Today we announced that we have an expanded partner program that includes a broad range of online marketing, ecommerce platform, analytics and ratings & reviews solutions providers.

Our partner program allows online retailers to further integrate industry-leading products and services with SLI’s hosted search solution… read more

Next week we’re attending the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West event in Santa Clara, CA, February 26 - 28, 2008.

SLI will be exhibiting (booth #320) and our CEO Shaun Ryan will be speaking on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 2pm - 2:30pm. The topic of Shaun’s presentation is “Internal Search and Navigation - Best Practices - and Their Impact on SEO”.

This is an interesting site that allows you to watch what people are finding at a variety of retailers. It’s a cool gimmick but it’s not the sort of thing I could watch for long. It might be useful if you’re looking for a gift - to get some random ideas. It could then be nice to be able to filter what you’re seeing - like don’t show me any women’s clothes - or only show me women’s clothes.

Yesterday, we announced that Vermont Teddy Bear Co., the largest manufacturer of American-made teddy bears, and parent company to leading gift sites, Pajama Gram and Calyx Flowers, is using our Learning Search and Site Champion solutions to drive more traffic and better tailor the ecommerce experience for customers to all three of its sites – www.vermontteddybear.com, www.calyxflowers.com and www.pajamagram.com.

The company reports that since implementing SLI about six months ago, they have seen increased traffic to all three sites. They have also experienced a decrease in complaints from customers who weren’t before able to easily locate products on the sites, and have been able to use the metrics we provide to redesign navigation and create new URLs based on most popular searches to ensure customers can quickly and easily find the gifts they are looking for.

In addition, Bill Cronin, ecommerce manager for Vermont Teddy Bear, told us that he was pleasantly surprised to learn that SLI could also serve as a guide to the types of merchandise the company should be offering on its sites. For example, on the Vermont Teddy Bear site, they found the majority of top searches were related to ‘bear outfits,’ but until they had the SLI data in hand, they weren’t aware of the demand for those products. So, they added a number of bear outfits to their product line and used SLI to help guide visitors to those outfits and have since seen a noticeable uptick in sales.

Before turning to SLI, Mr. Cronin said the site search solution that came with their ecommerce platform wasn’t performing well, so he looked to other online retailers for guidance. Another local Vermont-based company that he admired, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, led him to SLI. But, before buying, Mr. Cronin and his team also reviewed solutions from Endeca and Celebros, and found SLI best suited their needs.

You can read more about the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. implementation on our website: Vermont Teddy Bear Company chooses SLI. All of these sites are very busy at the moment with Valentines day.

Yet another study shows the importance of site search. This British study on consumer satisfaction was sponsored by RightNow (they provide CRM solutions). It found that 19% of online shoppers abandoned a purchase if the couldn’t find specific product information or couldn’t ask questions about a product.

This reinforces a lot of other data that we’ve seen that shows retailers will sell more when they have a good search.

Yesterday we announced that Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM), the largest volume home furnishings store in the U.S., has implemented Learning Search to deliver a better online experience to NFM.com customers. The implementation is about 3 months old at this point (including their initial 30-day free trial).

Jeff Douglas, NFM’s Internet Marketing Manager, told us he liked SLI from the beginning because of how easy it was to get up and running – particularly since it’s hosted by SLI – and because it continues to be mostly self-maintaining. He actually had purchased software from Endeca (one of our competitors) but couldn’t ever set it up because it required too much on his end and he had limited time and resources. He also says the customer complaints about their site search have greatly declined since using Learning Search.

You can read the press release here: NFM gains sales and marketing advantages with hosted site search solutions from SLI Systems. We’ll also be posting a podcast interview with Jeff Douglas in the coming weeks, which will hopefully be an interesting and informative discussion about his job, the company (which has a very colorful history), and some of the different marketing tactics they’ve tried. Stay tuned…