During the internet boom/bust years companies such as boo.com were criticised for trying to sell apparel online. Common opinion was that the internet wasn’t mature enough and business models (or execution thereof) were not robust enough to cope with the notion of selling clothes online. Broadband didn’t even exist in any meaningful way and most people were struggling to identify how best to harness the opportunities presented by the web. Here we are nearly 10 years later and according to a report from IMRG the UK e-retail market was worth nearly £50billion in 2009 with ecommerce showing 15% year on year growth (for clothing that jumps to 18%) and the UK in particular now has a seemingly insatiable appetite for buying clothes online. The apparel industry has seen a lot of success online where you’d imagine that most people would be more inclined to try before they buy.

So what is it that is driving this trend and why has it attracted the likes of companies like Google and countless others? Some of the answer lies in technology adoption, infrastructure improvements, generational shopping habits and accessibility but all of that is for another blog. The main answer lies in usability. It is no coincidence that the most successful and fashionable brands online have taken the extra care to focus on one of the central planks of shopping for apparel online – the user experience. It is also no coincidence that a recent Forrester report cited navigation and site search as the top two initiatives towards improving online performance. More than any other sector buying online in the apparel industry relies heavily on the emotional part of the user experience and the behaviour thereof. If you want to buy a 32″ tv and have a poor online shopping experience you can easily find an alternative website and buy the same brand (or an alternative) knowing that fundamentally you’re going to end up with a 32″ tv that looks and operates as you’d expect. That sort of scenario doesn’t lend itself so readily to fashion where looking and feeling unique is part of the aspirational sell. Therefore the speed and ease by which products are navigated, presented and then experienced is critical to the success of a fashion brand online. Other factors like logistics and customer service are also crucial but it’s the area of findability that continues to drive these important business processes within the fashion sector.

It still perplexes me why a business will spend a fortune acquiring and engaging new customers only to provide them with a poor site experience. The two standout areas to review in order to correct this are relevance and usability (with imagery not far behind). Whilst this may seem obvious there are many brands (large and small) who struggle with this. For example why show shoe sizes as a refinement when someone has done a search for shirts? When you realise this problem why then spend a small fortune and wait weeks/months to fix it when it can conceivably be addressed within minutes or prevented from happening in the first place? Speaking of refinements these are a vital part of the search results page as are other features such as zoom options, video, alternative viewing angles, reviews, blogs etc. The experience can be further enhanced with best of breed solutions like recommendation engines, personalised email, outfit makers, multivariate testing, surveys/polls and social media. Add to this the commercial opportunity that a mobile strategy can bring (without costing a fortune) to your fashion brand and it becomes all the more apparent that the time to look sharp and be smart with your site search experience is now.

In my last post on list, grid and hybrid views, I discussed the pros and cons of list and grid views and offered a new alternative – the hybrid view for search and navigation pages, which takes the best of both and combines it into one.

Today we’ll take the discussion a step further and, using the hybrid view as an example talk about using site search pages as landing pages for any campaigns your are running.

The key to these pages is they allow you to easily and dynamically create a landing page that is tailored to any phrase that is important to your customers. They are updated to include the latest products, prices and other content like reviews. Also important – and perhaps a bit more difficult – is presenting relevant product information above the fold that creates an engaging user experience. This is where the previously discussed hybrid view comes in.

Here are some tips for how to optimize the page for website visitors, using the site of our customer Sports Unlimited as an example:

1. Display relevant product information above the fold — we refer to this as “Auto Merchandising”

The ‘Riddell Revolution Youth Football Helmet’; is in position #1 as more people have selected this product than any other when searching for ‘revolution football helmets’ on the Sports Unlimited site. A different helmet may be # 1 tomorrow, or next week if the preferences of the site’s visitors change.

2. Include keyword specific clickable banners at top of page displaying related brands and categories
3. Offer standard landing page options:
1. Display the keyword at top. This provides what is called an information scent that should reaffirm to the visitor that they are on a page that is relevant to what they are looking for.
2. Offer “sort by,” “view” and “pagination” options at the bottom



3. Include related, user-generated phrases at the bottom



4. Include relevant refinement options to narrow selection by gender, category, brand, etc.



5. Offer product options to select quantity, color, size and call to action (i.e. “add to cart”) button (see image below point #6)
6. Use “mouse over pop ups” to offer more information, oftentimes a larger image



7. Use AJAX search to provide the WOW experience – which can be seen by clicking on any refinement option from this page (AJAX delivers a fast, streamlined experience when clicking on refinements or going back and forth within the search results):

http://sporting-goods.sportsunlimitedinc.com/search#w=revolution%20football%20helmets&asug=rev

This special type of dynamic landing page has resulted in increases in revenues and average order value. They can be used as landing pages for many types of campaigns, paid search, email, display advertising.

If you have any questions about this or comments to share, please feel free to comment below.

For retailers selling online, the question of “Grid View or List View?” for results pages is a common struggle. As Linda Bustos points out on her “Get Elastic” blog, “When presented with a list of search results, people often click the first result – paying attention to the top 3 or so.” And as “Get Elastic” reader Bob points out in his comment, “Grid views are predominantly used on sites selling merchandise when the visual appearance matters to the customer (i.e., clothing). List views are used when the text is important like a model number or more technical info is what matters (i.e., printer ink, computer RAM).”

Over the last three years I have had hundreds of conversations with retailers, and the overwhelming preference is to show site visitors results pages in grid view. Having also conducted a few A/B split tests to see which view performs better, the evidence suggests this as well. Our argument for why grid view performs better is that retailers can show more products “above the fold,” meaning that website visitors see more items in the browser window without having to scroll down. However, an argument for list view is that it gives you the opportunity to showcase additional descriptive text – good for shoppers who need product descriptions in order to make a buying decision.

The glaring problem with list view is that on the average laptop or desktop monitor, the visitor typically sees only two products above the fold. Given this conundrum, we’ve created a new view – called “hybrid view” – that incorporates the best of both worlds, offering pages that show more products, as in a grid view, while also including the additional descriptive information for shoppers.

Let’s look at a site search page from Sports Unlimited as our example. In the image below you can see how Sports Unlimited (with our help) has created a results page incorporating the best aspects of both list and grid views, and the results have been positive:

• 271% increase in revenue (directly from the landing page)
• 16% increase in Average Order Value (from the landing page)

If you have any questions about hybrid view for search, feel free to post a comment here or contact us at (866) 240-2812 or sales@sli-systems.com.

With the holiday shopping season well underway, there is talk of recent ecommerce site failures and anticipation of how these failures will impact online businesses during this season’s shopping frenzy. Nearly one year ago, Internet Retailer reported on major site failures experienced during Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) – two of the busiest shopping days of the season. Often, these outages are caused by the high volume of site visitors during peak shopping times and servers that can’t keep up. Or, they may be caused by natural disasters, power outages or software glitches. When entire sites go down there is tremendous impact: business is lost, customer loyalty suffers and a brand’s reputation is seriously compromised.

While site failures are extremely costly for online retailers, there are also individual aspects of a site that can lose functionality and also impact the online experience for shoppers; for example, site search, the shopping cart, product videos, etc. For these functions, it makes sense to entrust your site to a hosted services (or SaaS – software-as-a-service) provider so you can offload that traffic to a 3^rd party – particularly one that has built-in redundancy in its architecture and implemented business continuity policies, to protect you from these types of failures. For example, SLI Systems has implemented redundant servers in multiple data centers around the world to ensure that if a server goes down for any reason, another will step in to take over.

The Internet Retailer article from last year indicates that according to web performance measurement firm Gomez, Inc. the top 50 retail sites have an average of 97.60% availability, and an average site response time of 2.25 seconds (Gomez also says research shows there is a 2-second “standard” – referring to the length of time the average person will wait).

Like most retailers, you’re probably turning up the volume on your marketing efforts to drive as much traffic to your sites as you can in the coming weeks. But are you certain your site will be able to perform – and respond quickly? It’s not too late to offload your site search to a 3^rd party expert if that’s an area you have concerns about or haven’t looked closely at. Have questions? Feel free to comment below.

Lately, we’ve been beating the mobile drum pretty loudly. A few weeks ago, we announced our new SLI Mobile solution to help retailers quickly create a mobile version of their websites. And just last week, we announced that one of our customers – Century Novelty – worked with us to create its mobile site in a matter of days, in order to capture the growing numbers of mobile shoppers the company was already seeing.

Some in the industry think it’s just too early for companies to be worrying about mobile. That’s not our take, based on the experience many of our customers have had in seeing a steady growth in numbers of visitors to their sites from mobile devices. As Ian MacDonald of Century Novelty explained to us, over the past year they noticed a small percentage of sales actually coming from mobile devices. The amount wasn’t significant, but it was enough that they couldn’t ignore it.

Last week, the results of a recent NRF survey on mobile shopping were published by Evan Schuman in StorefrontBacktalk, showing that our thinking is correct – as many American consumers say they expect to shop by mobile device this holiday season. According to StorefrontBacktalk, exact numbers are hard to pin down due to the possibility that respondents may not have answered the questions in the same way (e.g. some may have treated social networking recommendations or texting friends as “conducting research” while others may not have), or because some people may not think today that they’ll shop via mobile device but come December they might. Still, the data is compelling. Of 8,767 consumers surveyed, 26.8% said they would use their smartphones to either research or make a purchase during the holidays this year; and of those in the 18 to 24 age range, 45% said they would.

Evan also mentions that his site conducted a survey with Forrester Research that showed an “alarmingly high percentage of retailers (21.3%) who said they have no plans for any M-Commerce programs in the next 18 months. And almost half of those surveyed choose ‘none of these’ when asked if they allow customers through a mobile site or a dedicated application.” In our own M-commerce survey from earlier this year, we found that 80% of retailers surveyed say they have no mobile commerce strategy in place, while at the same time, 83% of those surveyed said that between 1-10% of site visitors come from mobile devices.

While the numbers vary from survey to survey, one thing is clear: there is an audience today on the mobile platform, and that audience will only continue to grow in the months ahead. Retailers who choose to sit on the sidelines until this market is more mature may miss out on an opportunity to garner more sales, and possibly lose customers along the way.

For retailers who are eager to get started but are reticent to spend a lot of time and resources on a mobile site, a solution like SLI Mobile is ideal – it can help you create a site in a week or less, with minimal involvement from your team. And the expense is nominal. If you’re hesitating, don’t. We’re ready to help you today. Contact us now.

If you haven’t yet developed a mobile version of your website, it’s time to put this task at the top of your list. The mobile device market is growing at exponential rates, and your customers are quickly becoming comfortable with buying products and content on their phones and tablets – in fact, the Coda Research Consultancy says that U.S. mobile commerce sales in 2010 will reach $2.4 billion.

To help you get up and running in this new mobile commerce world, we’ve introduced SLI Mobile, our hosted solution for creating mobile sites with fast and easy-to-use search and navigation functionality. We create the product pages for mobile sites using customer product data that we already have on hand, and we optimize the pages for mobile searching – which is very important given the limitations of browsing on mobile devices. We’re also offering thumbnail product images for fast delivery on mobile devices, and we can integrate the pages with your product rating and review solutions, as well as social media content.

We can deploy these mobile features for all of the major mobile device platforms and devices, including iPhones, BlackBerries, and Android phones. To find out more about SLI Mobile, read our press release, or contact your Customer Success Manager or our sales team at sales@sli-systems.com.

To give you even more guidance on getting ready for the mobile commerce market, we’ve just published a new white paper, Site Search and the Mobile Commerce Revolution. In it, you’ll find advice on developing your mobile commerce strategy, how to create mobile-friendly site search, and your choices for implementation. The guide is free, and can be downloaded here.

Recently we issued our first “SLI E-Retail Holiday Index,” a report on site search and shopping trends that reveals the most sought-after items in various retailing categories. The data was pulled from a sampling of our hundreds of online retail clients, in such sectors as Apparel, Jewelry, Cosmetics, Electronics, and Gifts & Novelty (see below to discover the trends). We plan to issue this data on a monthly basis during the holiday shopping season, and ongoing afterwards.

Some of the data may come as no surprise to you – like the fact that winter boots are a popular apparel item right now (you can pretty much count on that every year around this time), or that traditional diamond stud earrings and engagement rings are highly searched for in jewelry. Still, some of the data may be less obvious – like the fact “iPad” was a really popular search term in the late spring/early summer, but has since dropped off the list. (Maybe it will make a comeback as we get closer to December, but who knows?)

As you continue to develop your marketing campaigns and enhance your sites to capture the high volume of cyber traffic during the holidays, the SLI E-Retail Index might be useful to you. But perhaps more importantly, you can actually get a lot of this data yourself by looking at your own site search analytics to see what’s hot and what’s not on your own site. If you’re not already looking at this data on a regular basis, now’s the time to start!

So, without further adieu, here’s the data from our first E-Retail Index – and keep a look-out for another report next month. And if you’re still looking for ways to beef up your site for the holidays, be sure to download our free guide: “SLI Holiday Guide: 10 Steps for Preparing Your Online Retail Site Search for the Holiday” (available at usblogsli.wpengine.com/holiday-guide.php).

Women’s and Men’s Apparel
Currently, men and women are seeking the best in hoodies, cardigan sweaters and winter boots in preparation for this holiday season, whether shopping for loved ones or to enhance their own wardrobes. Silly Bandz bracelets remain a popular purchase item across many of the retail apparel and novelties stores. And, women are actively seeking out Maxi dresses, while men want the hottest looks in leather jackets.

Jewelry
The most popular trends in jewelry this season are focused on more traditional items, such as diamond stud earrings in all shapes and sizes. In October, online shoppers also sought out ruby and diamond rings and engagement rings, as well as men’s watches, from top designers such as Rolex.

Cosmetics
Online shoppers are busy looking for chemical-free and skin purifying cosmetics items this year. Products such as sulfate-free shampoo and antioxidant moisturizers are high on shopper’s lists, while make-up kits, hair extensions and eyelash growth products are also being searched for frequently. The top brands this season include Dermalogica, Bare Minerals, Ultraceuticals and Jane Iredale.

Consumer Electronics
In the area of consumer electronics, online shoppers are hot on the trail of new laptops, netbooks and all-in-one printers from brands including HP, Panasonic and Toshiba. Cameras are also a popular item from top manufacturers Canon and Nikon. Interestingly, searches for iPads were at the top of the list in June, but tapered off in July and have not gone back up.

Gifts and Novelties
Silly Bandz, hoodies, black lights, Snuggies and electronics tailor made for seniors, like the Go Computer and the Jitterbug phone, were the most popular novelty items in October. And, as consumers prepare for the holidays, items such as tablecloths and champagne glasses were also top on the list. In addition, searches for experience gifts, such as helicopter flying lessons were on the rise.

Earlier this week we announced our new Learning Search for Publishers, a new variation of our hosted site search product aimed at the online publishing/digital media industry. The value proposition of a good site search in online publishing is similar to that of e-commerce: it improves the visitor experience, increases page views and can result in more sales. For publishers, our offering takes it a step further by providing useful data about search terms and resulting items clicked on to advertisers, giving them an opportunity to deliver more targeted ads to visitors.

Take our customer Dilbert.com (which we also announced yesterday). Dilbert.com recently added our site search to the popular cartoon strip site, making it much easier for fans to search the 20-year archive by character name or theme/topic (warning: if you engage in this activity you may find yourself wasting a LOT of time).

Dilbert’s previous site search didn’t allow for this, so people either had to know the exact date of the cartoon strip or search by character and hope they found it. Since the Dilbert.com site is supported by display ads, as well as licensing revenues (people license the comic strip for use in books, t-shirts, company newsletters and other things), a good site search is important to its business. Since deploying our site search, page views are already up 3 percent (a substantial number given that the site sees more than 1 million visitors a month), and the company says they also expect licensing sales to also increase.

Another benefit of an effective site search on a digital media site is the ability to drive visitors to the variety of content available – for example, videos and blog posts, and revenue-generating content, such as subscriber-only articles (some of our customers have also seen revenue increases from more people clicking on articles behind the pay-wall). Without the ability to refine and help narrow down searches to find the desired content, visitors are not likely to remain on the site or make return visits. And higher page views mean that online publishers can set higher advertising rates.

We’re excited about entering this new market and see lots of opportunity among media sites in need of better, more impactful site search. We’ll be talking more about the challenges publishers face and how site search can address them in the coming months, as well as some of the unique benefits our customers have gotten from using Learning Search.

Earlier this month we moved our North American headquarters into a new space in downtown San Jose. Our new location at 333 W. San Carlos Ave. is bigger, giving us plenty of room to grow. And if the past year is any indication, continued growth seems certain.  (The views aren’t too bad either.)

 As we continue to innovate new site search features and techniques and pursue new markets, demand for our solutions has grown. And so have our sales, marketing, development and customer support teams.

We’re also now fairly central to many of our customers and technology partners located around the Bay Area. Of course, we serve retailers and other Internet sites around the globe – and our UK and New Zealand offices have grown as well.

If you’re in the area, stop by and see us in our new location. And if you’re game, our team will gladly introduce you to the tempting grasshopper appetizers at the nearby Mezcal.