This week SLI Systems will be visiting Seattle, WA and San Francisco, CA as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

We had a great time at the Internet Retailer Conference last week in Chicago. It is very stimulating talking to so many people, including online retailers, industry experts, and the other vendors. SLI sponsored the opening reception on the Monday night and we gave away a MacBook Air (from our Cupertino neighbor, Apple) - this created a lot of interest. The winner was Shirley Tan of American Bridal. Conincidentally Shirley is an existing customer of SLI Systems. She was very happy to win the laptop.

This week SLI Systems will be visiting the OC, Orange Country, CA as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

Next week we’re traveling to Chicago for the Internet Retailer Conference. We’re exhibiting at booth #655 (near the front of the exhibit hall).

We’re also hosting a series of presentations with our partners - CORESense, PowerReviews, WebLinc, ExactTarget, Trinity Insight, and DMinSite will demonstrate how their leading technologies along with SLI Systems advanced site search and navigation solutions can help your ecommerce site jump to the next level.

If you would like to find out more or to request a meeting please visit our Partner Solution Zone page.

Today we’re announcing that Spencer’s and its sister company, costume retailer Spirit Halloween are using our Learning Search and Site Champion services. Spencer’s sells humorous gifts and Spirit Halloween sells costumes.

The two e-commerce sites (the company also operates brick-and-mortar locations around the country) see their biggest traffic around Halloween and Christmas. It’s important that we are able to handle these seasonal spikes to ensure that their customers can always find just the right products.

Jay Greenberg, director of ecommerce for Spencer’s, had been an SLI customer at his previous position at Franklin Electronics, and was so happy with our service that he advocated using us at his new company. We’ve seen this several times - when individuals move companies. For me this underscores the importance of ensuring that our customers receive the best service that they can.

You can read more details about Spencer’s and its choice of SLI here: Spencer’s and Spirit Halloween Improve Customer Experience on the Web Using Learning Search and Site Champion From SLI Systems.

This week SLI Systems will be visiting Toronto, ON and Minneapolis, MN as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

Next week SLI Systems will be visiting Cincinnati, OH and Chicago, IL as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

SLI along with Salesforce.com and Omniture are sponsoring Exact Target’s Route 1 to 1 seminar series titled “The New eMarketing Essentials”. This 13 city seminar tour will help put email, analytics, CRM and search solutions to work in ways that will help your marketing investments perform better.

This week we will be in Atlanta, GA on Tuesday April 22 and in New York City on Thursday April 24.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

Jay Shaffer, the VP of Marketing for our partner PowerReviews, wrote an interesting post last week about their competitor Bazaarvoice (who is also one of our partners). It’s interesting because Jay is openly accusing Bazaarvoice of trying to copy some of the PowerReviews capabilities. It’s a very aggressive approach to this sort of problem.

While not taking sides in this issue (as they are both our partners), we typically try not to be so openly critical of our competitors in these situatations because we don’t want to highlight them or tell them what they’re doing wrong.

As to the validity of what Jay is saying - I’ll let you read his post and talk to each company to decide for yourself. Because they’re both partners of ours I’ll remain neutral. We do have customers who are happy with the service from each of these companies. As far as I know they are the only vendors out there who will help you implement reviews on your site (let me know if I’m wrong). We have some customers who implement reviews themselves - as a rule I would recommend against this - the experts will do a better job (it applies to site search as well - but I’m biased about that). However I do recommend having reviews on your site - there are many benefits.

I doubt Bazaarvoice will respond directly - they probably don’t want to have a public slinging match.

Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.

This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.

As to the question around the value of the benchmarks - I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.