AI and the Online Economy: a Perfect Partnership

Tim Rentowl, Vice President of Product Management, examines how AI can deliver real value to e-commerce strategies. While it hasn’t yet reached the outlandish Hollywood depictions, AI has definitely gone mainstream. For many retailers, AI is working hard behind the scenes, transforming businesses and delivering tangible value. With its potential to harness both big and […]

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Navigating the Search for Peak Sales

Tim Rentowl, Vice President of Product Management, looks at how online retailers can best prepare for their peak season rush. Black Friday 2019 saw a staggering 93.2 million US shoppers making purchases online, with 83.3 million customers internet shopping on Cyber Monday. The UK saw similar results, with a huge £8.57 billion spent online on […]

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Why You Don’t Need to Brush Your Hair When You Buy Cosmetics

Are you addicted to cosmetics? Hoarding makeup is not uncommon. If you own multiples of eye shadows, lipsticks, blushes and brushes (as I do…), then you’re not alone. Indeed, it’s globally pandemic: according to research by Feel Unique, there are millions of women on the planet who hoard cosmetics. The same research also found women spend […]

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Do Americans Like Soccer? World Cup E-Commerce Data Is Revealing

Americans have a love-hate relationship with soccer. Just look at the headlines this week: 🙂 “The Debate is Over, Americans Love Soccer” (article3), 🙁 “America’s Favorite National Pastime: Hating Soccer” (Ann Coulter), 🙂 “World Cup Gives Soccer Momentum” (SFGate), 🙁 “Future of Soccer: Bright for Our Team, Not the Sport” (CBS), Because SLI works with […]

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Black Friday Roundup – eCommerce Sales Exceed $1 Billion

The numbers are in – and there were two major takeaways from this year’s Black Friday sales. First: eCommerce made a huge leap this year. Revenues for online sales exceeded one billion dollars for the first time on Friday alone. The second takeaway: mobile is red hot – 24 percent of all black Friday shoppers visited […]

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Bad Search is Everywhere

Unfortunately for online shoppers, bad search is more common than you might think. And if you routinely visit sites with great to fairly-good search, finding a bad search is all the more noticeable – and frustrating. When you search for an item that absolutely should be found, such as balloons on a party supply website […]

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Google Instant Previews – any lessons for site search?

Last week Google unveiled Instant Previews. This gives you the ability to preview a page by clicking a magnifying glass icon next to the title. This is a cool feature, although I’ve found that I haven’t been using it since it went live. I’m typically happy with the information that is shown on the SERP. However […]

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Its Time to Prepare for Mobile Commerce

We recently conducted a survey of more than 400 e-commerce companies about their plans and activities in mobile commerce (m-commerce). The feedback was intriguing, to say the least. We found that while recent reports are pointing to significant growth in mobile subscriber numbers and an uptick in m-commerce, the majority of online retailers (80%) do not currently […]

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Will Google suggest mess up referral stats?

Last week it was announced that Google’s search suggestion feature is being updated. The major changes are: You will see results and ads in the suggestions, along with the keyword suggestions (it looks like only one result and ad at any time) The suggestion feature will be rolled out to the standard search results page […]

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Refining search results by color/colour

When Google added a color picker to their image search last week I thought it would be worthwhile sharing a few ideas about the use of color refinements in site search. First – let’s take a look at what Google have done. When you do an image search a drop down menu is available at […]

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