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SLI Buyer Engine – The Heart of a Powerful E-commerce Suite

Posted by Chris Brennan, Chief Executive OfficerAbout us, eCommerce, Merchandising, Mobile, Navigation, Recommendations, Rich Auto Complete, SEO, Site Search, SLI Buyer Engine, Uncategorized

BuyerEngineI have a confession. For more than a decade, SLI has been far too modest about our e-commerce innovations. Perhaps our engineering team has garnered so many patents that they haven’t stopped to reflect. It hit me when we learned of the latest SLI patent related to our auto complete algorithm. We began applying for site search technology patents back when Amazon’s home page was about as intuitive as a bibliography and relevancy wasn’t even a thought.

The fact is, SLI is a global team of e-commerce innovators and expert consultants with unparalleled experience. Since 2001, our team has pioneered apps designed to generate more traffic, convert shoppers into buyers, and maximize orders for B2B and B2C e-commerce leaders worldwide – whether selling 500 or 500,000 products, whether in English, Arabic or 18 other languages, or whether specializing in high fashion or high tech.

At the epicenter of SLI’s flexible and powerful e-commerce suite is machine learning technology, which – until today – remained nameless. The SLI Buyer Engine™ is a cloud-based, machine-learning platform that powers all SLI apps and answers the single most important question: “What is your shopper most likely to buy right now?”  

This means our customers’ bespoke search, navigation, recommendations, mobile experience, merchandising tools and user-generated SEO apps are driven by the same patented technology that makes really smart use of big data in real time.

Machine Learning in Action – A Virtuous Cycle

SLI Buyer Engine Virtuous Circle coreOur Buyer Engine continuously learns to improve the performance of all SLI apps and make their results more relevant, whether a shopper is a new user or frequent customer. It can consume in real time a vast array of data streams today, as well as those to come tomorrow.

  • Behavioral data (what someone is clicking on and not clicking on)
  • Transactional data (what someone is buying)
  • Product data
  • Non-product data (blogs, reviews, articles, videos, etc.)
  • Social data (including the shoppers own social graph, and what they have been up to)
  • Contextual data (where are they, local weather, device type being used)
  • Third-party data (e.g. FICO scores)

This is where big data meets personalization. The SLI Buyer Engine drives personalized shopping experiences for first-time visitors and loyal customers. It continuously learns from user behavior, improving the performance of all SLI apps over time by making their results more relevant. By accurately predicting which products to present shoppers through their buying journey, the Engine shortens the path to purchase and makes it easy to delight customers and increase revenues.

Performance-Driven Commerce

Gartner’s 2016 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies puts machine learning at the cycle peak, noting that “This Hype Cycle specifically focuses on the set of technologies that is showing promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years.”

A recent InformationWeek article explains that machine learning is often used to make predictions through improving search results, anticipating movie or product selections, anticipating customer purchasing behavior, or even predicting new types of hacking techniques.

SLI provides clients with competitive advantage and clear results by addressing most of these use cases today. Search is indeed high-value. Our customers see 2.7x greater conversion rate when site visitors use search and those using the SLI Learning Recommendations™ app, which provides contextually relevant product suggestions while increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities, see 5-15% average uplift in conversions.

So while the automotive industry awaits self-driving cars, companies in the retail sector that are using SLI machine learning technology are already seeing business impact.

Performance-driven commerce will remain the mission for SLI Systems as we strive to continuously deliver the most relevant solutions for customers, and the most relevant results to their buyers. We will continue to invest in machine learning and big data in order to support other emerging technologies that may be applied to e-commerce, such as conversational commerce, augmented or virtual reality, etc. This will help ensure clients are able to provide the best possible and most relevant experience within new shopping paradigms as well. And at the heart of incrementally better e-commerce performance will be the SLI Buyer Engine.

To learn more about results that B2B and B2C e-commerce companies have achieved with the SLI Buyer Engine, download the report detailing how 40 Retailers Have Transformed Their Online Business Using SLI.

Get Heard, Get Prizes: Take Our Annual eCommerce Survey

Posted by Dawn MortensenAbout us, eCommerce, SEO, Site Search1 comment

Want your voice to be heard? It’s survey time again, when SLI Systems asks our network of online retailers and other eCommerce experts to weigh in on their current experiences with site search and their plans for the coming year. The annual eCommerce survey provides the industry with benchmarks on how businesses are attracting customers to their site, improving usability and increasing conversions.

If you haven’t yet completed the survey, please take 5 minutes to do so now at now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8QL7DJB. Every participant will receive a full report of the results. Plus, we’ll enter your name in a drawing to receive one of nine prizes: eight Apple gift cards and one Grand Prize of a new Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablet.

Last year, our 2013 eCommerce Survey of more than 450 eCommerce professional revealed that more than 40 percent of online merchants were making improvements to their SEO and merchandising in order to drive additional holiday shopping traffic. When asked about plans for 2013, retailers around the world identified international expansion as a major priority. Other top priorities were improving conversions (63%) and attracting more customers (61%).

For the 2014 eCommerce Survey now underway, questions are designed for learning how online retailers are using site search to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. We also ask about holiday plans and the year ahead. The results should be interesting – watch for them in early November.

This survey will be live only through next Tuesday, October 1, so please don’t hesitate. Please be sure to include your contact information at the end of the questionnaire for entry into the drawing. We’ll announce prize winners in October.

Thank you for your thoughtful insights, which always make our survey results valuable.

Are You Ready to Rock?! (With SLI!)

Posted by Kemberly GongAbout us
Mudrun - Before

Shiny, happy SLI folks pre-race

Just this past weekend, eight of our SLI family of us (plus friends & family) ran, climbed, jumped and crawled our way through the grueling 6K Gladiator Rock ‘N Run Challenge. Team members from our sales, customer success and marketing departments came out in force to rock the 17-obstacle course in the hills above San Jose.

Looking back on the challenging uphill trail, crawls through rocky mud pits and a horrible, horrible rope climb (in my humble opinion), it’s clear to me that we are lucky to have a great company culture that takes work as seriously as we play. When the going got tough, we urged each other on, helped pull each other up and rooted each other on when pushed to the limit – which isn’t far off from how we work at SLI.

We consider our business as the leading provider of SaaS site search to be a team effort, where all members share in the challenges and successes of our work, and ultimately provide the very best products and service. Our tight team dynamic is one of the reasons SLI is known for its excellent products and customer service, and hopefully from these pictures, you’ll see that we’ll go the extra mile to make sure our customers are happy.

Does SLI sound fun to you? If you’re interested in joining the SLI Team, check out these openings here.

Mudrun - during

SLI Teammates conquering “The Beast”

Mudrun - After

Team SLI with Dan “Nitro” Clark of American Gladiators

Moving Day – SLI’s Offices in New Zealand Tech Hub

Posted by geoffbAbout us

We’re just completing the relocation of our Christchurch team into the new EPIC Centre. EPIC is a recently completed facility that will serve as a high-tech hub. This move has been eagerly anticipated, not only as a chance to join other tech companies in a cooperative space, but also to move from the cramped temporary offices in which we’ve been located since the February 2011 earthquake fatally damaged our offices.

EPIC, which stands for Enterprise Precinct and Innovation Campus, is an ideal place for SLI as we continue to find new ways to provide innovative and useful products and features. Our temporary offices were very basic and didn’t stimulate our team as much as our older building, but we all stuck it out and made it work. The EPIC Center has good light, spacious offices, meeting spaces and communal areas.

According to Will McLellan, one of the EPIC project’s founders, “The EPIC concept is based on the Silicon Valley model – where a building structure and use promotes innovation,” he said. “Our building will be home to 17 technology companies and will stimulate the growth in the technology sector here in Christchurch.”

SLI employees hard at work in our new offices

SLI Systems is headquartered in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and it made sense to move into a building where we’d join a community of other tech companies. We’re looking forward to inspiring and being inspired by the collective passion for technical innovation that is being housed in this building.

Christchurch Central Business District was heavily damaged in the earthquakes; we feel that EPIC is leading the move back into the city center. The collaboration of tech companies is an important way to develop new innovative approaches, and having different companies in one campus will allow for new ideas which wouldn’t have been possible for one company alone.

Built-in Redundancy to Prepare for Natural Disasters

Posted by Shaun RyanAbout us1 comment

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, many areas of the North American East Coast were hit with massive storms and power outages. As record-breaking storm surges and heavy rains flooded cities, millions of homes and businesses have lost power and may be without electricity for days.

When natural disasters strike like this, it reinforces why we set up precautions to guard against natural disasters. SLI Systems has built various redundancies into our service to protect our customers’ search and navigation, so that in the event that a server or data center fails, the load will automatically be redirected to another location.

We were fortunate that our data center in New Jersey remained in-tact and our servers continued to function fully throughout the storm. Even with redundant power supplies and back-up generators, sometimes a data center goes off line. If that did happen what would happen to our services? Well, for customers, they would continue to see normal, uninterrupted service.

We have servers in eight data centers located around the world and multiple servers in each data center to help process the billions of queries conducted through SLI’s services. If there is an issue that shuts down a data center, our system will automatically divert all traffic to different geographic locations. If the issue occurs within one server, a load balancer will automatically remove that server from service,. In this way, we provide multiple layers of protection against our servers failing so that your business is safe.

Additionally, our solution is multi-homed, which means that our clients are duplicated on multiple servers in multiple data centers. If there is an internet connection issue between a specific user and one of the data centers, the user’s browser will ignore the address of the faulty connection and use one that is working.

We’ve taken the steps to have multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers so that our search functionality will operate without a hitch, regardless of where a failure might occur. It is during moments like these, even where there was no failure, where we’re glad we took the necessary steps to ensure undisrupted service for our customers.

If you have more questions about SLI Systems redundant architecture, please feel free to reach out to us.

SLI Systems Named in Top 100 NZ Tech Companies

Posted by Kemberly GongAbout us, eCommerce, Press

SLI Systems was just ranked in the TIN100 report, which catalogs the top 100 technology companies in New Zealand. The ratings rank companies by revenue, an analysis of market sectors, a New Zealand company ownership review, in depth statistics of the current financial times and the impact on the industry.

We’re honored to be part of the list of impressive companies, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to the tech industry in New Zealand. Since the company’s inception 11 years ago, the core premise behind SLI Systems has remained the same: to help businesses give their customers the best website search experience possible and to take care of them every step of the way.

We have kept that goal in focus through the years, and we think it’s paid off: we have a large group of clients who enjoy and advocate for our product and our service, and we continue to grow every year by leaps and bounds. We’re continually looking at ways to improve our products and expand into new regions so we can offer our technology to a wider base of eCommerce companies. This has allowed us to grow our engineering and product management team in New Zealand and open offices around the world to serve our customers. We just hired our 100th employee and we’re still going strong.

The TIN100 Report is a quantitative study of New Zealand’s leading internationally-focused technology businesses in the areas of Hi Tech Manufacturing, ICT and Biotechnology. To qualify for the award, companies must meet a number of criteria, including originating in and retaining a meaningful presence in New Zealand. According to the report, in 2012 the leading 100 companies had revenues of NZ$7.2Billion and offshore revenues of $5.2Billion.

Best workplace award

Posted by Shaun RyanAbout us

Great news: SLI Systems New Zealand office has been voted one of the finalists for Best Workplaces in New Zealand!

The survey, which was completed by Kenexa, took into account answers from 33,000 kiwis from 289 organizations. Winners for each category will be announced in November, and we’re looking forward to learning the results.

This nomination reaffirms our vision for how a company should really work. At SLI we believe that a great work environment comes from surrounding ourselves with other like-minded folks: hardworking, customer focused, slightly-geeky individuals who work as hard as they play. Is it possible to be serious about work and have fun while doing it? Absolutely.

We not only pride ourselves on our work environment, but on a larger company culture that puts our customers first. We’re fortunate that through hard work and commitment to excellence, we’ve become the top SaaS provider to IR500 firms, and we take our job seriously. We have extremely high rates of customer satisfaction because we’re aligned with our customers. Our team works tirelessly to ensure successful integrations, improve and develop new features and make sure our customers’ visitors have the best experience possible. Bottom line, we just aim to be friendly, extremely effective and totally accommodating.

Sound like a great place to work? Check out these openings we have in our Christchurch office.
In the States, the UK or Australia? Our San Jose, London and Melbourne offices are pretty fun too.
One of our team building days - design something to throw a water balloon as far as possible

Goodbye SLI birth place – with explosives!

Posted by Shaun RyanAbout us, Press

On Sunday Radio Network House in Christchurch, New Zealand was demolished by implosion. Check out the video.

Our first office was located on the 6th floor this building. We moved in 11 years ago with half a floor of space and eventually occupied a whole floor before we outgrew it.

The building was damaged beyond repair in the February earthquake last year – as were most of the buildings in downtown Christchurch. It was sad to see it go – but dramatic to watch.

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