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.