Magento | EasyAsk

The Integration of EasyAsk Search and Merchandising with Magento Allows Customers of Any Size to Take Advantage of the Conversion Power of Natural Language

BURLINGTON, MA and LOS ANGELES, CA—November 1, 2011 – EasyAsk, the industry leading provider of natural language e-commerce search and merchandising solutions, today announced a partnership with Magento, the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world, to integrate EasyAsk’s best-in-class natural language eCommerce search, navigation and merchandising platform with Magento, bringing the solution to Magento merchants around the globe. The integrated solution makes it faster and easier for Magento Enterprise and Community customers to power their sites with EasyAsk’s enterprise-class natural language search and merchandising to increase conversion rates, deliver the best shopping experience and grow their e-commerce revenue.

“Converting visitors into buyers is a significant priority to our customers regardless of size or sector,” said Phil Robinson, Vice President of Business Development at Magento. “The EasyAsk search and merchandising solution uses natural language technology to provide an enterprise-class solution that is affordable and easy to use by any size customer. Now, any of our merchants can take advantage of EasyAsk to increase their conversion rates and grow their eCommerce revenue.”

The EasyAsk eCommerce search and merchandising software – available on-premise or as a service (SaaS) – is a comprehensive, full-featured solution that uses natural language technology to offer superior capabilities, including:

Intuitive natural language search that allows customers to enter highly descriptive search phrases – “men’s blue polo shirts under $50” – and find the exact products they seek in a single click
Powerful automatic features such as relaxation, spell correction and more, virtually eliminating the “no results” page creating a better shopping experience and drastically reducing lost visitors due to search
Integrated faceted navigation powered by natural language attributes that make it faster and easier for shoppers to navigate to products they like and speeding conversion
Easy to use merchandising tools which allow non-technical users to create powerful promotions with cross-sell and up-sell offers driven by natural language rules
Advanced analytics that identify trends in shopping behavior, brand experience and more, providing pinpoint advice to merchandising teams to better tune the shopping experience

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition has helped customers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase their e-commerce revenues.

The EasyAsk Magento Extension integrates EasyAsk search, navigation and merchandising with the Magento eCommerce platform for fast, easy implementation and delivers a seamless customer experience for site visitors. The Extension and the easy to use EasyAsk tools allow customers to implement EasyAsk natural language search and merchandising in days versus the weeks or months required by other third party search platforms, for faster return on investment.

“We are pleased to partner with Magento to create an innovative eCommerce solution that combines to deliver the best customer conversion rates in the industry,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Blending EasyAsk’s natural language technology with the state of the art eCommerce functionality of Magento allows customers of any size to offer a superior shopping experience that will fuel their eCommerce growth. We are truly delivering the benefits promised by IBM/Watson to all of our EasyAsk eCommerce customers and doing it today.”

IJHANA, a leading e-commerce consulting firm and Magento partner implemented the combined Magento and EasyAsk solution for a large tool retailer with a catalog of over 5,000 items. “The e-commerce catalog was characterized by complex descriptions and terminology requiring a search product that intuitively knew what the visitor was looking for,” said Kevin Calloway, Managing Partner, IJHANA. “The EasyAsk natural language solution was easy to implement and dramatically expanded the search and navigation capabilities, helping the site convert customers faster.”

About Magento
Magento (https://www.magentocommerce.com/) is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class eCommerce solution that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content, and functionality of their online store. In August 2011, Magento was acquired by eBay Inc., and is now part of the X.commerce division (www.x.com). Launched in 2007, the Magento platform now serves tens of thousands of merchants worldwide, and is supported by a global community of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento Go is a hosted, software-as-a-service solution that provides small and growing merchants with the ecommerce tools they need to succeed online. Based in Los Angeles, Magento, Inc. is a fast-paced, entrepreneurial organization dedicated to the mission of enabling the eCommerce ecosystem. www.magentocommerce.com

About EasyAsk
EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through the company’s ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results on demand. The EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver an industry leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boosts online revenue through increased conversion rates, better customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Business Edition revolutionizes enterprise decision-making, moving beyond traditional business intelligence solutions with easy, low-cost deployment and a unique natural language interface that extends access to information anywhere in the organization.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, Hartford Hospital, Ceridian, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and e-commerce operations daily. For more information, please visit EasyAsk.

Endeca goes to Oracle. Now that is big news. I’ve read nine articles analyzing the acquisition and they all paint the same picture: good news for Oracle’s BI solutions; an enhanced Oracle BI architecture with Endeca’s ability to integrate unstructured data; new functionality for Oracle BI in analyzing data from Hadoop.

The consensus is clear: the Endeca acquisition was driven by the need for Oracle to expand its BI solutions and have more offerings to sell to existing Oracle customers.

But does anyone remember when Endeca was an e-commerce search company? What about that segment of their customer base? What should Endeca e-commerce customers expect?

The acquisition news is fresh, so there is little solid information beyond a few comments expecting an integration of Endeca’s search and merchandizing with Oracle’s ATG platform. Does this imply that ATG will become the primary, or even only e-commerce platform which Endeca supports? Where does this leave customers using Endeca with other e-commerce platforms (WebSphere, Magento, others)? With all the focus on the BI aspect of this announcement, I’m not sure anyone knows the answer. . . yet!

What I can tell you is this – Endeca e-commerce customers should not be surprised if they’re treated as second-class citizens. A recent study by Computer Economics found that “42% of Oracle (ORCL) customers are dissatisfied with the quality of Oracle’s support while 58% are dissatisfied with the cost of the support.” And that was for traditional Oracle customers! What about Endeca customers coming into the fold? What about Endeca SaaS customers? Who knows?

What I can tell you for certain is that EasyAsk believes in customer satisfaction. Or as Ford Motors used to say it is ‘JOB 1’. Since we spun EasyAsk from Progress Software back in ’09, we’ve made sure our ALL our customers know how important they are to us and how committed we are to making them successful.

Providing the very best search and merchandizing technology is what EasyAsk is all about. We can deploy in a fraction of the time it takes for a traditional Endeca site and typically ¼ the costs.

Our natural language based search provides dramatically better results, while our merchandizing tools are so intuitive and easy to use you can return control of your e-commerce merchandizing to the experts – your merchandizers.

This is why NetSuite, Magento and Infor were excited to partner with EasyAsk. We provide IBM Watson-like natural language functionality that is intuitive and optimized for customers and end users. With EasyAsk powering you search, when a visitor searches for a product they get the right result the first time, every time.

Congratulations to Endeca on their sale to Oracle. I’m sure they knocked it out of the park. Congratulations to Endeca’s investors and to their employees.

For Endeca’s e-commerce customers however, this might be a different story. If you are looking for best of breed search technology, remember that EasyAsk is here for you too.

Thanks for listening,
Craig

Tag Archive for: Magento

EasyAsk Partners with Magento to Bring the Enterprise-Class Natural Language EasyAsk E-Commerce Edition Search to Magento Merchants Worldwide

Oracle Buys Endeca – Another E-Commerce Software Company to Vanish?

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