Merchandising Archives | Page 2 of 5

Amazon & You: How to Win

Posted by Tim CallanFebruary 5, 2016eCommerce, Merchandising, Site Search

Last week SLI Systems sponsored the Internet Retailer webinar Amazon & You: Top New Competitive Strategies for 2016. eShopportunity founder Fahim Naim and Medelita CMO Dan Stephchew took a look at what is emerging as the best ways for online retailers to compete with Amazon.

The webinar was jam-packed with examples from the recent 2015 holiday shopping season (including how to gracefully opt out of Black Friday without killing your sales).

While Amazon is undeniably a Goliath, you can beat the e-commerce giant by turning its weaknesses into your strengths. Here are a few key takeaways:

Help shoppers find what they are looking for. Amazon isn’t the easiest place to shop. It can feel like you are wandering through a huge warehouse without a soul in sight to help you. You have little choice but to base your purchasing decisions on price and reviews.

Fahim advises, “Do a better job of helping customers engage and find relative products.”

An effective way of providing a more satisfying shopping experience is by delivering relevant site search results. Engage customers further by offering a product or gift finder, which suggests a collection of products based on a series of questions. This level of personalization is impossible to deliver via the Amazon interface and it allows you to build brand loyalty.

Treat shoppers differently. Amazon is one-size-fits-all. There is no room to massage your message for different audiences. As a result, you miss the opportunity to create tailored offers for different shoppers, like first-time buyers and loyal customers. You can outshine Amazon in this area by leveraging your email marketing with content and offers designed to reach specific shoppers.

Own long-tail search terms. It’s OK if Amazon wins broad keyword searches. Shoppers who find your site via long-tail search terms are more likely to find exactly what it is they want to buy. You can build landing pages specific to these keywords. (To learn more about this, check out the webinar Advanced Data Mining.)

For more competitive strategies, watch the Internet Retailer webinar. To see how SLI Systems can help you implement these strategies, join us for our next live demo on March 8.

A New Look at the Shopper Journey – Introducing the SLI Dashboard

Posted by Rachel UpsonJanuary 21, 2016dashboard, Merchandising, Reporting and Analytics, User Experience

“Big data” is all the buzz. It’s a challenge to merchants and data providers alike. Complex calculations on large volumes of data can be fascinating to a programmer. But these aren’t just numbers – they represent real-life actions of people on a website. If we aren’t careful, our calculations can outsmart the spirit of these actions, resulting in meaningless (or at least misguided) data for merchandisers.

Recently we undertook a project to create a new dashboard for the SLI Merchandising and Reporting Console. With more than 100 metrics already available in our console, it would have been easy to present some of these and call it a day.

But we decided it was time for a fresh start. We talked to our customers about what was most important to them. Then we went further – all the way back to the basics. We examined our underlying calculations to ensure the way we tracked data considered customers on their shopping journey and not just purchases.

Many existing reporting systems, including our own, count events like transactions and compare them to other events like page or session counts. But tracking events in isolation doesn’t always reflect how shoppers behave. Consider a shopper who starts browsing in the early evening, breaks for dinner and returns to make a purchase after putting the kids to bed or the shopper who has a late-night browsing habit and completes her purchase after midnight. Many analytics simplify and examine activity based on a set time period. As a result, each of the previous examples would likely be considered as two sessions – one that failed to convert and one that succeeded – when in actuality each was a single shopper.

A session-focused versus shopper-focused model can cause e-commerce sites to worry needlessly about conversion rates when in actuality the trouble is with how their analytics views the data.

Another example of analytics skewing reality is when a customer completes a transaction and then realizes he forgot something and makes a second purchase. Should one customer be treated as two just because he completed a second transaction? When considering conversions, is a shopper who transacts twice buying one item each time really more valuable than the shopper buying two items in a single transaction? We don’t think so.

The new SLI Dashboard now includes shopper-focused attribution. As a result, SLI looks at all of a shopper’s activity in the 24 hours leading up to a transaction, regardless of when it occurred. A site visitor with activity before midnight that continues into the next day is counted once, and multiple conversions from a single customer are treated as one successful conversion.

Conversion rate and average order value are critical measures of your e-commerce site. You need them to be an accurate representation of how many people successfully found what they were looking for, how many items people bought and how much they spent. The new SLI Dashboard provides a real-life view of how your customers are interacting with your site. In a world of numbers and calculations, let’s remember our customers are people too.

Refining Your Site Navigation (Part 2)

Posted by Lauri LarjoJanuary 13, 2016Color, eCommerce, Merchandising, Navigation Tips, Refinements, SEO, User Experience

As we discussed last week, the purpose of refinements is to allow shoppers to find what they are looking for more quickly. By indicating specific characteristics to narrow down the number of options shown in a category, visitors don’t have to scroll through pages of products to find the right one.

There are some simple ways you can deliver an exceptional shopping experience through your refinements.

Consider a Color Palette

Color palettes provide a visually appealing way to show color options for a particular product. Plus, it takes the guess work out of identifying colors with names like vermilion (a reddish orange) or verdigris (a yellowish green). Color palettes are often displayed on the left column with other refinements.

Show Products in the Right Color

Display products in the color shoppers requested. For example, if the default image for a shirt is red, but it is also offered in blue, show the blue shirt when shoppers refine the category to blue.

If your product is available in several colors, let visitors see the color options from the navigation page. One effective way of doing this is to allow visitors to hover over the color palettes directly under the picture of the product. The color of the product changes, while other products on the page remain unchanged.

Use Images

The human brain processes images faster than text. Consider using images to signal certain refinements, such as apparel type (dresses, shirts, pants), brands, ratings, colors and shapes. Of course, images won’t work for some refinements, so use your judgment. Make sure the images you use are clear and simple, so your customers won’t be left guessing.

Use Easy-to-understand Navigational Images

If you use navigational images to identify subcategories, make sure they are easy to understand. You want to make sure shoppers don’t accidentally confuse the subcategory images for the product selection.

Provide the following visual cues:

Show products as well as subcategories
Include the number of results for each subcategory
Label the subcategory images clearly
Distinguish between the layout of your products and subcategories

Offer Multiple Ways to Unselect Refinements

Let visitors easily change and remove refinements. Customers may want to navigate to the top or up one or several levels within a category. Use a Show All link or a breadcrumb trail to enable a quick link back to a category page or higher navigation levels. Breadcrumb trails help visitors see  exactly where they are on the site and what refinements have been used.

Another best practice is to use an X or checkmark beside the selected refinements. This allows visitors to easily remove a refinement selection without deleting all the selected refinements and gives shoppers the flexibility they need to find the item they’re looking for. A Clear All option offers a quick “back-to-the-top” navigation alternative.

For more tips on how to improve your site navigation, download our Big Book of Navigation Tips.

Refining Your Site Navigation (Part 1)

Posted by Lauri LarjoJanuary 6, 2016eCommerce, Merchandising, Navigation Tips, Refinements, SEO, User Experience

Refinements allow visitors to quickly narrow down their product selections as they travel through your site. This is one of the best ways (aside from using the search box) that visitors express to you exactly what they want.

The right use of refinements can make the shopping journey easy and intuitive. From broad category pages, you can break down choices into more specific subcategories. On a furniture site, for example, shoppers might start with the Living Room category then navigate to Sofa and Armchairs, Coffee and Side Tables or Living Room Lighting, depending on what they need.

In addition, providing refinements for brand, price, style and color can help shoppers pinpoint the products they had in mind. In my next two blog posts I will outline some practical ways refinements can help you improve your site navigation.

Don’t Show Too Many Refinements

Instead of showing every possible refinement (which can overwhelm shoppers), examine your analytics to see which refinements are used the most and which are hardly used at all. For example, do you really need the option to refine jeans by the number of pockets? If it is useful to your visitors, then show this option only when it’s relevant. A simple list of refinements versus a convoluted one increases your chances of improving your conversion rates.

Only Show Refinements with Results

Show relevant refinements for each category and make sure each refinement option contains results. You may be tempted to provide general refinements across your site for all category pages, but this can lead to a frustrating shopping experience. For example, you wouldn’t want to provide a refine-by-color option if an item is only available in one hue.

Show the Number of Products for Each Refinement

By indicating the number of products for each refinement, shoppers quickly understand how many results they can expect to find under each option. This guides them to consider other refinements if necessary and assures them they have seen all possible products.

Provide Different Ways of Ranking Products

Let visitors easily re-rank the criteria for how products are shown. Shoppers might want to view products by best sellers, highest rated, new arrivals, most expensive or least expensive. As a default, show products in order of most relevant or most popular. Once a visitor chooses a new order, remember the preference to spare him or her the hassle and frustration of re-ranking products on each category page.

For more tips on how to improve your site navigation, download our Big Book of Navigation Tips.

Dressbarn Wins Award for Customer Engagement Success Using SLI

Posted by Tim CallanDecember 16, 2015eCommerce, Merchandising, Site Search, Success Stories

This year, industry-leading retail magazine Retail TouchPoints recognized 18 innovative retailers with a 2015 Customer Engagement Award. According to Retail TouchPoints, each winner has gone the extra mile to delight, surprise and satisfy shoppers. SLI is honored to be recognized with Dressbarn, the Silver Winner in the E-Commerce Innovation category.

“Customer engagement has become a key focus for retailers striving for success in today’s omnichannel world,” said Retail TouchPoints Editor-in-Chief Debbie Hauss. “The award winners are ahead of the curve and are achieving business success in this increasingly competitive marketplace.”

Among the winners this year, Dressbarn joins retail giants AT&T, Barneys New York, Kate Spade, Kohl’s, Payless ShoeSource and Pep Boys.

Dressbarn Uses SLI Learning Search to Create Great Omnichannel Customer Experiences

A major priority for Dressbarn is to always provide a great customer experience, regardless of the channel. One way the retailer continues its mission is to use SLI Learning Search® (and search data) to offer its customers a unified, seamless experience, making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for across all channels.

Online

Dressbarn pays close attention to online trends, monitoring site search activity and on-page analytics, to optimize landing pages, PPC ads, email campaigns, site search and more. For instance, this past summer, Dressbarn saw a spike in search volume and conversion on the keyword Camryn dress. Dressbarn used its top-performing keywords report to identify the Camryn dress as a product to feature across channels to take advantage of its recent popularity.

Dressbarn quickly created a landing page using SLI Landing Page Creator™ just for the Camryn dress and then promoted it via the home page, email campaign and PPC ads. With search data in hand, Dressbarn also was able to fine-tune the page’s meta tags for better SEO. Conversion rates and sales soon skyrocketed.

Mobile

Dressbarn also provides its customers with a mobile-friendly experience. To adapt to the physical limitations of the mobile user experience, the retailer implemented SLI Mobile’s prominent search bar (vs. tiny magnifying glass) and easy-to-select refinements on search and navigation pages (e.g. color, size), speeding the shoppers’ path to purchase. The retailer also resizes all images into thumbnails, increasing the page load speed and customer engagement.

On its mobile site, Dressbarn has seen noteworthy results engaging customers and increasing conversion with SLI Rich Auto Complete™. Rich Auto Complete™ delivers a search experience with fast, visual and dynamic results. Shoppers are able to type less and buy more. With Rich Auto Complete, the time it took a shopper to find a product and complete a purchase decreased significantly, and mobile site search usage increased by 25 percent.

In-Store

At Dressbarn brick-and-mortar stores, the retailer offers associates and shoppers an endless inventory of products and information via iPads on display. If a product isn’t on the rack at the time, customers are able to use site search to look up the product, review the product description and get a clear idea of how it would look. This was a unique opportunity to use Dressbarn’s digital properties to make its stores more effective and its customers more informed and engaged.

For Dressbarn, it’s not all about making the sale right at that instant, but about building a seamless and delightful omnichannel experience that creates loyal customers who love Dressbarn and want to have a life-long relationship with the retailer.

Congratulations again to Dressbarn for a well-deserved win.

To learn more about Dressbarn’s winning merchandising strategies, view recent SLI webinar with Dressbarn E-Commerce Marketing Manager Sri PV: Merchandising Matters.

Retailers: Get Ready to Sell Rain Gear (and More)

Posted by Christina StublerNovember 19, 2015eCommerce, Merchandising

In drought-drenched California, we are preparing for an extra holiday guest. But instead of washing sheets for the air mattress, we are fixing leaks and clearing gutters. El Niño, a climate event defined by warmer than usual Pacific Ocean temperatures that affects global weather patterns, is expected to bring heavy rains over the next few months to California as well as the entire southern tier of the U.S.

According to NOAA, this year’s El Niño is one of the strongest on record. Parts of California could see 40-50% more rain than average while Florida could get 70% more rain.

While some might wait and see, the wise will no longer ignore long-neglected winter chores.

What does this mean for retailers? Folks have a legitimate weather-induced excuse reason to shop. (You think I’m kidding, but I just bought myself three pairs of boots.) Here are some ways you can capture the attention of shoppers preparing for El Niño:

Treat El Niño like its own retail season. Look at your products with fresh eyes and think about what people might need to buy during an extra rainy season. Yes, people might want boots, hats, gloves, jackets, umbrellas and waterproof socks. But they might also need floor mats, windshield wipers, rain barrels, tarps, sand bags, heavy plastic sheets, generators and sump pumps. Parents will need activities for kids who are cooped up inside for days at a time. And let’s not forget the best in rain-proof beauty products, such as waterproof mascara and anti-frizz hair products.

If you sell anything your shoppers might want to weather the upcoming storms or make cabin fever more manageable, make sure they know what you’ve got. All the best practices of merchandising apply. Highlight special deals on El Niño-related items. Recommend products based on what shoppers are searching for. Curate landing pages to showcase your entire El Niño-related product selection.

Provide how-to guides. The Los Angeles Times offered readers 28 things to do to prepare for El Niño rains this season. The list includes must-do tasks for your home, garden and car. Many are DIY projects. For example, No. 18 on the list: Plant winter vegetables in raised beds or elevated rows. If you specialize in home improvement, garden or auto supplies, share your expert advice and provide shoppers with an El Niño checklist or direct them to already existing how-to guides so they are ready for the rain. They will appreciate that you are looking out for them.

Keep an eye on your popular search terms. The more it rains, the more people are going to realize they need certain things they hadn’t thought of. Make sure you are reviewing your most popular search terms. (If you are an SLI customer, make sure to look at your Poor Results report too.) Keeping in tune with what shoppers want will help you better merchandise the products you have. In addition, user-generated SEO will help your site be found as new, seasonal long-tail search terms gain in popularity.

Stay dry, friends. And for more merchandising tips, check out the SLI Knowledge Base.

How Catalogs Can Succeed in an Omnichannel World

Posted by Dawn MortensenNovember 12, 2015eCommerce, Merchandising, Mobile, Site Search, Site Search Tips

Right after Halloween, the catalogs started arriving as usual for the time of year – Frontgate, Lego, Learning Express, Uncommon Goods, Crate & Barrel, Tinyprints and many, many more.

Each holiday shopping season, I find myself initially surprised at why retailers continue to send catalogs when more people are buying online instead. But then, as my kids start to flip through the catalogs to build their wish lists and I find myself earmarking pages over breakfast, I see why catalogs still work: Even though fewer people today will pick up the phone to make a catalog order, these colorful, glossy merchandising tools catch our attention in our homes, when we’re not intentionally thinking about shopping, and they drive us to the online or retail stores where we’ll make a purchase.

In this multi-channel (and increasingly omnichannel) world, there’s no reason for retailers to give up one form of merchandising that works, even if the actual purchase point for the customer changes. There are, however, many reasons to make sure that your different merchandising channels are working well together.

Here are a few tips for making sure that your catalogs are effective in driving shoppers toward a final purchase:

Know what actions you’re driving customers toward. Is your catalog a purchasing vehicle, an advertisement or both? Do you want people to have the option to place a phone order? If so, then the usual catalog best practices apply (a customer code on the back, a toll-free number on each page, clear color choices, item numbers, etc.). Or are you simply using your catalog to drive people to your online or brick-and-mortar store?

Each year I see more “catalogs” that promote products without providing a way to actually shop from the catalog. Learning Express doesn’t list item numbers or a toll-free number because they don’t offer shopping by phone; their catalog is simply a driver to their stores and web site.

Think about what will make shoppers buy from you versus a competitor. Special offers and promotions can make a big difference in whether your catalog encourages shoppers to go to your site or to a competitor’s site to complete a purchase, especially for products that are available through multiple vendors.

I have three learning-toy catalogs in a pile by my computer, each from a different retailer and each containing products that are available in at least one of the other catalogs. When I go to make my online purchases, I’m going to buy from the store that has advertised an offer I can’t refuse. If the offer is not compelling enough, I’ll just skip all three stores that sent me catalogs and buy the item from my favorite local-based online toy retailer.

Make sure shoppers can quickly find catalog items on your site. Once your catalog has done its job of making a shopper want an item that they carry, you’d better make sure that shopper can easily find the item in your online store. Don’t overlook the importance of having top-quality site search: if you don’t show the most relevant items first, whether the customer searches by item number, item name or a descriptive name, you’re not going to make the sale. Features like Rich Auto Complete™, faceted refinements and smart mobile navigation are now expected.

Remember that shoppers often go to their computers or tablets to finalize a purchase because of the speed and convenience of buying the item online rather than making a phone call. Other shoppers will use your catalog or web site to browse before walking into a store to try something on. But all shoppers need to easily find the products they’re looking for on their computers, phones and tablets. If you don’t make your products easy for them to find anytime and anywhere, then you’re not going to succeed in an omnichannel world.

Aim for Holiday Merchandising Perfection

Posted by Dawn MortensenOctober 23, 2015eCommerce, Merchandising, Mobile, Webinar

There’s a great deal of science behind online retail, especially this time of year. Holiday shopping projections and results are measured by every retail organization and publication from August through February. Smart retailers analyze these numbers to create merchandising strategies that maximize their conversions.

At SLI Connect last month, Jim Davidson, Head of Research at Bronto Software, shared his latest findings on what retailers believe shoppers want versus what consumers actually expect for the 2015 holiday season. Following are a few interesting points from his presentation, “Creating Holiday Perfection Online,” which he will share in an SLI webinar next week.

Highest Converting Holiday Promotions
Bronto surveyed retailers and shoppers to learn which holiday promotion messages work best for online buyers versus in-store buyers. One of the discoveries was that 38% of shoppers will not buy if free shipping isn’t offered.

Mobile Shoppers: Browsing or Buying?
We know there’s an increasing trend toward using smartphones or tablets to shop online. However, because some retailers are slow to make their sites mobile-friendly, many mobile shoppers still turn to their desktops or go to a store to make the purchase. Bronto found that 22% of shoppers plan to actually make a purchase on their smartphone this holiday.

Even with holiday merchandising in full swing, there are plenty of digital promotions yet to be executed and much fine tuning to be done in the next two months of 2015. Listening to the retail analysts, along with optimizing your site search and mobile search, can help you achieve perfection.

Learn more by registering for the webinar “Creating Holiday Perfection Online” on Tuesday, October 27, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Announcing Next-generation Learning Navigation

Posted by Lauri LarjoSeptember 24, 2015eCommerce, Merchandising, Navigation, SEO, User Experience

In the drive to turn your visitors into buyers, navigation is a critical part of the shopping journey. More than 70% of site visitors navigate their way to the products they have in mind. But if your navigation is clumsy or confusing, those shoppers are more likely to bounce than buy.

Site Navigation as a Tool for Merchandisers, Content Marketers and SEO Pros

Originally we launched SLI Learning Navigation® in 2006 to provide a consistent experience across a site that also uses SLI Learning Search®. Learning Navigation® has always leveraged our patented learning technology to continually re-rank products based on user activity. Over the years, our navigation solution evolved based on customer feedback.

Today we are excited to introduce the next generation of SLI Learning Navigation – completely rebuilt for improved SEO and better merchandising. The newest version of Learning Navigation is designed to give you more control over your SEO while creating a better user experience based on industry best practices.

Our revamped navigation solution dynamically generates clean, search engine-friendly URLs, making it easier for shoppers to find your products during an organic search. Our new interface allows you to quickly edit URLs, titles, headings, meta tags and page descriptions, giving merchandisers and content marketers more direct control over factors that affect their SEO.

Learning Navigation also helps you avoid SEO issues with duplicate content by controlling which pages search engines index. The navigation pages provide refinement and filtering options for the whole product catalog.

Bring Your E-commerce to the Next Level

Adapting to the evolving e-commerce experience and expectations of our customers is at the core of SLI – to continuously enhance our offering, accelerate your sales and provide these improvements seamlessly via our SaaS platform. We are excited to help you bring your e-commerce to the next level with this newest version of Learning Navigation.

For new customers, we recommend signing up for Learning Search together with Learning Navigation to gain the maximum benefits of SLI learning technology. For existing SLI Learning Navigation customers, our SaaS platform allows us to easily upgrade your Navigation for no cost at your discretion.

To learn more about Learning Navigation, click here.

Infographic: 6 Mobile Merchandising Tips for the Holidays

Posted by Dawn MortensenSeptember 16, 2015eCommerce, Infographic, Merchandising, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, Press, Site Search Tips

This latest infographic by SLI Systems was also published in Multichannel Merchant on September 10.

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