Author Archive for: admin

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Boosting Product Findability to Increase Conversion

Since “find” is the first stage in the purchase process, understanding how customers find products on your e-commerce site and adjusting the site to match their needs is the most essential element to improving the purchase process. This will increase your customer conversation rate, generate larger order sizes, drive more revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

To improve your “product findability” you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand how they behave on your site. You can then take this knowledge to tune your site to work effectively with this customer behavior and improvove your conversion rate.

This white paper will explore five common customer behavior patterns that e-commerce sites often ignore or do not handle effectively. And it will show you ways to improve your site to handle these cases and convert move customers in the process.

Download White Paper
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Promoting Your Best Products Online

When a customer performs a search or navigates to a category, the most important thing is to get the right products to the top of the page.  But what defines the right products?  They could be the combination of products that most accurately match the search and products you want to promote at this time which fall within the search parameters.

“Relevancy” is the most important feature in a search engine for accuracy.  EasyAsk’s natural language engine delivers far more accurate relevancy scoring through features such as phrase matching, column weighting/ranking and value-based relevancy to expand control over results and deliver better hit rates.  Read more on our earlier blog post on relevancy.

Your merchandisers also need the ability to adjust where products are displayed on an e-commerce site just like they would promote on the floor of a brick and mortar store. You may want to promote specific products based on:

  • Inventory – promote products with low stock for clearance, or products with high stock in order to jump start sales,
  • Margin – promote your higher margin products to improve profitability,
  • Brand – suppliers may give you incentives to promote specific brands, or you may find certain brands to be better sellers,
  • Product Age –promote older products to clear out the remaining inventory or promote newer products that might be more in season.

The results and category pages need to be driven by promotion rules that can take into account these different factors.
This is where natural language rules come into play. It allows the merchandisers to specify the priority of the products in the display in their own language. These rules also allow merchandisers to create “derived attributes” that create customer friendly ways to display and categorize products without the time and cost to re-design the attributes in your product catalog.

EasyAsk customer Andertons Music took advantage of natural language rules to better promote products on their e-commerce site (read the press release).

Promoting the most effective products is the third customer behavior use case in our new white paper: Increasing Customer Conversion through Better Product Findability. You can download this free paper and find ways to better tune your site to customer behavior.

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The North Face Europe Uses EasyAsk on Magento

We were pleased to announce this morning as part of our continued partnership with The North Face® that The North Face Europe has rolled out EasyAsk eCommerce Edition for Magento on 11 different sites across Europe. This rollout delivers the customer conversion power of EasyAsk’s natural language search, navigation and merchandising to each of these sites.

The North Face Europe has already seen fantastic business results from this rollout – a 35% increase in search conversion rates and a 24% increase in revenue from search. EasyAsk was deployed in 9 different countries and the accompanying languages including: UK, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain and Austria. The North Face had already deployed EasyAsk eCommerce Edition in the United States and Canada.

The internationalization and localization features of EasyAsk truly shine in the rollout at The North Face Europe. We offer many thanks to the team at The North Face Europe for allowing us to share this great news with our community.

 

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The North Face® Europe Uses EasyAsk for Magento to Allow E-commerce Customers to Search Using Natural Language and Voice

Leading Outdoor brand The North Face, a Division of VF Outdoor Inc. deploys EasyAsk eCommerce Edition across key European business units to deliver enhanced site search and navigation, seeing a 35% increase in search conversion rates and a 24% increase in revenue from search.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

The North Face EMEA have deployed EasyAsk to deliver advanced site search across 11 sites supporting key European markets to help their customers find the products they are looking for quickly and easily across multiple channels.

Visitors can now utilize EasyAsk’s unique natural language and voice capabilities to specify what they are looking for in their local language to deliver a far more effective search experience than is possible with traditional keyword search.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM and BURLINGTON, MA, USA – March 12, 2014 – EasyAsk (www.easyask.com) today announced that The North Face has deployed EasyAsk’s comprehensive advanced site search, delivering for their customers a vastly improved user experience, allowing customers to quickly find the product or content they are looking for to complete their purchases, whilst leveraging The North Face’s existing Magento ecommerce platform.

Following the success of the EasyAsk roll out in the USA and Canada, The North Face EMEA have deployed EasyAsk to support their business units across 9 countries including the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain & Austria taking full advantage of EasyAsk’s support for local languages, whilst further leveraging the investment made in their existing ecommerce systems.

Chris Todd, Director of Ecommerce The North Face EMEA said “At The North Face, we are constantly innovating to provide the best products to our customers, to deliver the best advice instore & deliver a similarly quality user experience online. EasyAsk allows our customers to find the right products quickly and efficiently. The resultant uplift in conversion rates and revenue from search has been extremely positive.”

Simon Persse, VP EasyAsk Europe said “EasyAsk simply allows consumers to interact with brands as they would when speaking to a store associate, specifying exactly what they are looking for via PC, tablet or Smartphone and then receiving highly relevant results. EasyAsk even allows user to speak their query as well as typing text, providing a much richer user experience which is far more relevant to today’s always-connected, multi-channel consumer and way beyond anything possible with traditional key word search solutions.”

About The North Face®

The North Face, a division of VF Outdoor, Inc., is the world’s leading outdoor brand. Headquartered in Alameda, California, The North Face creates and distributes athlete-tested, expedition proven products that help people explore the world and test the limits of human potential. The North Face products are guaranteed for life and available in specialty mountaineering, backpacking, running, and snowsport retailers, premium-sporting goods retailers and major outdoor specialty retail chains around the world. For more information on The North Face, please visit www.thenorthface.com.

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of natural language software and solutions for e-commerce and business applications. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in their own language and receive highly tuned results from e-commerce sites, mobile devices and business applications. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading site search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boost online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has customers such as The North Face, Samsonite, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Coldwater Creek, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, True Value, Andertons Music and Harbor Freight Tools that rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

 

northface-uk-site

 

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Search-as-you-Type completely transforms your search box into a sales box

Once upon a time the search box was a mundane rectangle sitting in the upper part of an e-commerce site.  It served a purpose and sites that recognized the need for good e-commerce search enabled their customers to find what they were looking for.  Simple features such as auto-complete and search suggestions helped guide visitors in their search process.

EasyAsk Search-as-you-Type (SayT) takes the e-commerce search box to a whole new level, transforming your search box into a “sales box.”  SayT goes far beyond auto-complete and suggestions, allowing visitors to navigate a large and complex range of products directly within the search box.

SayT provides optimized suggestions for products, categories, navigational attributes and content as the visitor types.  With the click of a single item in the SayT list, the customer is whisked to the product they are looking for.  SayT converts visitors into buyers quickly and easily.

SayT was one of the main reasons Andertons Music selected EasyAsk for its’ e-commerce search, navigation and merchandising needs, and helped the company deliver record growth last year.

Watch this short video to learn more about the revolutionary Search-as-you-Type capability for e-commerce search and see how it can transform the customer experience on your e-commerce site.

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Search-as-you-Type transforms your search box into a sales box

 

Auto-complete and search suggestions were interesting add-ons to help enhance your e-commerce search box.  But Search-as-you-Type (SayT) completely revolutionizes how your search box works and turns it into a “sales box” that converts visitors into customers so fast, it will make your head spin.

Watch this short video (1 minute) to see how Search-as-you-Type delivers this customer conversion machine to your e-commerce sites.

 

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Using Product Concepts to Enhance Your Search and Satisfy More Visitors

Sourcing agents and merchandisers have a direct understanding of the characteristics of your products and reliably put this information into the product catalog – brands, sizes, colors, materials, wear and tear and more.  These characteristics can power refinements in faceted navigation and enable some simple searching (red jackets, color televisions).

But your customers may use their own descriptions that are unique to your specific retail sector.  This is a second customer behavior use case we examine in the white paper: Increasing Customer Conversion by Boosting Product Findability.

Here are some examples:

  • Boating/Marine Accessories: “galvanized plow anchors” or “waterproof radar displays”
  • Hardware/Tools: “jobbers drill bits” or “solid carbide cutting blades”
  • Beauty Supplies: “nourishing skin cream” or “foaming facial cleanser”

With e-commerce sites becoming increasingly specialized, the ability for visitors to find products their own way makes the difference between a sale and a lost visitor.

Searches such as these use what we call “product concepts.”  This goes far beyond keyword search and requires a natural language search engine that can easily understand and process groups of terms that combine to form a description of product.

Let’s look at how outdoor and clothing retailer The North Face uses product concepts on their site.  We will first search for “lightweight ski jackets.”  This returns products that are ski jackets with the characteristic “lightweight” (see image).

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A search with similar terminology is “lightweight running jackets.”  But this search returns a very different set of results (see image).

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A keyword search engine would deliver a superset of products based on each term – a result not optimized for what the visitor is seeking.  Only a natural language engine can understand these product concepts and deliver the right results to the visitor.

Download our free white paper,  Increasing Customer Conversion by Boosting Product Findability and learn more about how you can tune your site to deliver a better customer experience and increase sales.

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EasyAsk Releases Guide to Increasing Customer Conversion through Better Product Findability

New EasyAsk guide offers ways to optimize sites for five important e-commerce customer behavior patterns

BURLINGTON, MA – March 5, 2014 – EasyAsk, the industry leader in e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising, today announced a new best practices guide that shows how e-commerce sites can increase their customer conversion through better product findability. This new guide examines five critical customer behavior patterns on e-commerce sites, and offers specific ways in which e-retailers can optimize their sites to support these behavior patterns.

Shopping involves three stages – find, decide and purchase. Yet, most E-commerce sites measure their success based on conversion rate and abandonment rate, which are measured in a simplistic manner – did a visitor complete a purchase after placing items in a cart, or did they leave the site and abandon that cart? This simplistic view can often mask other problems with the e-commerce site, in particular all the activity up until placing items in the cart. This is why many practitioners are now advocating measuring, understanding and tuning your site across this entire process.

Since “find” is the first stage in the purchase process, understanding how customers find products on your e-commerce site is critical to adjusting the site to match their needs. To understand the “product findability” on your site, you must put yourself in the visitors’ shoes and understand how they behave. The EasyAsk guide examines visitor behavior and defines five very common customer behavior patterns for e-commerce sites.

“Understanding customer behavior on your site, in particular how they find products, is critical to optimizing the purchase path,” said John Morrell, Vice President of Product Marketing at EasyAsk. “Site optimization requires more than just understanding – you need the tools to deliver the richer customer experience. Our guide not only gives you the ‘what’, but also gives you the ‘how’ – how to tune your site effectively for your visitors.”

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of natural language software and solutions for e-commerce and business applications. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. EasyAsk uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boost online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has customers such as The North Face, Samsonite, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Coldwater Creek, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, True Value, Andertons Music and Harbor Freight Tools that rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

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Andertons Music Uses EasyAsk to Help Deliver Record Online Sales Growth

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We announced this morning that Andertons Music Company in the U.K. is using EasyAsk eCommerce Edition to help deliver record growth on their online site. We are thrilled we could be such a great enabler for the Andertons e-commerce site.

Andertons choose EasyAsk last year to replace their existing search technology from competitor SLI Systems. And their results once again show how natural language search, navigation and merchandising delivers better results than keyword search engines.

The Andertons site takes advantage of three very unique features of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition:

  • Search as you Type (SayT) – EasyAsk SayT delivers far beyond typical search box auto-complete providing a fantastic customer experience directly in the search box through optimized suggestions for products, categories and content as the visitor types.
  • Derived Attributes – EasyAsk’s natural language rules allowed online marketers at Andertons to create new attributes such as “beginner” products (beginner drum kits, beginner guitars, etc.) and eliminated an expensive and time-consuming process of restructuring their product catalog when they wanted new attributes.
  • Descriptive natural language search – With over 11,000 products with a wide range of categories and industry terminology, EasyAsk’s natural language search allows visitors to be far more descriptive in their search and find their products faster.

Congratulations Andertons and we look forward to even more success in the future.

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EasyAsk eCommerce Edition Supports Andertons Music Company’s Record Online Growth in 2013 by Delivering a Superior Customer Experience

Andertons Music Company, the musician’s No.1 superstore, deployed EasyAsk in 2013 to deliver a greatly enhanced search & navigation capability to support the expansion of their online business whilst leveraging their existing ecommerce platform.

 

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – March 04, 2014 – EasyAsk, the leader in natural language software and solutions, today announced that Andertons Music Company has achieved record growth from their online business since deploying EasyAsk eCommerce Edition early in 2013. EasyAsk’s comprehensive advanced site search, navigation and online merchandising solution, which replaced SLI Systems old-style keyword search offering, has delivered a vastly improved customer experience and helped Andertons Music to achieve record revenue growth in 2013. The EasyAsk solution allows customers to more easily find products or content, driving improvements in conversion rates and has empowered the Andertons web team with a simple to use but powerful capability to deliver an optimal, relevant and personalized shopping experience on any device.

“At Andertons Music Company, the online channel is a key element of our growth strategy” stated Lee Anderton, CEO. “2013 delivered a record year in terms of online sales with revenue increasing by 25%. We have to offer our customers the very best online experience to mirror the high quality expert service we offer in-store and an important element of this is helping guide our customers to the right product. EasyAsk has enabled us to drive significant business improvement in a short period of time, increasing conversion rates and reducing bounced searches, whilst allowing us to leverage greater return from our existing ecommerce infrastructure. Without having to re-platform EasyAsk has delivered results, underpinning the growth we have seen from online and equipping our relatively small team with the necessary tools to deliver continuous improvement to our online offering.”

One of the unique EasyAsk features – derived attributes – gave the Andertons online merchandising team far greater flexibility to market their products to different audiences and skill levels. For example, Andertons were able to create a new merchandising attribute called “Beginners” which is defined in a simple, English style natural language rule and reused across different products, such as “Beginner Drum Kits”, “Beginner Guitars” and “Beginner Keyboards.” According to Andrew Chart, Ecommerce Manager at Andertons, “EasyAsk derived attributes simplified our search, navigation and merchandising, and eliminated a costly process of restructuring our product catalog every time we wanted new attributes.”

With a product range in excess of 11,000 products, ensuring browsers can quickly and easily find exactly what they are looking for is critically important to support Andertons ambitions for their online business. EasyAsk’s natural language search technology allows consumers to be far more explicit when defining a search term, facilitating a more human interaction via the search box, as opposed to the traditional key-word search solutions which lack the intelligent understanding of language to deliver a rich and satisfying search experience.

EasyAsk’s advanced Search As You Type (SAYT) functionality provided a tremendous boost to the Andertons site, allowing browsers to navigate a large and complex range of products directly within the search box, helping find the right products in a single click. The SAYT functionality goes beyond traditional auto-complete, providing detailed optimized suggestions for products, categories and content as the visitor types. SAYT helped Andertons Music Company achieve a 12% increase in conversion rates and a 10% decrease in bounced searches.

The successful deployment of EasyAsk’s eCommerce Edition by Andertons Music is highlighted by a number of significant advances, including:

  • The deployment of EasyAsk’s advanced “Search As You Type” functionality to proactively highlight relevant search terms and navigation options as the visitor types, getting them to the relevant products faster.
  • The ability for visitors to utilize EasyAsk’s unique natural language and voice capabilities to deliver a far more effective search experience than traditional keyword search.
  • A richer user interface that offers a deep set of refinement options on both search and navigation giving customers many different methods to find products that meet their specifications.

“It is great to see EasyAsk delivering so well for Andertons Music, not only in terms of a greatly enhanced user experience but also helping drive real business improvement and underpinning the growth of their online channel, said Simon Persse, VP EasyAsk Europe. ‘ EasyAsk’s natural language technology is providing a next generation search capability, which is essential as today’s consumers demand more than being able to search using key words’.

About Andertons

Andertons Music Co. is a family run musical instrument retailer with nearly 50 years of experience serving the music community in the UK. From the Guildford music store and the online musical instrument shop, Andertons offers musicians a huge selection of guitars, amps, drums, pianos, keyboards, synthesizers, recording equipment, PA systems, music accessories and more – all at competitive prices and with a high level of customer service. For more information, please visit www.andertons.co.uk.

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through ground-breaking Natural Language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as The North Face, Coldwater Creek, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, True Value, Journey’s, Anna’s Linens and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

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