EasyAsk Voice Shopper Unites Voice and Mobile for a Revolutionary Shopping Experience

E-retailers can easily embed voice-enabled conversational shopping into their m-commerce sites and mobile apps

Highlights

• EasyAsk introduces EasyAsk Voice Shopper, a revolutionary new mobile commerce search and merchandising solution
• Q3 2014 statistics from the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly show that customer conversion rates on mobile devices were only 0.80%, much lower than the 2.78% customer conversion rate for on traditional desktop PCs.
• EasyAsk Voice Shopper creates a new paradigm for mobile shopping by allowing customers to have a conversation with a mobile commerce site or app, just like speaking with a sales associate.
• Having evolved from over 15 years of natural language research and development, the EasyAsk conversational search engine powers the conversation with the customer, combining an understanding of the shopper’s intent with the deep knowledge of retailer’s products and merchandising objectives to deliver the right products

National Retail Federation, The Big Show, New York, NY, USA – January 12, 2015 –EasyAsk (www.easyask.com), the leading provider of e-commerce search solutions for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce, today announced EasyAsk Voice Shopper, an intuitive, conversational voice search solution for mobile commerce sites and native apps. EasyAsk Voice Shopper enables customers to interact with a mobile commerce site or app using their voice to find the right products quickly and easily for fast, easy customer conversion.

According to Forrester Research, mobile commerce will surpass $293 billion in sales by 2018, comprising 54% of the total U.S. e-commerce, and surpassing desktop web commerce sales. Yet, the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly from Q3 2014 showed that customer conversion rates on mobile devices were only 0.80%, much lower than the 2.78% customer conversion rate for on traditional desktop PCs. The limited screen real estate and clumsy thumbpads make it hard for shoppers to interact with mobile commerce sites or apps to find the products they want, hindering customer conversion.

EasyAsk Voice Shopper creates a new paradigm for mobile shopping by allowing customers to have a conversation with a mobile commerce site or app, just like speaking with a sales associate. Having evolved from over 15 years of natural language research and development, the EasyAsk conversational search engine powers the conversation with the customer, combining an understanding of the shopper’s intent with the deep knowledge of retailer’s products and merchandising objectives to deliver the right products.

The EasyAsk Voice Shopper allows customers to ask for products or services using any style – explicit names, categories or sub-categories, virtual categories or product concepts, long-tail searches, and full sentences. The request can have terms or attributes in any order, allowing the customer to freely speak their search in their own words.

In addition, EasyAsk Voice Shopper offers unique conversational features such as:

• Voice refinements which allow a customer to narrow search results with their voice rather than using a touchscreen menu,
• The ability to interrogate search results and offer ways to provide better results such as cases where there are no results or few results,
• Customized, conversational responses for interactive feedback to the customer and the ability to offer additional product or search options.

A video demonstration of EasyAsk Voice Shopper can be viewed at https://www.easyask.com/products/mobile/.

EasyAsk Voice Shopper is part of the EasyAsk E-Commerce Search and Merchandising product family, which delivers a harmonious omni-channel (mobile, web, and in-store) customer experience which is optimized for different devices (mobile, tablet and desktop).

“Traditional shopping methods such as navigation or keyword search simply will not be tolerated by consumers on mobile devices, impeding conversion and m-commerce sales,” said Craig Bassin, EasyAsk CEO. “EasyAsk Voice Shopper delivers a new paradigm for mobile shopping by engaging customers in a conversation and helping them find products faster and easier. Retailers will need an interactive voice mobile customer experience such as this to effectively compete in the new mobile commerce world.”

Voice has now become the interaction method of choice on mobile devices. Major mobile and e-commerce leaders such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are making voice the centerpiece of the mobile user experience. According to the October, 2014 Google Mobile Voice Study, 85% of adults and 89% of teens now believe voice search to be the future for mobile.

EasyAsk Voice Shopper works on both tablets and mobile smartphones. It supports mobile commerce sites on any mobile device, and mobile commerce apps on iOS and Android devices. EasyAsk Voice Shopper works with built in voice translation services on mobile devices.

Existing EasyAsk customers can extend their existing search services to use the Voice Shopper with no additional effort. Leading e-retailers such as True Value Hardware, The North Face, JJill, Lamps Plus, Anna’s Linens, Boscov’s, Travers Tool, Journey’s and AlphaBroder have mobile optimized m-commerce sites powered by EasyAsk that support voice search today.

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce. EasyAsk products go far beyond traditional site search, allowing customers to ask for products like interacting with a sales associate and getting exactly what they want. EasyAsk Voice Shopper enables e-retailers to support voice shopping, allowing visitors to converse with a mobile commerce site or app by speaking to their mobile device. Customers that use the EasyAsk software see a tremendous boost in online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, the EasyAsk solutions are used by leading e-retailers and e-commerce sites such as The North Face, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Aramark, JJill, True Value, Andertons Music and Sonic Sense. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

From the Mobile Commerce Daily magazine:

Outdoor gear and apparel retailer The North Face continues to see strong results from its use of natural language and voice-enabled search, helping its sites across mobile and desktop in several European counties to deliver a 35 percent increase in search conversion rate and 24 percent increase in revenue from search.

As mobile use continues to grow, consumers are increasingly looking for streamlined on-site search experiences from their smartphone, which natural language and voice capabilities can provide. The North Face introduced the enhanced search capabilities on its sites in the United States and Canada in late 2012 and to the European sites in the summer of 2013.

Click here to read the rest of the article in the Mobile Commerce Daily.

Amazon Voice Search Leads the Way in M-Commerce Despite Flawed Experience

This article in Mobile Commerce Daily examines the new release of Amazon’s iPhone mobile app, and its new feature: Voice Search.  In the article, EasyAsk’s John Morrell comments on the user experience with the Amazon Voice Search.

EasyAsk site search, navigation and merchandising gives shoppers on Oya Costumes conversational search to easily find products and convert swiftly

Burlington, MA – October 14, 2014 – With Halloween fast approaching, the number of shoppers on the Oya Costumes e-commerce sites grows daily, reaching peaks for the year. Up to 70% of the annual online revenue for Oya Costumes lies in the balance during the critical Halloween season, making customer conversion incredibly important.

Oya Costumes uses EasyAsk, the leading provider of e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce. EasyAsk products offer engaging conversational search which has unprecedented accuracy and precision, putting the right products on the first page every time. EasyAsk voice mobile search gives freedom of speech to shoppers on mobile commerce sites, allowing them to search by speaking to their mobile device.

Oya Costumes is Canada’s finest internet costume business selling fun, costumes, hats, makeup, decor, masks, shoes and lots more. The company has sold products online for 10 years and operates 3 different sites powered by EasyAsk – a U.S. English site, a Canadian English site, and a French Canadian site. The Oya Costumes sites run on the NetSuite Ecommerce platform.

Oya Costumers offers over 6,000 products on its’ e-commerce sites. In 2014 Oya Costumes added over 1,500 new costume designs, many licensed from new licensors over a large number of new themes and characters. This created a big challenge for the online merchandising team. Shoppers needed to find products in many different ways – by character, theme, licensee, category, size, color and more.

A recent e-commerce search usability benchmark study by the Baymard Institute [1] showed that 54% of the top 50 U.S. e-commerce sites did not support “thematic searches” (searches around themes or concepts) and 50% did not support “relational searches” (searches using terms that are related to the items). With EasyAsk, Oya Costumes offers search with the utmost flexibility, supporting searches using themes (“1970s women’s disco costume”) and terms related to items such as various characters (“Princess Elsa from Frozen costume”).

“The very nature of our products and the various ways shoppers try to find the right product makes our business very unique and challenges our online team,” said Faten Hodroge, owner and President of Oya Costumes. “In order to best service our customers, we have to offer search with extreme flexibility that allows shoppers to find the products they are seeking in their own way.”

EasyAsk’s ability to support more sophisticated search terms and ease in adding search synonyms played an important role in Oya Costumes getting the new and existing products onto their site and giving shoppers an easy search experience and richer site navigation. EasyAsk’s integration with NetSuite Ecommerce made the EasyAsk rollout swift and immediately adds new search capabilities as additional products are added to the Oya Costumes NetSuite catalog.

Oya Costumes sites are in two different languages – English and French – and support two different currencies – U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars. EasyAsk’s internationalization support and its’ multi-currency capability played a strong role in Oya Costumes selecting EasyAsk for their e-commerce sites.

The Oya Costumes site relies heavily on navigation powered by EasyAsk. “We were pleasantly surprised to find out our left column navigation, implemented by EasyAsk, is heavily used by our online customers,” said Faten Hodroge. One extremely helpful feature is that EasyAsk allows customers to filter their search by size, color, type and other attributes. This makes it possible for customers to easily find what they are looking for.”

Additional unique characteristics of the Oya Costumes site powered by EasyAsk include:

• Search suggestions provided in the search box speed the search process and are powered directly by the deep EasyAsk search analytics
• The search tolerates mis-spellings for a friendlier shopping experience based on EasyAsk’s automatic spell correction capabilities
• Shoppers are always returned products and “no-results” searches are virtually eliminated due to the search term relaxation capability of EasyAsk
• The Oya Costumes merchandising team can quickly promote products based on operational data such as sales (e.g. top sellers) via the easy to use EasyAsk Commerce Studio

“EasyAsk has surpassed our expectations and allowed us to deliver a wonderful online shopping experience for our customers,” added Faten Hodroge. “The EasyAsk team has been highly proactive in servicing our needs and ensuring our success.”

[1] – E-Commerce Search Usability, Exploring the Customer’s Search Experience, a study performed by the Baymard Institute, publication date of May 29, 2014

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce. EasyAsk products go far beyond traditional site search, delivering unprecedented accuracy and precision to deliver the right products on the first page every time. EasyAsk voice mobile search gives freedom of speech to shoppers on mobile commerce sites, allowing them to search by speaking to their mobile device. Customers that use the EasyAsk software see a tremendous boost in online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, the EasyAsk solutions are used by leading e-retailers and e-commerce sites such as The North Face, Samsonite, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Aramark, JJill, True Value, Andertons Music and Sonic Sense.

Please visit EasyAsk at the Internet Retailing Conference 2014 on Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at Novotel in Hammersmith, London, United Kingdom. The EasyAsk team will be at Stand 46 with the EasyAsk solutions on display for you to test drive.

From EasyAsk’s industry’s best search and voice-enabled mobile search, Magento customers benefit via increased customer conversion rates and online revenue

Burlington, MA – October 13, 2014 – EasyAsk, the leading site search solution for e-commerce, mobile commerce and B2B commerce, has been named a silver Magento E-Commerce Technology Partner. Through this partnership, EasyAsk and Magento will jointly market EasyAsk’s industry’s best e-commerce search, navigation and merchandising solution and the two companies will work together to further integrate EasyAsk into the Magento platform.

EasyAsk’s industry leading e-commerce search solution and Magento Connector is already used by leading Magento customers worldwide including the North Face EMEA, Anna’s Linens, Sonic Sense, Gretchen Scott Designs, DAZ 3D, Canada’s Motorcycle, Blauer, HD Tracks, Eckler’s and Schuler Shoes. Prominent Magento integrators such as Zeon Solutions and Hara Partners are already partnering with EasyAsk to deliver richer e-commerce sites for their customers based on the EasyAsk solution.

Only EasyAsk provides an intelligent, intuitive search capability that enables mobile shoppers to just speak into their mobile devices (similar to Google Now or Siri), search a mobile commerce site, and find exactly what they are looking for. EasyAsk eliminates the need to type searches with clumsy mobile keypads and navigate using a small touchscreen.

EasyAsk’s natural language technology truly delivers the best search box in the industry, as well as richer navigation and easy to use online merchandising. Other search suppliers claim to have “better search, but they are based on obsolete keyword search technology that cannot come close to delivering the results EasyAsk can.

Quotes from some of the Magento customers that have deployed EasyAsk show the customer experience improvement and business result gains from the solution:

Chris Todd, The North Face EMEA:
“EasyAsk allows our customers to find the right products quickly and efficiently. The resultant uplift in conversion rates and revenue – a 35% increase in search conversions and a 24% increase in revenue from search – has been extremely positive.”

Preston Smit, Technical Director at Sonic Sense:
“EasyAsk’s natural language technology has given our customers the ability to find any product quickly to streamline purchases. EasyAsk’s integration with our Magento catalog and easy-to-use tools allowed us to deploy the most extensive and flexible search capability possible”.

Lloyd Buchanan, Owner of Gretchen Scott Designs:
“We needed a powerful tool to improve the online experience for our customers. Intuitive search can be difficult to achieve using Magento and we wanted a search solution that would require minimal set-up. The Search As You Type (SayT) feature and advanced natural language processing capability makes it incredibly easy for our users to navigate to the exact items they are after in a single click or by using a long tail search query, whether that be a wide selection of cotton dresses, or a very specific long sleeved blue summer dress.”

The EasyAsk Connector for Magento seamlessly integrates the best-in-class EasyAsk search, navigation and merchandising services into the Magento platform and e-commerce sites based on Magento. EasyAsk e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising delivers the following capabilities and benefits to Magento customers:

• Highly accurate and precise e-commerce search allowing online shoppers to find products faster and convert more easily and often,
• Voice-enabled mobile search that allows shoppers to speak their searches to the m-commerce site for an engaging mobile shopping experience,
• Direct integration with the Magento product catalog, categories and attributes for fast, easy implementation
• Advanced visual Search-as-you-Type (SayT) auto-suggestion that displays product, search and category suggestions to convert customers directly from the search box,
• Support for “derived attributes” that allow you to create new categories and facets without the time and cost of restructuring your Magento catalog,
• Seamless integration into the Magento site display with no API programming for rapid implementation and easy change,
• A dynamic navigation plug-in that supports the selection of multiple attributes for faster navigation to products by visitors,
• An easy to use merchandising studio that allows merchandisers to define and rollout promotions without IT support, speeding time to market and reducing IT costs,
• Full internationalization and localization which enables the simultaneous rollout on sites in different languages and countries.

“We are excited to have a closer partnership with Magento and bring the customer conversion benefits of the EasyAsk search solution to additional Magento customers,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Adding EasyAsk provides significant capabilities in terms of search functionality and accuracy, which benefits the e-retailer through a better shopping experience and higher customer conversion. Simply look at the results our customers have seen and you will know why they chose EasyAsk.”

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce. EasyAsk products go far beyond traditional site search, providing unprecedented accuracy and precision to deliver the right products on the first page every time. EasyAsk voice mobile search gives the freedom of speech to shoppers on mobile commerce sites, allowing them to search by speaking to their mobile device. Customers that use the EasyAsk software see a tremendous boost in online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, the EasyAsk solutions are used by leading e-retailers and e-commerce sites such as The North Face, Samsonite, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Aramark, JJill, True Value, Andertons Music and Sonic Sense. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.