems differently.  We’re always happy to confirm when EasyAsk best practices match those of top-tier research firms, such as Gartner.

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Internet Retailer: Tool retailer lets mobile shoppers speak their searches

Travers Tools Company implements a voice search feature into its mobile site.

Consumers visiting the mobile site for Travers Tools Company Inc. searching for a specific drill bit now need only ask for it.

The retailer recently launched an updated m-commerce site that enables consumers to speak their site searches. The service, from site search provider EasyAsk, lets shoppers touch a microphone icon then say what they want into their smartphone to see a list of results.

“The industrial supply business is very competitive and what sets us apart is our industry knowledge and our ability to provide the right tools and parts for our customers,” says Bruce Zolot, president, Travers Tools. “EasyAsk search helps us ensure that our customers find what they are looking for quickly on our site and now just as easily on our mobile site. Shoppers can speak what they want into the search box and see what they want immediately.”

Shoppers can use their Apple Inc. iPhone 4S or a smartphone using Google Inc.’s Android operating system to speak their search queries. Consumers see a microphone icon next to the search box that prompts them to speak into their device.

“A consumer might be in a hardware store and see a tool they want,” an EasyAsk spokesman says. “Maybe they think it costs too much, or they want to see if they can get a better deal online. They pull out their Android or iPhone and go to Travers Tools and touch the search box microphone icon. They say ’Jet bandsaw‘ or ’Jet bandsaw over $1500.’ They can speak their search as they would describe it to a salesperson– the more info, the tighter the search results. The list is short and accurate, which is critical on smartphones with little screen space.”

EasyAsk uses what it calls natural language search—software and algorithms provided by EasyAsk that seek to understand what the consumer wants to buy and returns appropriate search results, the company says.

This natural language search engine can better understand the intent behind shopper requests than other search engines, EasyAsk says. “Try ’not stripe dress shirts under $80‘ for example,” the spokesman says. “Keyword-based search engines would return stripe shirts for $80 and possibly underwear and dresses. People can get around poor search on a desktop, but won’t on a mobile device.”

Travers Tool, No. 826 in Internet Retailer’s Second 500 Guide, already uses EasyAsk for its e-commerce site. The site search tool on the retailer’s desktop e-commerce site supports multiple search methods, such as the ability to view results within a category and narrow the results to specific items using a single results page, and also recognizes synonyms for search terms common to the metalworking industry. The results also reflect the current pricing and inventory amounts.

Travers began using the EasyAsk site search technology after consumers began telling the retailer they couldn’t find items on its e-commerce site as easily as they could in its print catalog. Given that the site offered a search box, those complaints represented a clear sign that that the search tool, which was supplied with its information management software, wasn’t working.

The EasyAsk system connects to Travers Tool’s back-office system that manages the flow of inventory and tracks product costs for the retailer’s more than 100,000 SKUs. This ensures that shoppers get up-to-date inventory and pricing information.

“Keyword-search back-ends won’t cut it,” says Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Even Google understands this. They’re in the process of evolving closer to natural language with semantic search. If your search box can’t understand the intent behind shoppers’ requests now, you’ll be irrelevant when that request comes from a mobile device. Mobile users can’t navigate as easily and will quickly abandon the site if it requires multiple searches. They either see it and get it, or move on.”

This article originally appeared in Internet Retailer: https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/06/14/tool-retailer-lets-mobile-shoppers-speak-their-searches

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EasyAsk Products – Excerpt from Sync-Up Interview on the Pulse Network

Sync-Up host Tyler Pyburn asks CEO Craig Bassin about EasyAsk’s products – EasyAsk eCommerce, Business Edition and Quiri.

 

 

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EasyAsk Quiri – Interview Excerpt on Pulse Network Sync-Up">Voice Recognition & EasyAsk Quiri – Interview Excerpt on Pulse Network Sync-Up

EasyAsk CEO Craig Bassin talks about the differences between “voice-recognition” and “natural language search” – without understanding intent, you can’t accurately answer questions. Craig also notes that even Google is evolving from traditional keyword search.

 

 

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Travers Tool Mobile Site

EasyAsk customer, Travers Tool Company, has launched a new mobile commerce site. The mobile optimized site presents the search engine, category structure and products in a more friendly way for the smaller screen real estate of mobile devices.

The new mobile platform will be especially convenient for finding product attributes and specifications when a PC is not close by. Also, crews on construction sites, repair teams on the road, and others should find this new format especially convenient.

EasyAsk powers the search, navigation and merchandising for the new mobile site and has been used for years on the main Travers Tool Company e-commerce site, Travers.com. And best of all, the Travers.com mobile site is automatically “Siri-enabled” due to EasyAsk.

Go to the Travers site on your mobile phone (www.travers.com will recognize you are using a mobile browser and re-direct you to the mobile site).  On the home page, touch the search box, press the microphone button on your keypad and speak your request. Say, “solid carbide jobbers drill”, hit Go, and you will find the exact drill bits for that search. It works like a charm.

 

 

Also note how effectively Travers uses the screen real estate on the mobile site. It is very different from their main site and is optimized for FINDING PRODUCTS. The search box is prominent. Why? Because while search is important on an e-commerce site, search is CRITICAL on a mobile commerce site, as I spoke of in this blog post a few months back.

 

 

Travers Tool is an amazing organization. They continue to grow and take market share due to a strong focus on serving their customers, and the delivery of e-commerce services that outclass their competitors, including their new mobile commerce site.

The Travers mobile site it another indication on how simple it is for small and medium businesses to deliver competitive advantages using EasyAsk natural language search, navigation and merchandising.

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SKU Processing: Optimizing search results to maximize conversion

As much as we like to promote natural language long-tail searches here at EasyAsk, the unfortunate reality of the e-commerce market is that Google (and others) have taught us to search wrong. Many visitors go to a web store and do what I call SSTN – simple search then navigation.

But what if your site has many thousands of SKUs or Items? What if your site carries many of the same product, but in different sizes, composition, color or brand? A simple search could return hundreds of undifferentiated products that leave the visitor with the daunting task of sifting through those many results just to find the item they are looking for. How quickly will they abandon the site? I’d bet on 3 seconds or less.

Luckily there are techniques that can help you reduce the “search result overload” on your visitors. We call it SKU processing. Let’s show you how it works by looking at the e-commerce site for Travers Tools.  A very common search in their business is – “titanium drill bits.” So if we do this search on we get:

 

 

Travers only returns 23 products, even though they have thousands of different titanium drill bits. EasyAsk allowed Travers to group all the SKUs (or items) for each product into blocks. The blocks are organized such that the visitor can choose a particular drill bit style, drill down, and then select the specific SKU based on size, length, etc. (see below) This organization makes it easier for the visitor to choose the right product, providing a better customer experience.

 

 

If you go to many other hardware and tool retail sites, you will get hundreds of results for “titanium drill bits”, making it incredibly hard for the visitor to then find the ones they really want. And if we look at the products, many of them are the same. They are just different sizes and lengths.

But wait, there’s more. What if the search is more of a long tail search? In this case there might be a length – ¼” titanium drill bits. EasyAsk will produce similar first level results as the above example – product blocks or groupings (see the first image below).

 

 

But when you drill down to a product (look at the second image below), EasyAsk carries forward the length from the search, showing specific SKUs for ¼” bits.

 

 

In this case, EasyAsk remembered the “context” of the visitors search and carried that forward to the product drill down. This again simplifies the buying process for the visitor, leading the customer directly to the product they were seeking.

Carrying forward the context is one of the hidden beauties of EasyAsk natural language search. SKU processing, search result simplification and context carry-forward is something you can and should take advantage of to improve customer conversion and customer experience.

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EasyAsk at SuiteWorld 2012

We at EasyAsk will be very busy at the upcoming NetSuite SuiteWorld 2012 event next week in San Francisco.  At this event we will be showing our eCommerce Edition for NetSuite and Business Edition for NetSuite.  In addition, we will be unveiling a new EasyAsk Quiri solution for NetSuite (look out for the news on that!).  Click here for more information on what we will be showing for e-commerce customers.

In the past year and a half, our e-commerce business on NetSuite has grown dramatically.  As our news note said, we now have dozens of customers in a variety of industries and retail sectors.  Each has seen substantial increases in customer conversion rates and order sizes after implementing EasyAsk.  And our team has worked hard to reduce our already fast implementation times.  EasyAsk has established itself as the 3rd party search, navigation and merchandising solution of choice for NetSuite Ecommerce customers.

Please be sure to visit us in Booth EX-111 where we will be able to demonstrate our innovative and game changing products for e-commerce, business intelligence and mobile solutions.

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IBM Watson-like Natural Language Search, Navigation and Merchandising with Apple Siri-like Voice Enablement at SuiteWorld

Compatible with all types of e-commerce platforms, EasyAsk Improves conversion rates, virtually eliminates “no results” pages and improves average basket size

EasyAsk, named a “Cool Vendor” for 2012 by a leading analyst firm, and the leader in natural language technology and solutions, will be demonstrating its best-in-class search, navigation and merchandising tools at NetSuite SuiteWorld in May 14-17 in San Francisco.

EasyAsk, which has over 300 e-commerce customers, has acquired dozens of new NetSuite e-commerce customers in the past 18 months supporting B2C and B2B sales. These customers cross a broad set of industries from pet supplies, automotive parts, office supplies, hardware and apparel. EasyAsk eCommerce for NetSuite delivers enterprise-class website search, navigation and merchandising software in an affordable, integrated package for NetSuite Ecommerce websites. In the last 12 months, EasyAsk has further developed its eCommerce for NetSuite solution, improving platform speed by 100% and enabling much faster deployment – from weeks to days.

With EasyAsk, you’ll have access to easy-to-use merchandising tools to create promotion, cross-sell and up-sell promotions and Business Rules. More importantly, customers will find what they’re looking for faster, buy more and buy with you more often, leading to an increase in your e-commerce revenue.

EasyAsk eCommerce virtually eliminates “no results” page, increases conversion rates, lowers bounce rates, increases customer retention and increases average basket size. EasyAsk also automatically handles spell correction, improves navigation and puts navigation and merchandising tools in the hands of your merchandisers.

Multi-Channel & Mobile

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition offers a capability no other search, navigation and merchandising platform can offer – EasyAsk powered sites provide automatic extensibility to voice-enabled mobile commerce with natural language search. EasyAsk will be showing how it incorporates its Quiri-like functionality to allow visitors to mobile commerce site to speak complete natural language searches and find products faster, dramatically increasing mobile conversion rates. EasyAsk eCommerce customers have a rich natural language engine already in place that is ideally suited for multi-channel marketing. Multiple studies have shown that mobile e-commerce is best optimized for voice interaction and search – and only EasyAsk eCommerce automatically understands descriptive search requests from today’s voice-enabled smart phone users, and responds with the most relevant results.

“EasyAsk leads the industry with cutting-edge natural language technology for e-commerce,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Not only are we the best at understanding shopper’s intention in the search box, we are now the first to provide voice-enabled natural language search for e-commerce. That means that we are the only vendor that can help ensure your mobile shoppers get the results they expect when they speak to their smart phones – Apple’s Siri is changing the way people interact with their phones. Don’t be left behind.”

Implementation Partners

EasyAsk has also built new partnerships with leading NetSuite integrators and resellers, including Explorer Consulting, GProxy and SuiteCommerce.

Please come visit us at booth EX111, where we can show you how to improve your e-commerce efforts.

Ready to see how EasyAsk's eCommerce solution can help you? Request a demo!
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