Tag Archive for: Natural Language search

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B2B Series Challenge 1: Product Findability

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that businesses optimize the eCommerce experience for their customers. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

Fast-track your Customers

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B2B Series Benefits and Challenges

According to Forrester, business eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

B2B eCommerce: Benefits

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Retailers are Marketing to more than Five Generations, is your Site-Search Flexible enough to help them all?

The world we know continues to change, and we as a people, are forced to change with it. Sometimes it’s in small ways, like swapping Bell Bottoms for White-Washed jeans, then swapping those for Skinny Jeans. Sometimes it’s in larger ways, like going from hailing a cab on the sidewalk, to ordering an Uber from your bedroom/office/etc. with a touch of a button. Some of us prefer the former, while others have adapted, or were even raised with the latter. It is those inbred traits from our particular generation that make us who we are. The beauty of today’s age is that our technology can handle whichever you prefer.  Can your site-search say the same?
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Research Shows Voice Input is Overtaking Typing on Smartphones

Voice as a Computing Interface is exponentially faster than typing, it is easier than typing, and computers are finally intelligent enough to understand 95% of what is said… compared to just 70% in 2010.  And people are using it more and more.  Just as Responsive Web Design has become a necessity since more people search on their phones and tablets, so too is having a Natural Language Search Engine that understands what these millions of shoppers are saying.

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“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – The Realities of eCommerce Search

Sometimes online shopping in 2015 is a flashback to 1969 when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sang the above titled song in their album ‘Let It Bleed’. You search for something to buy, but the website doesn’t seem to understand what you are asking for and delivers up stuff you didn’t want. You look at the results and decide to shop elsewhere. Lost customer, website bad.

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You’re Betting Your eCommerce Business on . . . SOLR ??!!

What’s behind your eCommerce search box? You’re not going to like the answer

As an eRetailer, one of the most critical functions on your website is your search box.  This is where your shoppers go to find things they want to buy.  The truth is that, deep down; you know it just doesn’t work very well.  Most eRetailers think that “search” is just “search” and that all search tools are just about the same.  They expect that their search has some navigation, basic spell correction, and maybe type-ahead.  If that’s all search offers, then what’s the difference, really? Read More

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Automatic Spell Correction in eCommerce Search Saves you Time and Money

The last thing any visitor wants to see when they perform a search on an eCommerce Site is a page that says “No Results”. As we indicated in our recent whitepaper, Increase Customer Conversion by Boosting Product Findability, misspellings and using different tenses is a very common occurrence by eCommerce shoppers.

To make your site tolerant of misspellings and the like, you have two options: Either manually enter all the various misspellings and whatnot into your search engine, which will take you God-knows-how-long… Or, the better approach, use an eCommerce search engine that offers Automatic Spell Correction and stemming against terms in your product catalog.

This gives you out-of-the-box tolerance of these visitor errors, enabling them to find the right products and keeping them on your site as opposed to going to your competitors.

Watch this one-minute video and see how Coldwater Creek uses EasyAsk’s automatic spell correction to convert more visitors into customers.

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If Your Search Box Was a Personal Shopper, Would You Fire It?

 

In the world of online shopping, your site search box is like your personal shopper.  You know, like the ones who ask you, “How may I help you?” when you walk into a department store.

In the real world, if you’re asked that, you’re going to tell them how they can help you.  But in the eCommerce world, most of the sites you go to can’t help you the way a personal shopper can. Why?  Because of Keyword Search limitations, and the fact that most people don’t know what’s possible with their eCommerce Site Search.

In the early days of the Internet, way back in 1995, the Keyword attribute was popularized by search engines like AltaVista.  But even as early as 1997, which was 15 years ago, they discovered keyword search was unreliable.  But people still continue to use it!  Why?

Yahoo! and Google…

If you use a long-tailed search (i.e. “Women’s black long-sleeved dresses”), the chances of your search returning the right product, are very slim. And now you’re reduced to clicking through page after page to try and find what you want. Or, if you’re like me, you leave the site altogether.

Let’s flip it around and compare it to real life. What if you told a personal shopper that you wanted a “Women’s black long-sleeved dress,” and she returned with long-sleeve shirts, coats, jackets, short-sleeve dresses, strapless dresses, etc. You would look at her like she’s… how do I put this nicely?… AN IDIOT. Because you made it clear you what you wanted and she didn’t understand you.

You wouldn’t accept this in real life, so why are you accepting this with eCommerce websites? Because you’re used to it? That’s just ridiculous, especially when your eCommerce Site Search has the ability to understand the entire intent and context of your request.

If you’re using the right technology…

Natural Language/Semantic Search has been around for years, but has not gained steam until fairly recently with IBM Watson and Siri on the iPhone. It’s a SMARTER and FASTER search than Keyword, and can understand long-tail searches, price constraints, and synonyms.  Flip-flops, sandals, thongs, slippers are all the same thing, you know it, I know it, your search box should know it.

It’s time to stop accepting below-average as the norm. Upgrade your eCommerce Site Search to a Natural Language Engine. EasyAsk has done wonders with companies Large (Lands’ End) and small (Schuler Shoes).

Take a look for yourself and see what can be accomplished with the right Searchandising tool.

 

 

 

 

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Intelligent Search: What Google’s New “Semantic Search” Means for Search on your e-Commerce Site

BY EasyAsk CEO Craig Bassin

Google has recently announced that it is adding more “semantic search” techniques into its otherwise largely keyword search. This means matching on the meaning of words, rather than just the occurrence of words. Since nearly all of your customers also use Google, their expectations for search are conditioned by Google. Over time, there is a trickle-down in the expectation that shoppers have of search, based largely on their experience on Google.

Therefore, it’s a reasonable question to ask: “What changes should I make in search at my commerce site to keep pace with customer expectations?” Beyond keeping pace with expectations, there is another even more important reason to invest in semantic search on your site — increased conversion rate. Analysis of Neilsen netRatings conversion rate studies across similar e-commerce sites has not only confirmed the impact of natural language semantic search, it has actually measured it!

What is Semantic Search?
The literal definition of semantic search is searching on meaning rather than searching on words. Google is now knocking at the door of semantic search by associating word groups as concepts. If some people search on “beach sandals” and other people search on “beach flip-flops”, while both groups click to show interest in the same item set, then the concept “sandal” and “flip-flop” may be related. The distillation of words into concepts is one part of the greater field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Searching on concepts in their various forms delivers more complete results and is more tolerant of user search variations. As you have seen, semantic search is quite valuable – but there is more power available when you go deeper using more NLP techniques.

A semantic search with deeper NLP (let’s call this Natural Language Search, or NLS) support brings even more converting power to a commerce site. Lets look at these two commerce searches, “return policy” and “sweaters under $100”. Searching all your product descriptions for the words “return” and “policy” will clearly lead to ridiculous results. Clearly, the intent of this search is to display your policy on returns – treating this as a phrase and recognizing its special nature are important to the shopper, and easy with NLS.

Similarly, treating “under $100” as a keyword search will yield undesirable results. The intent of the user is to restrict the products based on price. Recognizing that “$100” is not a word, but rather a price requires something smarter than a keyword search. This occurs in other forms when the user wants to express a range restriction, not just on price, but any other numerical product attribute such as length, weight or wattage.

Units of measure commonly stump keyword search engines. For example, keyword searching for “12 volt 24 amp motor” will unfortunately return all motors with 12 or a 24 anywhere in the description. Thus, both 24 volt 12 amp motors as well as 24 watt .5 amp motors with a 12″ shaft will be shown! If your site gets lots of dimensional/size searches, the capabilities of NLS is absolutely critical. A semantic search with NLP is aware of units of measure, such as “volt”, “v” or “amp”, “A”. This unit of measure awareness automatically creates a phrase around “12 volt”, and to include searches on variations like “12V” or “12 V”. When a shopper searches for “Nike size 10”, NLS will recognize that “size” is an attribute with numeric values & therefore select the products with “size=10”. These capabilities impact countless unique searches that would otherwise stump almost all search engines.

These examples illustrate how easy it is for dumb keyword searches to yield embarrassing results. Have you ever searched a site only to see hundreds of irrelevant results? This not only reflects poorly on your brand, but can actually cause you to lose customers! Nearly all of us have had the experience of getting such poor results from a search on a commerce site. We get frustrated and leave the site altogether to buy from another site. This illustrates how improving search can improve conversion rate.

In order to measure the correlation between semantic search and conversion rate, we used Nielsen netRatings to compare the conversion rates of sites that were similar except for their use of semantic search. We compared sites for catalog companies and non-catalog companies separately. In both groups, the sites using semantic NLP search had about 20% higher conversion rate than the sites using keyword search. Of course, there are many other phenomena that impact conversion rate, but these would generally balance out across all the groups. Furthermore, the 20% improvement is consistent with the uplift we see when customers switch from keyword search to semantic search. Details of the Nielsen study are available on request.

Google is moving the world towards semantic search. Eventually user expectations will demand it from your commerce site as well. Switch sooner rather than later – you’re leaving money on the table every day until you make the switch!

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EasyAsk Partners with Explore Consulting to Help Fusion Beads – a NetSuite E-Commerce Site – to Improve Search and Navigation

Partnership offers e-retailing customers, including those of Fusion Beads, improved shopping experience

EasyAsk, the leading provider of natural language solutions and technology, and Explore Consulting, a professional services company that provides innovative technology solutions for managing business data and a cost-effective approach to completely outsourced IT in the cloud, today announced a partnership to deliver natural language e-commerce solutions to retailers using the NetSuite e-commerce platform. Additionally, the companies announced a successful deployment at Fusion Beads (www.fusionbeads.com), an online store offering a wide selection of products and information to the beading community.

“The Fusion Bead deployment is a good example of what the Explore Consulting and EasyAsk partnership is aimed at providing,” says Steve Jones, CEO of Explore Consulting. “The partnership offers all types of e-commerce retailers the most advanced search and navigation and intuitive merchandising tools – cost-effectively and very quickly – especially on the NetSuite platform.”

EasyAsk’s NetSuite integration works from within the NetSuite pages, ensuring that page content is search engine friendly and utilizes the item records in NetSuite accounts to maintain centralization of data. Item attributes are configured in NetSuite and the EasyAsk Business Studio is used to configure search and navigation rules based on the attributes a merchandiser wants to use. EasyAsk is similarly tightly integrated with Magento, as well as other popular e-commerce platforms.

After selecting NetSuite as a new e-commerce platform, Fusion Beads turned to Explore Consulting and EasyAsk because they wanted to make it easier for their customers to navigate the wide range of products offered through their website – more than 50,000 items. Not only does Fusion Beads offer a lot of products, but they also catalog a tremendous amount of product and project data to ensure their customers are getting what they need. With the EasyAsk solution, Fusion Beads can now configure down to the item level the product attributes that should be used for search and navigation from over 600 custom item fields they currently use.

“We turned to NetSuite when the Fusion Beads Website became too large to maintain manually,” said Gunilla Eriksson, Director of Online Operations at Fusion Beads. “Additionally, we needed EasyAsk to help us manage search and navigation with our large product catalog and to display, in parallel, relevant projects ideas to our customers. Now shoppers can own their own search and view projects and products in one page. People love it and we love it. It works so much easier.”

“EasyAsk is very excited about the Explore Consulting partnership and the value we are adding at Fusion Beads,” said Marc Schnabolk, VP of Sales and Business Development at EasyAsk. “Explore will help us deliver the EasyAsk eCommerce search and merchandising solutions throughout the NetSuite user-base – both on-premise or as a service (SaaS). We are offering unique capabilities, including intuitive natural language search, relaxation, spell correction, integrated faceted navigation, easy to use merchandising tools and advanced analytics. EasyAsk and Explore Consulting are perfectly aligned in their vision to help Internet retailers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase e-commerce revenue.”

About Explore Consulting
Based in Bellevue, Wash., Explore Consulting was founded in 2001 and is a professional services company dedicated to providing innovative and cost-effective solutions for their customers’ database and IT systems needs. With a heavy focus on SaaS web-based business systems like NetSuite (NYSE: N) and Amazon Webstore, Explore has developed industry-leading PC and mobile platforms for seamless data integration in the Cloud. Additionally, Explore develops custom solutions ranging from eCommerce web stores that are fully integrated to back-office systems to highly specialized business applications written in Microsoft’s .Net and SQL platforms. Explore was recently ranked among Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies for four straight years as well as the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies three years running. Explore Consulting is the largest NetSuite Solution Provider and reseller in the Northwestern United States and was recently named as 2011 NetSuite Partner of the Year, Americas. For more information, visit www.exploreconsulting.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 industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boosts online revenue through increased conversion rates, better customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Quiri & Business Edition revolutionize 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.

Ready to see how EasyAsk's eCommerce solution can help you? Request a demo!
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