Author Archive for: Matt

We at EasyAsk are here for our customers, and we want OUR customers to keep THEIR customers.  So this piece is a friendly stat-and-tip sheet to help.  (By the way, even people who are not EasyAsk customers are allowed to read. You’re welcome.)

The world has changed tremendously since the dawn of the Internet.  Nowadays people look at their phones more than their loved ones.  So Tip #1 is get in front of your customers.  Utilize this technology to the best of its abilities.  Little statistic for you: Ninety percent of retail companies have a Twitter account, but only 29 percent use it to connect to their customers.  Don’t be that company, be the responsive and involved company.

Which leads me to my next Stat and Tip…

Apparently half of your customers will be gone within a week if they’ve tried to contact you and YOU have not responded.  That sounds like quite a risk, so don’t take it.  Tip #2 is Make sure you are responding to your customers needs.  You don’t have to resolve every issue, but you should respond in a timely fashion if they’ve brought up a question or grievance.

Oh, and in case you’re not worried about losing half of your customers, another stat for you: A company only has a 20-40 percent chance of winning back a customer that they have lost. Just FYI…

Tip #3 is Be proactive, not reactive.  Don’t take the chance of having to try and win a customer back when being a little more attentive during the relationship will keep you out of trouble in the first place.  Got a final stat for you: The average business loses one-fifth of its customers annually by failing to attend to the current relationships they have with their customers.

If you take these tips and stats to heart, then you shouldn’t have problem keeping your customers happy, which in turn keeps your business happy and successful.

This bit of advice was brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood EasyAsk.

To learn more about keeping YOUR customers happy with a smarter eCommerce Site, give us a call at 781-402-5641, or visit our website. (Stats for this piece obtained from Multichannel Merchant.)

With the introduction of Smart-phones and Tablets, eCommerce business has changed dramatically.  Gone are the days of people shopping only on their desktops and laptops.  People today shop on-the-go, and you can either get with the program, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

Is your business ready for this evolution?

Online-shopping Giant, eBay, DOUBLED their Mobile-Commerce revenue in 2012 from their numbers in 2011*.  Their mobile-app appears on over 120 million smart-phones and tablets.  Now, to be fair, having a mobile-app, as well as a partnership with PayPal, certainly helps increase those mobile-commerce numbers (PayPal’s mobile payments increased over 250 percent from 2011 to 2012)*.  But the numbers wouldn’t even be possible without people deciding to use their smart-phones and tablets to shop online.

If you go the way of the dinosaurs, then you are ignoring Mobile Commerce, and are continuing to rely strictly on traditional eCommerce shopping.  That means overrating Navigation and underrating “the Search Box”.

Let me paint a picture for you: You’re in a retail store, and you see a product you’d like to buy… But the price is a little too high for you.  What do you do?  In the past you either swallowed it and paid that price, drove around and went somewhere else, or maybe you went home, fired up the desktop, searched online and hopefully found it for a cheaper price.

Today, that is not the case.

Nowadays people are searching online while never leaving the store, whether through an app on your smart-phone, or by searching on a mobile-site… If the company has one.  Notice I said SEARCHING, not NAVIGATING, because with a 4-inch screen, Navigation is tedious and annoying.

You need a mobile site that understands the way today’s customers think and act.  And you need a site that utilizes eCommerce Site Search to the best of its abilities.  Keyword Search simply cannot do that.  But Natural Language Search understands the intent and context of the entire search request, does wonders with long-tail searches, and understands price constraints.

To see how your Mobile Site and eCommerce Site stack up to those that use Natural Language Search, contact us at 781-402-5641, or visit our website.

*(Numbers for eBay and PayPal received from “Showrooming Shoppers Send eBay Soaring” by Rachelle Dragani)

Way back in 1924, Travers Tool co., Inc. began serving the metalworking community with tools and industrial supplies. Back in the late 1990’s, Travers joined the rest of the modern world by starting an eCommerce site to take orders online. The internet was a different game back then, and with the vast amount of products Travers offers, their site struggled to keep up.

But in 2010, Travers looked for a change and switched to EasyAsk for their eCommerce Site Search.

“We really wanted to increase our percentage of online business. It was in the low teens and we wanted to get it up to at least 30 percent and eventually over 50,” Travers Tool president Bruce Zolot said.

With well over 100,000 products, Travers needed an eCommerce Site Search that could integrate seamlessly and reduce the time it takes to find the right product, even with long-tail searches.

Enter EasyAsk, a Natural Language search and merchandising software that delivers rapid, intuitive search results, using plain English.  Travers was looking for a solution that would tightly integrate with its backend system for pricing and inventory availability, as well as return accurate results for a complex search in under five seconds.

“We decided to go with a best-of-breed search application and that was EasyAsk.  Choosing EasyAsk also meant we could go to market much more quickly, “ Zolot said.

The results were better than expected. Travers has seen a 12 percent increase in average order sizes, a six percent increase in orders per day, and an eight percent decrease in time spent searching on their eCommerce site.

“EasyAsk lets customers search our site the way they want and not waste time learning how to search,” Zolot concludes. “We can use all the data attributes we’ve collected about our products and provide a very precise, guided navigation.”

EasyAsk accommodated Travers Tool’s large product catalogue, and while the catalogue continues to grow, EasyAsk continues to provide rapid, high-performance indexing and search.

Want similar findability for your eCommerce site? Contact us at 781-402-5641 or visit our website www.easyask.com

Free Implementation offered to the first FIVE companies to contact EasyAsk

With the revealing of Google ending their Google Commerce Search at the end of 2013, EasyAsk is offering a way to simplify the lives of Google Commerce Customers by offering a replacement program.  The program provides these customers with improved eCommerce Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising.  These replacements will help Google Commerce Customers keep and in most cases, increase their conversion rates, resulting in higher revenue and increased profits.

Over the last year or so, the search industry has undergone enormous changes as Natural Language/Semantic Search has proven to be more advanced than Keyword Search. Companies like IBM (Watson), Apple (Siri), and Google’s Internet Search (Semantic Search), have all deployed smarter search algorithms that don’t rely on keyword search.

EasyAsk has lead the industry since 2001 in providing the fastest, most accurate search results for online shoppers.  Using Natural Language technology to understand the entire intent and context of the search request. the results are dramatically more accurate search results and significantly higher conversion rates, which lead to increased revenues and profits.

EasyAsk customers include well-known brands such as The North Face, Lands’ End, True Value Hardware and many more.  And EasyAsk is platform agnostic, deployed on any eCommerce environment, including Websphere Commerce, Magento, Netsuite SuiteCommerce, and others.

To take advantage of EasyAsk’s Google Commerce Search Replacement Program, please call 781-402-5641 or register on our website.

EasyAsk recently made its debut appearance at NRF’s 102^nd Annual Convention & EXPO at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. With over 25,000 attendees, the EasyAsk team was quite busy to say the least. 

While at the show, EasyAsk bumped into a few current customers who swung by the booth to say hi. (Keith Barnes at Lands’ End, and Clark Linstone at Lamps Plus).

We also heard a rumor that Google is abandoning Google Commerce Search at the end of 2013.  People told us they are not taking on any new customers, and will not be supporting their search solution for online businesses beyond the years’ end.

If this rumor is true, it means companies like GNC, Panasonic, Forever 21 and others will need to find someone else to take care of their search capabilities.

We hope they’ll consider EasyAsk, as we have an awesome natural language site search, navigation and merchandising solution that has helped our customers significantly increase conversions on their websites, and generate a ton more money.

We reached out to Google, but have not heard back. If anyone out there has heard directly from Google, we’d love to get confirmation that it is true.

Mobile shoppers and mobile devices are drastically different than traditional online eCommerce scenarios.  Mobile shoppers typically have less time to browse, screen sizes are tiny in comparison, keyboards and eCommerce navigation are awkward and voice-enabled features are becoming more common.  Here are a few things to consider while building your mobile eCommerce site.

Search is King
The limitations on mobile devices prioritize search on mobile eCommerce sites.  Faceted navigation and browsing just don’t cut it.  Shoppers want to see what they are looking for quickly and the search box is the fastest path to purchase.  You should assume that the vast majority of your mobile eCommerce shoppers will interact with your search box before making a purchase.  How can you make it easier for them to get to your search box and enter what they are looking for?

Accurate results
The importance of eCommerce site search in mobile environments means that the search box must produce accurate, relevant results, even when shoppers enter partial or complex queries.  You need a backend system that understands shopper intent and that can showcase the most relevant items from your product catalogue.  Quality trumps quantity – mobile shoppers are much less likely to scroll through pages of results.  Results need to be displayed clearly, with uniform images ranked by relevancy.

Voice enabled
Most new phones, including the iPhone and Androids, are voice enabled and your shoppers are becoming much more comfortable speaking to their devices, as they would a personal assistant. People can now click a microphone button on their mobile devices to enter text into your search box and this is leading to more naturally spoken, descriptive queries.

Remember: Mobile DEMANDS great eCommerce site search.  Consider natural language processing solutions, which automatically understand shopper intent and match queries to the most relevant items in your product catalogue.  Natural language and semantic solutions are vastly better at understanding longer, more descriptive queries, like those spoken into voice-enabled devices.  If you are not able to upgrade from keyword to natural language or semantic search, make sure you tune your system as best as possible – adding all relevant synonyms, common misspellings, as well as commonly associated terms and product descriptions for each item in your catalogue. Also frequently review your site’s analytics to see how people are searching, which will help you improve your site’s results over time.

Do you have additional mobile eCommerce site search tips to share?  Drop them in the comments below or Tweet us with #EasyAsk.

A search box should be like a friendly sales associate – engaging shoppers and directing them to exactly what they are looking for.  Search is the most important eCommerce navigation tool on your site.  It should be easy to find and available from all pages.  Below are a few basic things to consider:

Size of box and buttons
In general, boxes and buttons should be large and rectangular. Creative shapes may look nice, but can hurt you when it conflicts with expectations, as shoppers scan sites quickly and are accustomed to corners.

Make sure the search box is long enough to accommodate more descriptive search terms and phrases.  The submit button should also be large enough to click on in a hurry.

Think about a complimentary or bright color scheme to help the box and button jump off the page.  Also be sure to label the button “search” or “find” instead of something more ambiguous like “go.”

Position
Always place your eCommerce site search box at the top of each page – right, left or center. Make sure it stands out from other boxes.  Subscription or other promotional boxes can create confusion if they are not clearly differentiated. You may want to consider placing other box-like promotions at mid-page or lower.

Suggestive search box
Add a phrase to your search box like “what are you looking for?” A conversational question or phrase will lead to more descriptive searches, which will produce more accurate results.  Conversely, a search box that says “product number” will suggest to shoppers that you want succinct model number versus a conversational phrase.  Shorter eCommerce site search phrases may not have enough information to match to all the relevant items in your product catalogue.

Remember: the search box is the most valuable real estate on your site. Your eCommerce merchandising and eCommerce searchandising strategies will fail if shoppers can’t find and properly utilize your search box.  Spend the time and effort upfront to get it right.

Do you have additional search box tips to share?  Drop them in the comments below or Tweet us with #EasyAsk.

Avoid “No Results” Page and Increase Conversion Rates with these 4 Tips:

Cyber Monday sales were stellar, with some of the largest U.S. retailers seeing a 30 percent increase from last year, according to Smarter Commerce.  Research firm ComScore Inc. (SCOR) says that Monday spending reached a record $1.46 billion!  Some retailers were punished however, as sites with poor eCommerce site search lost customers due to the dreaded “no results” page.  Mobile shoppers, who accounted for 18 percent of Monday’s retail traffic, are a major percentage of that group who left, as mobile devices offer cramped screens and clumsy navigation.

Here are four tips you can apply to avoid the “no results” page to improve conversion rates and ensure you capture your share of this holiday season’s online and mobile sales.

Auto complete and spell correction
Show your shoppers full search terms as they type, so they can pick and click.  And automatically correct or compensate for your customers’ typos to provide the most meaningful results.

Relax Long-Tail Searches
Many “No Results” pages are the result of long-tail searches, such as “Men’s black Ferragamo loafers.” The worst thing an Internet retailer can do is return a “No Results” page because the visitor will just jump to another site to find what they’re looking for. A good site search and merchandising solution will “relax” out words to find something close to what the buyer is looking for. In the example above, if the retailer doesn’t carry Ferragamo brand, they can show “men’s black loafers”. The best search-relaxation systems recognize concepts, like understanding that “black” is a color and “loafers” is a category. With this understanding, a top-notch site search solution can prioritize which concept to drop first.

Explain why there are No Results and offer solutions
The most frustrating “No Results” pages don’t indicate why nothing is displayed.  Use this space to tell them why the search failed and give them options and instructions on how to continue their search.  Many sites offer a list of popular searches or popular brands offered and, if possible, personal assistance via phone or chat.

Provide a rich, mobile eCommerce solution
There are new mobile eCommerce solutions that enable Smartphone users to just hit the microphone button and speak directly into the search-box.  The very best eCommerce solutions provide this, transforming iPhones, Androids and Window’s Phones into a fully functional eCommerce shopping experience.

These are just a few tips you should consider implementing within your eCommerce software solution to mitigate the “No Results” page.  What other ideas do you have to improve your site search results? Let us know in the comments section, or Tweet them to us with #EasyAsk.