SLI Systems Blog, Guest Post

Contributed by: Ed Kennedy, Business Development, Guidance

Recently, I was listening to APM’s Marketplace Tech Report which highlighted how Google and Bing are now including social content such as Twitter and Facebook postings in natural search results.  The report left me wondering how retailers can leverage social search to drive traffic to their sites.

So … I decided to contact eCommerce search partner, SLI Systems, to learn more about how this new trend has impacted their site search and navigation solution.  During our conversation, we talked about ways retailers can combine social and search to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.  Here are some of them:

• Index social media content in search results: If you have blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall posts, videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, all of this content should appear in your site search results – possibly in a separate tab, as Yarn.com handles it.




• Place Facebook “like” buttons on product pages: This will encourage site visitors to share your products with their connections. In addition, Facebook “likes” can improve the page’s ranking on search engines, like Bing. You can also import the number of likes that each product has into your site search index and allow your site visitors to reorder site search results so the products with the most “likes” are ranked highest.
• Add search to your Facebook page: You can add a search box to your company Facebook page, and results will appear within Facebook. This is a good way to build stronger relationships with shoppers who like to combine shopping with social networking. Here is Chaparral Motorsports’ facebook search.




• Implement Facebook Sign-In for your store: A more advanced integration between Facebook and your commerce site is allowing visitors to use their Facebook profile as their account on your store. This reduces the amount of information visitors need to provide to create an account with your site. This functionality can also trigger personalized content for the user based on their friend’s activity on the site. TripAdvisor does a good job of encouraging Facebook Sign-In and using friends’ activity to promote certain destinations or trips.




• Encourage user generated content and tie to social networks: When Guidance designed TOMS Shoes, our User Experience and Design team looked for ways to combine the customer’s passion for the brand’s canvas shoe and the popularity of social networks. They came up with How We Wear Them, a section on TOMS’ site that allows users to upload a photo of themselves wearing their favorite pair of TOMS. The user associates the shoe in the photo to a SKU in the catalog, linking directly to that product detail page (PDP) and is then prompted to share the photo on Facebook. These images are then represented as thumbnails on the PDP, adding a social touch to the buying experience.

Got any tips of your own?  Share them with me via Twitter, @EdwardPKennedy, or via @guidance.

We just posted our latest video tip by Shaun Ryan today, the 2nd of a two-part series on site search refinements. This latest tip (just 6 ½ minutes long) covers many aspects of how best to display refinements on your site, looking at options such as category boxes down the left with items underneath (either links or check boxes), drop-down boxes (which allow for more refinements above the fold), refinement tabs across the top of the search results page, and other variations, like using icons instead of text.

The video also discusses how best to allow your visitors to refine results and then go back to the full list if they wish, and options for offering price range refinements. Additionally, the video looks at the benefits of introducing new refinements after a top-level refinement is selected. As Shaun emphasizes throughout, there are many best practices approaches to follow, but the best way to determine what works on your site is to test, test and test (we can help you with this effort).

In the first part of this two-part series (a 4 ½-minute segment), Shaun discusses what refinements are, why you should have them on your site and how best to select the refinements that will work best for your products and customers – for example, by color (using color swatches), top-sellers, men’s/women’s, star ratings, etc. One way to tell what refinements might work is to look at your search logs to see what terms people are using on your site (e.g. “red shirt” may indicate that a color refinement will work well). Aside from the obvious benefit of streamlining the search experience for your customers, refinements give you a deeper glimpse into what your customers are looking for and how they’re searching – which is always useful information for your business.

MagnetStreet, an online retailer of personalized save-the-date items and wedding invitations, has four distinct lines of business: one for real estate agents and general businesses, one for schools, one for brides-to-be and one for general consumers. As such, the company has distinct product lines for each business segment, which previously posed significant challenges in how MagnetStreet handled the different lines in its site search. Ultimately, MagnetStreet turned to us for help.

The solution we created, which has worked well for MagnetStreet and its customers, is to deliver search results with separate tabs for each distinct market, so brides-to-be aren’t seeing items geared towards real estate agents or school teachers in their results. If you go to www.magnetstreet.com and do a search for “save the date” you’ll see what I mean. Across the top of results are tabs for “All,” “Weddings,” “Business,” “Life Moments” and “Schools” – making it very easy to view the type of products you’re uniquely interested in. Results can also be refined by style, color, theme, product type and more – to streamline the search experience even further.

The results are telling. MagnetStreet’s analytics show that people who use the search box on the site convert at nearly double the rate of those who don’t, and twice as many site visitors now use search than they did previously. Additionally, visitors using site search view more than twice the number of pages per visit than visitors who don’t, and also spend slightly more per visit than shoppers who don’t search.

So, back to the original question – should separate lines of business have their own site search? The answer is: not necessarily – You can create one site search for the whole company, and offer separate tabs for each line of business. That will give you brand consistency across your different business lines, and also only one technology to maintain. As one of my friends once told me: “Sure, I could buy a boat with two engines instead of one, an go faster, but that will give me two things to maintain, instead of one.” So, words to the wise: keep it simple, and keep it consistent. For MagnetStreet, that approach has worked well.

In my last post, I offered some tips for improving the visitor experience at online retailing sites. To continue the discussion, below are some simple website enhancements that can help your customers find information they need more easily, and will likely lead to more valuable interactions.

• Prominently display the customer service phone number on the home page (and every page of the site) – and make other company contact information easy to find. You don’t want people to have to hunt down the info. Check out the home page for Allé Jewelry, which displays the company phone number right under the logo at the top of every page.
• Place the e-mail subscription box high up on the web page so it’s more readily seen – more subscribers can equal more sales. Agri Supply places its email signup box near the upper left corner of the page, which makes it hard to miss.
• Give visitors a good incentive to sign up for e-mails, such as: “Want to receive additional discounts, offers and hear more about our events? Sign up here.” Buggies Unlimited touts exclusive deals for people who subscribe to its e-mails.
• Test different placements for your search box. Most retailers place it somewhere in the upper right-hand section of the page. However, some of our customers – such as WEBS and LydiasUniforms.com – place the search box on the center of the page, and even experiment with different search box sizes. It’s worth testing placements and sizes to see what works best for your customers.
• Include a “Your Account” button in an easy-to-spot location on the home page, so return visitors can quickly check the status of recent orders, their purchasing history, etc.
• Include a “Locally in Retail Stores” link so people can easily find out what items are available in stores nearby, in case they prefer to purchase offline.

These are just a few things you can do to make your website perform better. If you have other ideas to share, feel free to post a comment below.

As head of SLI’s customer success management team, I’ve had lots of interactions with online retailers and have seen many instances of companies not doing all they can to turn online visits into sales. Simple things like not utilizing empty space on a web page or offering easily viewed company contact information can amount to lost opportunities – or basically, leaving money on the table.

Based on my own experience (and that of my colleagues), working closely with retailers to improve the usability of their sites, as well as industry research I’ve come across, I’ve put together some fairly simple tips for online merchants – no matter how big or how small the company – to improve the visitor experience and generate a higher ROI (Return on Interaction) online. Below is the first set of tips. In my next blog post, I’ll offer more suggestions for enhancing your site to give customers better access to information and drive stronger interactions.

Feature a new “Item of the Week”: This can catch customers’ interest and is also indexed by search engines as refreshed content each week, so it helps generate more visibility. You can feature it right on the home page – as a banner or in a special content box, or in another way that fits the look and feel of your site. BikeSomeWhere.com does this by showing “this week’s newest products” in a prominent box on the home page.

Make the most of empty space: Use empty white space on the right side of the webpage for a list of “bestselling items” – again, because this content refreshes on a frequent basis, it’s indexed by search engines. Also, research shows that most sites don’t utilize the right side of the page, so it’s valuable real estate that’s likely available, and can help clean up content that may be cluttering the left side of your site pages. On its site’s right-hand margin, Beauty Bridge lists “best sellers” to highlight product options for shoppers.

Show rotating “featured items” on front page: This is a good way to showcase different items you offer, perhaps popular sellers or items you want to promote more. You can do this in a rotating banner – perhaps midway down the page – where every few seconds a new item shows up. The feature can help keep customers engaged, reduce clutter on the home page, and increase site usability. Hansen’s Surf Shop does this on its home page with a rotating banner, allowing visitors to see a constantly changing selection of clothing, accessories, and even special offers like free shipping.

In my next blog post, I’ll tell you how to make your online retailing site more user-friendly.