This week we posted another interview with Shirley Tan from American Bridal. Hear how Shirley started the American Bridal 14 years ago as a mail order catalog and has grown it significantly over the years. One of their secrets is their unique product collection which Shirley puts a lot of effort into. She has managed to turn her passion for shopping into valuable business skill. Shirley shares some of the lessons she’s learnt as they’ve grown. I’m sure any retailer will find that it’s time well spent listening to her story.

Last week we announced that Lighting by Gregory, one of the largest lighting and ceiling fan distributors in the U.S., has seen some impressive results from using our Learning Search site search and Site Champion user-generated SEO solutions. In fact, they’ve seen a 40% increase in their online conversion rate since deploying our technology.

With more than 150,000 products in their e-commerce inventory, the lighting retailer needed a robust, intelligent search solution that would give visitors an easy way to find what they’re looking for and not deliver items with little or no relevance in the search results. The company also needed something that returned results lightning quick and that could help customers further refine their searches. Their previous site search from Google just didn’t cut it. (Don’t get us wrong, we like Google and think their Internet search engine is a powerful tool (as does practically everyone else!), but site search is not their sweet spot. It IS ours, as Lighting by Gregory’s results show.)

Lighting by Gregory initially underwent a 30-day free trial, a standard offer for any new customer, and saw how quickly SLI went to work for them. They signed up immediately after the trial ended and have continued to see positive results.

As Lighting by Gregory learned, site search users usually bring in more revenue on average per visitor than those who opt to simply navigate the site. If your site search isn’t delivering the results it should, we’d love to go to work for you too.

We’ve recently posted two more interviews on the Ecommerce Podcast site: One with Patrick Colletta of PC Universe and one with Raj Lahoti of Online Guru.

PC Universe are an online store with a large catalog (tens of thousands of products). This brings their own set of challenges. Patrick gives us a background on the company, the technologies they’re using and talks about the difficulties of maintaining accurate product descriptions for tens of thousands of products.

Online Guru’s main site is DMV.org - the unofficial guide to the DMV. In the interview with Raj he talks about how he started the company with his brother and how they’ve grown it to be one of the most popular sites in the US. It’s a fascinating story of a young entrepreneur who has a wealth of opportunities ahead of him.

This week SLI Systems will be visiting Miami, FL and Boston, MA as the last two cities in the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on this event and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

I spotted a new customer of ours, Central Vacuum Stores, blogging about their powerful new search. I’m always pleased to see a happy customer.

Our June newsletter contains details on some of our recent product enhancements that you may find useful.  Recent product improvements include the release of our Auto Complete feature (read the blog post The benefits of Auto Complete for more information), our redesigned merchandising console, and improvements to the speed of our core search technology.

For more information read our site search newsletter.

We recently released an autocomplete feature that’s been picked up by many of our clients. This uses previous user’s searches (in aggregate) to automatically create keyword suggestions, which are then displayed in order of popularity. It is really fast too. Head over to surveillance-video.com if you want to see it in action.

Prior to the release we had trouble estimating how often people would use it. We couldn’t find any usage stats out there we could use as a baseline. While it is still early days, it is currently being used 20% of the time, and on average people are saving themselves from typing about eight characters each time. Saving a few keystrokes is great, but the real benefit appears to be helping people use search terms that are hard to spell – spelling suggestions are required much less often on sites with this technology. This means more people are finding what they want the first time, which has to be a good thing.