EasyAsk is pleased to announce that is has attained certification as a verified business partner solution for IBM WebSphere Commerce. The verification process is proof of EasyAsk’s ability to be installed and run at a client site running on strategic IBM technologies. IBM performs a technical/marketing assessment of all nominated solutions to verify that the nominated IBM products are being used correctly.
EasyAsk provides intelligent, cognitive search for WebSphere Commerce, returning exactly the products shoppers are looking for and driving significantly more revenue.
EasyAsk is currently in production at Timberland and The North Face Europe, both V.F. Corporation brands.
With the holiday season in sight, it’s time to capitalize on new search and merchandising technology and take advantage of what is sure to be an excellent e-retail season. This season is poised to top last year’s $56 billion threshold. According to the U.S. Census Bureau News, online retail spending neared $97.5 billion for Q2 2016, an increase of 4.5% over Q1 2016 and up 15.8% percent versus the same time period a year ago, strong indicators that this holiday season will break all records.
Let’ take a step-by-step look at how you can improve your website to increase your conversions and drive eCommerce revenue. Read More
Smarter search that delivers the right products drives higher revenues. It’s proven, benchmarked, and now, guaranteed. It’s also about delivering a shopping experience that delights your customers and encourages them to buy from you vs. your competition. Read More
Every year, eCommerce pundits share their predictions for the holiday shopping season. As a whole, eCommerce sales continue to show remarkable growth, particularly exciting is the explosion of sales on mobile devices.
Here are some articles that are “must reads” to ensure that your website is maximized to take advantage of all this holiday season has to offer:
No no no no no! Search Laboratory: Avoiding having to tell our customers this!
Last month we wrote about making use of dedicated site search technology by EasyAsk to improve the experience for our online browsing community. We also manually optimise our site search to ensure it continually returns the best results for you.
Behemoths of search like Google & Bing are incredibly good at interpreting users’ questions. We figured that all we needed was billions of dollars and a crack team of – say – nine hundred people, and we too could build ourselves an infallible
search engine that could basically read peoples’ minds.
Unfortunately, the combined resources of the web team piggy bank and the sales office swear jar (someone has clearly been neglecting to pay their dues into that swear jar) only amounted to £4.60.
We needed a humanised process to continually keep our site search performing exceptionally. The Andertons Search Laboratory was born.
On Andertons.co.uk, you can currently choose from 2130 Electric Guitars.
That’s a lot of strings! But does your perfect guitar have 6, 7, 8 or 9?! What about colour? For a long time, helping our online browsers narrow down the search for their perfect guitar was a challenge.
In our store, our guitar experts are easily able to guide people to the best instruments, based upon their needs. Online — of course you can drop us an email, or phone for help — but what if you just want to browse the website
and find your dream instrument from the comfort of your own home? Read More
Are you like me? Have you come to rely on talk-to-text on your phone? I am one of those people who use the microphone button on my iPhone to dictate my texts and my searches. For the most part, my phone does pretty well at translating my voice into the written word. But like countless others, there are times when I re-read what I have written, only to find garbled text that barely resembles what I said. Sometimes I have to read it out loud to see if I can recapture the essence of what I was trying to say.
EasyAsk Technologies is increasing its reach to retailers who need a stronger solution in the mobile commerce (mCommerce) space. EasyAsk’s genius search and merchandising technology is in lockstep with the current mobile, voice-enabled trend toward mCommerce. Read More
comic courtesy of Christiann MacAuley (www.stickycomics.com)
They’re both extinct.
It’s a pretty good analogy, really. If we set the way-back machine to 2007, there was no mCommerce (eCommerce on a mobile device). Why? Because the mobile devices of the day were not designed to be the computer-in-a-pocket devices that we have today. The very best options in those days were slick flip-phones (like the Razr, I still have a red one sitting in a drawer), PDA’s that doubled as phones (like the Palm Treo my boss had) and, of course, the Blackberry.
In the same universe, eCommerce searches, like all searches, were based on keywords. We were all trained to search in terse terms, knowing that the search engine was not intuitive and could not understand the intent or context of the words we use in normal, everyday language. So we searched based on one or two words and then used navigation to drill down to find what we were really looking for.
But technology evolved, as it always does. First came the iPhone, followed closely by the Android. Here was a game changer, we all rapidly abandoned our formerly beloved cell phones to harness the amazing power of a smartphone. By December 2014, 9 out of 10 (88.9%) mobile subscribers aged 25-34 owned a cellphone and 3 out of 4 (75%) of all mobile subscribers over the age of 13 had one. (source: marketingcharts)
I don’t need to tell you how smart your smartphone really is – you already know that. With the advent of voice technology like Siri and GoogleNow, the next big game changer came in the form of smarter search. We now have the ability to speak to our smartphone the way we speak to another person. For example, if I’m in Boston’s famous North End and I want pizza, I can ask for the best pizza in the North End and get a list of shops – with recommendations. How cool is that?
But what about mCommerce? Here’s a world where search is critical. After all, any shopper coming to your site has the potential to become a buyer. If they found what they were looking for on their first search, there’s a better chance of delighting them and converting them into a buyer.
So, if I want to buy a blue dress, I ask for a blue dress, and if I want that dress in a size 6 for less than $100, then I ask for a blue dress in a size six under $100. Here’s the interesting part, most of the technology that is used to search in eCommerce still uses keywords. Those engines will pick apart my query and return things that have nothing to do with what I asked for. I’ll get lots of blue things, and I’ll get underwear and I’ll even get a message telling me that they can’t find any matches (the dreaded no results page) or worse yet, I will get 10,000 items that are all wrong.
But, there are some technologies available today that understand the true context of my question, and will return results that exactly match what I asked for in the first place.
It’s funny because Google, Bing, Yahoo and IBM’s Watson all use this new natural language technology for their searches, but in the eCommerce world, the obsolete keyword search model still pervades the market. Why? Because it is free and it is embedded in the eCommerce platforms and many eRetailers don’t even know that a better way exists.
If you are an eRetailer you must be asking yourself if a natural language search engine would give you a competitive edge, delight your customers and drive your revenue. The answer is, of course!
When your business is relying on returning the right products, the first time, don’t give it to the dinosaur. Because what do dinosaurs and keyword search have in common? They are both extinct.
Innovative and successful Tacoma Screw competes with W.W. Grainger and others in the B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year category
June 4, 2015 – Burlington, MA – EasyAsk Technologies is pleased to congratulate Tacoma Screw Products on its nomination in the B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year Category at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2015 show. Also competing in the category, the other nominees were W.W. Grainger, MSC Industrial Supply Co., Environmental Lights Inc., and Newark element14. The 2015 Internet Retailer Excellence Awards recognize the achievements over the past year of the most innovative and successful eCommerce players who are setting the standards for excellence. Read More
EasyAsk is pleased to announce that is has attained certification as a verified business partner solution for IBM WebSphere Commerce. The verification process is proof of EasyAsk’s ability to be installed and run at a client site running on strategic IBM technologies. IBM performs a technical/marketing assessment of all nominated solutions to verify that the nominated IBM products are being used correctly.
y searches. For the most part, my phone does pretty well at translating my voice into the written word. But like countless others, there are times when I re-read what I have written, only to find garbled text that barely resembles what I said. Sometimes I have to read it out loud to see if I can recapture the essence of what I was trying to say.
