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In a previous blog, we discussed the concept of “Learning Search” and what the technology can and can’t do. In this installment, we’d like to look a little closer into how it can be used to better effect when incorporated into a system which takes other factors into account as well.

The problem with most search technology which employs learning search is that it is used as the primary sort for delivering search results. The technology simply measures what products matching the search description are clicked on the most and then delivers those products first in the search results. The search results therefore become both a popularity poll and a self-fulfilling prophecy.  (The products that are clicked most get pushed to the top of the page – and the items at the top of a page get clicked most.) And the search function is “learning” only insofar as it is updating its tally of the number of clicks a product is receiving.

Furthermore, when implemented through a sub domain, this activity is taking place away from the retailer’s eCommerce site, degrading SEO in the process.

Learning search can be helpful, however, when taken as part of a larger, more holistic approach to delivering search results. This is where EasyAsk’s approach and technology come in. EasyAsk takes a multifaceted approach to delivering the most accurate, relevant results to a site search inquiry. First and foremost, the cornerstone of EasyAsk’s technology is natural language search software.

By using natural language search, EasyAsk finds the most relevant results because it understands the meaning and intent of the search term – even complex, long-tail search queries. From that point, the delivery and display of the search results can be refined by a formula which takes many factors – including popularity and click-through rate, if desired – into account. This customizable formula, created collaboratively by the retailer and EasyAsk staff, can factor in many variables, including inventory levels, profit margin and sales trends, among others.

The results meet both the customer’s and the merchandiser’s needs and can be adapted on the fly to meet changing market and inventory conditions.  Plus the search and display results are delivered on the etailer’s site, not on a sub-domain page.

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition leads with language relevance and can further sort products in a self-tuning system that takes not only click-through popularity, but also newness, margin, stock level, sales popularity and any other metrics a site owner may decide to include. It’s just a smarter way to go.

Magento is an eCommerce giant, with products to help retailers build and deploy eCommerce sites as well as manage online operations. It’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the planet, and for good reason.

Even with great products and support, Magento knows there are areas where integrated third party solutions can add significant value. They partner with select, vetted firms to provide customers with additional options and expertise to help users maximize their investment in the Magento platform.

EasyAsk provides site search, navigation and merchandising solutions that integrate seamlessly with Magento. Using natural language search technology, EasyAsk has helped scores of Magento users, like Anna’s Linens and Zenni Optical, increase conversion rates, improve customer experience and implement agile merchandising tactics.

Magento comes with good, but basic, keyword search, category navigation and merchandising functionality. If you’re a small business, or just starting out, it may initially be enough. As your site grows in terms of product offerings and visitors, however, problems can ensue.

If your site search can’t handle an expanding product catalog with numerous attributes and growing traffic volumes, your customer experience will suffer. Most importantly, your conversion rate will decline, and with it sales and profits.

An upgrade to EasyAsk allows retailers to expand their site and offerings without experiencing growing pains or customer frustration. A few key highlights:

• Highly Descriptive Search. The more visitors you have, the more diverse ways your customers will look for items. EasyAsk gives shoppers the ability to enter detailed descriptions into the search box, and deliver highly-tuned, relevant results.
• Faceted Navigation. As your product offerings grow, navigational attributes become more varied. And as shoppers increase, they want to navigate the site different ways. EasyAsk enables highly granular, dynamic navigation attributes to allow customers to easily find what they seek.
• Agile Merchandising. EasyAsk gives you insight into shopper behavior, and the ability to rapidly adjust merchandising via banner ads, promotions and cross-sells – with no need for IT involvement.
• Manageability. Clear reporting, actionable analytics and automated services such as spell-correction, stemming and relaxation make managing even the largest product catalog manageable.

A Note on Solr:

Magento does offer a search and navigation “upgrade” based on the open source offering Solr. Although Solr does give some increased functionality over the basic Magento search product, it has a number of limitations.

• Many users find its administration via HTML interfaces laborious, especially when search terms need to be added.
• Lack of support for spell-correction and stemming forces admins to enter all possible variations of a word  into the system manually
• Rules for navigation, sorting or merchandising are defined in SQL, require IT support for any change
• Solr lacks the ability to understand and process long-tail search terms

EasyAsk eliminates these hurdles and allows you to grow the shopping experience along with the rest of your site. EasyAsk offers both on-premise and SaaS versions that seamlessly integrate with your Magento site to maintain great SEO and easy product data integration.

More people in the eCommerce world are becoming familiar with the tantalizing idea of “learning search.” Learning search promises to increase conversions by delivering results based on data “learned” over time. The sales pitch is that the technology works like a human brain – constantly watching, learning and improving. Sounds interesting, but does it deliver on this intriguing premise?

According to EasyAsk product experts, that answer is more “no” than “yes.” The first major hurdle is in understanding what “learning search” really does.  Despite “learning” in the name, the search function is not learning and adapting based on the visitor’s past choices and behavior – which is a common misconception.  It’s just pushing the most popular items to the top of the search.

At its essence, learning search is basically a popularity poll, ranking the most asked-for and clicked-on items at the top of the search results, regardless of nuance or relevancy to an individual searcher’s parameters. It’s really nothing more or less than an aggregator, putting the items purchased the most at the top of the search results, regardless of whether they are really what the customer is looking for.

Let’s say a customer is looking for a cold-weather winter coat. Using EasyAsk, a shopper could put in those exact search term, or any variation, such as “warm winter coat.” EasyAsk’s natural language technology actually understands the meaning of the words, and deduces the intent behind them. The learning search software will not understand any of these qualifiers to “coat” unless they part of the catalog product description, and instead simply deliver the most popular results for the word “coat.” If that happens to be a rain coat or other lighter outerwear, the results will clearly not be relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Another issue with learning search is that is does not understand or account for typos or misspellings. If, for example, I hurriedly typed in “coal” instead of “coat” I would not get the results I was looking for. I would probably not get any results at all, unless the retailer surprisingly also sold coal in addition to coats.

If names of products are not English words, that can also be a serious issue.

SEO is another problematic area for so-called “learning search.” A fundamental flaw with most platforms which use this technology is the use of what are called sub-domains. This takes the visitor off of your website, degrading your SEO. For example, if I visit the mythical site www.store.com and enter in a search term, I will be directed to a subdomain, such as search.store.com.  If I click on a product, I would then be routed back to the website, but this is not what you invested all that money, sweat and tears on SEO for. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, but they are generally costly to implement.

So despite the name, there are smarter technologies out there than learning search, including natural language search.

 

There are a number of simple steps you can take to make sure your search box is working efficiently to help drive conversion. Size and placement on the page are two of the most important. You want visitors to your search function to connect quickly and efficiently to the products they are most likely to buy.

The first step in doing this is to make sure the box is easily seen and that its function is immediately apparent. It almost goes without saying that no one should have to search for the search box. Yet many e-Commerce sites, in a misguided effort to maximize page real estate, make the search box so small it is hardly noticeable. Similarly, many sites make the assumption that the visitor will know what its intended usage is. Don’t assume anything. Let the visitor know exactly what to do.

The brief video below gives you a few specific search box tips that can improve your conversion rate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earlier this summer, EasyAsk unveiled a powerful new tool in its search arsenal. Search-as-you-Type (SayT) is a major enhancement that brings customers one step closer to immediately finding the product they want. We thought it was worth taking a closer look at the product and how it works.

We’re all pretty familiar with the idea of auto-complete when using our computers or mobile devices. You begin typing in a word or phrase, and get immediate suggestions for completing your entry.

SayT goes way further. In addition to offering word suggestions based on your partial entry, SayT presents product results and targeted category and attribute suggestions that automatically update as a shopper scrolls through the search suggestions.

A few highlights:

Smarter Search Suggestions: Intelligent search suggestions and product results are returned with refinements as the shopper types, eliminating the problem of too many results and irrelevant results. SayT not only improves the shopper experience, it decreases the time to shopping cart and checkout.

Instant Product Results: As the user types, SayT examines the input, sends it to the server for suggestion generation, then presents the results to the user – all in an instant. SayT provides immediate feedback to the shopper who can see the products their search would return while they are typing. It doesn’t get any faster than that.

Product Images: SayT allows shoppers to see images of the actual products as well as the search results descriptions. The product images that match the search can be displayed below the suggestions and be instantly clicked through to the product page.

Customizable Results: What the shopper using SayT sees is completely under the control of the retailer.  You can customize what types of content to display, how it is shown, and where the information is displayed. The site manager can even market specific offers to shoppers instantly while they are typing. In short, it’s a merchandiser’s dream come true.

Guided Navigation: As the search results and images come up, the user can press an arrow key to highlight one of the suggested products.  The products and navigation for that selection are then shown.

But a picture is worth a thousand words. The screen shot above shows a sample scenario of a shopper who has typed “purs” into the search box. Our shopper has then used the arrow key to navigate to the suggestion of “leather purses,” which has brought up images and description of the best products matching that search.

At this point, she can click on a product and go straight to its product page, click on a navigation choice and see those results (brown leather purses, for example), or click the suggestion of “leather purses” to see all the results and navigation for that selection, or continue typing to see further suggestions and refinements.

It’s simple, intuitive and fast.

SayT is available at no additional cost to all current EasyAsk customers, whether using the cloud-based SaaS or the installed version of EasyAsk eCommerce Search. A new customer incentive program includes SayT free of charge with all purchases of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition by September 30, 2013.

 

The eCommerce world is large, complex and fraught with both danger and the opportunity to open new markets and increase sales. The stakes are high, and companies want to make sure they are making all the right choices along the way. Those are some of the reasons why retailers choose to work with the industry’s largest vendors. They are also some of the very same reasons why many select smaller partners to accomplish their goals.

In the world of online retail, bigger isn’t always better.

Large vendors and technology providers often tout their global footprint, number of employees and financial size in their corporate profiles. All of these are potentially good things, but not necessarily relevant to delivering the best solution to a customer.

Etailinsights recently offered some food for thought on why bigger isn’t always better. We think they’re right on the mark and have a few more ideas to add to the discussion.

Innovation. Many smaller technology vendors can spot a product opportunity or a common customer issue and design solutions far more quickly and with less bureaucracy than their larger counterparts. They can adapt to changing market conditions rapidly, and aren’t left trying to sell last decade’s solution in 2013.

Specialization. Smaller partners don’t have to try to be all things to all people. In many cases, they have a niche – a certain specialty product or a specific market type or size they service best. All of their focus goes into providing the best possible customer solutions for those audiences

Attention. As Etailinsights points out, there’s little doubt that smaller vendors often excel when it comes to personal service and attention.  Resources can be quickly shifted to address clients’ needs.

Cost Effectiveness. The smaller vendor usually does not need to support a global sales force or multiple offices around the world. Product development, sales and management are often under one roof, which not only translates into less cost to the end user, but also sparks greater innovation (see above).

When it comes to search technology for today’s eCommerce retailer, we like to think EasyAsk delivers the best of both worlds. We’re innovators in the field of natural language search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. That specialty focus and unique technology have helped drive some of the highest conversion rates in the industry. Yet our mainstream approach means we integrate seamlessly with eCommerce sites from some of the biggest names in the industry, including Magento and Netsuite.

Those of us of a certain age may remember a tag line which Avis Rental Cars famously launched in the 1960s. It not only gave Avis a memorable brand promise, it also it summarizes in a nutshell why it’s often a smart move to take a look at the smaller vendor: “We Try Harder.”

While classic merchandising techniques such as cross-selling and up-selling remain important in today’s retail environment, eCommerce has brought many changes to the world of merchandising. There are new merchandising tools and analytics and algorithmic display techniques. Sales influencers have also changed dramatically with the increased importance of social media and customer reviews.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that while most bricks and mortar merchandising is designed to promote certain products for a fixed period of time, online merchandising operates in real time, and can be changed immediately depending on customer behavior.

Leveraged correctly, and with the right tools, these changes hold the promise of an effective, agile merchandising environment. Let’s take a look at how to make that happen.

Unlike many eCommerce platforms, EasyAsk was designed with the merchandiser in mind. Using information from the product catalog, and based on the products a visitor is looking at, merchandisers can configure truly dynamic merchandising programs.

And while most platform merchandising tools allow very limited data to drive merchandising, EasyAsk allows merchandisers to enter any number of fields or attributes, and can even derive attributes for specific promotions. Operational attributes, such as sales data, product margin or inventory level can also be used to drive merchandising efforts.

Product promotions can be displayed in a number of different locations on an eCommerce site using EasyAsk. Landing pages, product detail pages and the shopping cart are all options for cross-sells, upsells and promotions.

Banner ads are the online equivalent of promotional store signage, but with greater functionality. The banner can link to any group of products which the merchandiser can create through a natural language search query.  So a banner ad promoting “The Season’s Hottest Shoes” could execute an EasyAsk rule for “5 best-selling pumps.”

Landing pages can also be configured to show products based on dynamic, natural language rules.

Smart merchandisers are already using social media and product reviews to better position products and increase sales. In addition to reaching customers with sale and promotional information via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, retailers are leveraging customer feedback, product reviews and Facebook “Likes” to drive sales. EasyAsk makes it simple to raise and/or promote products based on reviews, stars or “Likes” using natural language rules.

For example, a merchandiser could use product review data to group products and display specific items at the top of the page. A plain English rule, “lawnmowers rated 4 stars or higher” would create a group of “4-Star Lawnmowers” for the customer to shop. Or a rule “top 5 rated televisions” would find and present the most highly rated TVs, honing the customer’s search and bringing the sale closer.

With buyers increasingly interested in purchaser feedback, this becomes an extremely powerful merchandising tool.

EasyAsk Commerce Studio makes it easy for merchandisers to take advantage of the promise of online merchandising by making it easy to define, maintain, and manage merchandising programs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merchandising has been around for as long as there have been marketplaces. Both veteran retailers and academic experts have spent countless hours analyzing and honing the best practices for displaying products for maximum sales and profits.

While many of those tried-and-true principles are applicable to the world of online retailing, there are important differences. Understanding those differences, and exploiting the advantages that new technology is bringing to the retail landscape, can make a huge difference in your bottom line.

First, what’s the same: The concept of promoting certain products over others, cross-selling and up-selling are universal, no matter whether you are selling your goods in a corner boutique or an online superstore.

It seems intuitive that eCommerce platforms should simplify these tasks, but in many cases that promise has not been fulfilled. With many eCommerce platforms, cross-sells and upsells often need to be configured on an item-by-item basis, which can translate into an onerous and time-consuming task.

Similarly, the ordering of items on display pages is often based on rudimentary algorithms which assign a static “priority value” to each item. Merchandisers wanting to push certain products to the top of pages have to re-number their priority values – another thankless chore that makes it hard for merchandisers to react quickly to changing market conditions.

Deciding where merchandise should appear on category and subcategory pages is hard-wired in many eCommerce platforms. That wouldn’t be so bad if the retailer only had to configure things once and be done. But inventory is never static – and as products are added or removed, additional time and effort is constantly needed to keep the most attractive products from a merchandising perspective at the forefront.

All of these challenges are multiplied for large and/or highly active retailers.

EasyAsk completely eliminates these issues and delivers solutions that allow merchandisers to react quickly and easily make changes in how products are displayed, upsold and cross-promoted.

For example, using natural language rules a merchandiser can feature specific products by identifying common product attributes and presenting them to the customer in a creative manner, such as “Hot Items” or “Great Values.”

Changing the display order is just as simple. A merchandiser can create and apply a variety of different rules (using plain English) to order products based on any number of attributes, including product attributes such as price, color or brand or operational attributes such as inventory level, popularity and margin.

Cross-sells and upsells are also easily implemented using natural language rules. Let’s say a retailer wants to cross-sell sunglasses with swimwear. With EasyAsk Commerce Studio, the merchandiser would create an event rule for “swimwear” and an action rule for “sunglasses” with a promotion type of “cross sell.” Done. Quite a bit easier than selecting every swimwear item and manually placing sunglasses in the “related products” area!

To entice a customer looking at handbags to consider a premium brand such as Kate Spade handbags, a merchandiser would simply set up an event rule of “NOT Kate Spade handbags” and an action rule of “Kate Spade handbags” with a promotion type of “upsell.” This would ensure that Kate Spade handbags appeared as “Items You Might Be Interested In” on any page where handbags other than Kate Spade were shown.

Classic merchandising techniques such as cross-selling, upselling and product promotions still hold powerful promise for eCommerce retailers. But the ability to quickly react and adapt to changing trends and market condition makes these tactics even more valuable to the bottom line. In our next installment, we’ll look at how to maximize some of the newer merchandising considerations that are unique to the age of internet retailing.

Site search is getting better these days, and with that development comes the assumption that the most “relevant” results should always show up in the first page of the results display.  While that seems like a pretty reasonable expectation, there is actually more to it than meets the eye.

“Relevancy” is actually a loaded term that can have differing meanings depending on how the term is used, and who is using it.  EasyAsk understands that there is a difference between “search relevancy” and “business relevancy,” and allows the merchant to control the results display based on the importance of both of these considerations.

Consider this example:  A customer of a large online retailer is looking for a television. She types “television” into the search field and sees results that include TVs, but also television remote controls, television antennas, and other television-related products. Those results all contain the keyword she entered and are therefore “search relevant.” But are these results displayed optimally from a “business relevancy” perspective?

It’s a common mistake for a search admin to treat this kind of situation as a search issue and attempt to improve the results by restricting the definition of “television” to return only actual televisions and not accessories.  The problem with this approach is twofold: It now makes it harder for the site search function to find accessories for a “TV remote” search, and it doesn’t allow the customer to further navigate to the TV accessories after viewing the actual televisions.

EasyAsk’s technology delivers a different solution. With EasyAsk, the retailer doesn’t need to eliminate results to present the most “relevant” options first. EasyAsk allows customization of how results are displayed through simple “business rules” that weight search results.  Using plain English, the retailer can simply type in rules that will prioritize how the results of the search are displayed.

This gives the retailer complete control and solves a problem common to many site search engines. It also has dramatic implications for merchandising, since items can be prioritized by brand, price, whether they are on sale, etc. We’ll explore that avenue further in a future blog.

But back to relevancy: In many cases it’s very difficult for site search technology to know how business relevant a product is to the search request. A related item such as accessory may be categorized in the same place as the looked-for item, and have many of the same words in the product title, but may actually be quite different from the searched-for item.

The site search is doing its job when it finds every product that corresponds to the searched phrase in the correct product category. Now it’s up to the retailer and the display technology to show that information in such a way that the buyer and seller sees what is appropriate in the top results.

To illustrate with another example, let’s say a customer searches for a gas grill.  Good site search technology should find all of the products related to gas grills — including the grills themselves as well as accessories such as grill covers and grill cooking implements. A merchandiser with a powerful tool like EasyAsk, however, can control how the search results are displayed with a simple business rule that prioritizes non-accessories when showing equally search relevant products.  In this way, a single business rule can have the HDTVs and the gas grills show first for their related searches while also including their equally “search relevant” accessories  further down in the results.

The topic of relevancy in search results is more complex than it initially seems. But with EasyAsk, there is also a simple solution that serves the needs of both the retailer and consumer.