Blog | Blog - SLI Systems

A critique of ABCNews search

Posted by Shaun RyanMay 26, 2009Site Search

ABCNews recently announced they had improved their design, navigation and search. I took a look at it and had a few comments.

It’s nice to see images in the search results – although I think they could be a little larger. It’s also good to have refinements and sort options.

OR Search

I noticed that they seem to do an OR search by default. That is they show you results that contain any of the terms in your search query. For example when I clicked on one of their Hot Topics shown above the search box – Susan Boyle. I was surprised to see that there were recipe results for the amateur Scottish signing sensation. On closer inspection they appeared to be showing because there are recipe results that contain the word “Susan”. Doing an OR search like this does mean there will be more results – so you are less likely to show no results. But it also means there can be a lot of irrelevant results. I recommend showing AND results by default – that is results that contain all the words in the query. If there are no results you can fail over to show results that contain some of the words. (A previous blog post discusses more strategies for the no results page)

Showing facets with no results

I also noticed that they show facets even when there are no results. For example a search for proposition 8 tells you that there are 0 recipes for that term. This is not that useful and they would be better off not showing that refinement option – this is standard practice for faceted search.

Not indexing all content

I tried searching for advertising or contact information (they have links for these in the footer of their pages) – but nothing relevant was returned. I suspect their site search isn’t indexing that content. I think it’s a good idea to index all the content on your site.

It’s nice to see ABC improving their site search for their news site and their stated commitment to improve it further. In my experience there is always room for improvement and because so many people elect to use the search – even small improvements in usability can have a significant impact.

Will Google suggest mess up referral stats?

Posted by Shaun RyanMay 25, 2009SEO, Web Search

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 – at the moment it is only on Google’s home page & toolbar. (I guessed they would do this in my post about Google Suggest last August)
The suggestions shown will incorporate your search history

I haven’t seen the new features live yet – but I wonder what impact this will have on the referrals you see in your web logs. If someone searches from Google’s homepage – and clicks on a result from the Google suggest list – then the referrer will presumably be google.com. This will mean that the referral URL won’t contain the search term. I recently saw google.com in our own web logs but didn’t think anything of it at the time. I wonder if was a referral from Google Suggest?

If someone searches from an existing search page then the referrer will be that page and won’t contain search term they were actually using. That means the referral URL will contain a different keyword – possibly completely irrelevant. For example if I search for Microsoft then type in Apple and choose the Apple.com homepage from Google Suggest then the referral URL in Apple’s web logs would be something like: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft and analytics software may mistakenly assume that they were ranking for the term microsoft.

There may be similar problems with the reporting for paid search. Presumably the folks at Google have thought of this and have some sort of solution.

Has anyone seen evidence of this happening? Is there anything Google could do to help us accurately see the search term that was actually used (for example sending people through a redirect that contained the keyword in the URL)?

An interview with Tammie McKenzie from Cruiser Customizing

Posted by Shaun RyanMay 20, 2009eCommerce, Podcast, Site Search

This week we posted an interview with Tammie McKenzie from Cruiser Customizing. This was a very interesting interview. Cruiser Customizing started as community for for those who are passionate about cruiser riders. The members of the community were able to review and discuss the various accessories that are available. The ecommerce part of the business was added at a later stage – after the community was formed.

This is a contrast to a lot of ecommerce businesses that are primarily retailers who then try to create a community around their store – they add reviews, forums, blogs etc but they do all of that after they’ve created the store. At Cruiser Customizing they did it the other way round and it means they have a genuine, engaged community.

Cruiser Customizer operates a number of different sites to cater for different types of bikers who would normally not want to be associated with each other. There’s Realhog for the Harley Davidson parts and accessories, Goldwing Country for Honda Goldwing accessories, RideGear for Sport-bike accessories and Dollar Rider for discount accessories.

SLI has done quite a bit of customizing of our services for the Cruiser Customizing sites. While we run their site search like we do for most customers, for logged in users we preselect their make and model so someone who owns a Honda won’t see Harley specific products but we’ll still show products that are not make and model specific like clothing. We also have built a tire finder and a gift finder and are continuing to work on a number of other initiatives.

I’m sure you’ll find the interview with Tammie informative. For more you can follow Tammie (@karmahappens) and Cruiser Customizing (@CruiserCustom) on Twitter.

Telescope Winners

Posted by geoffbMay 10, 2009Conferences

This year we’ve been exhibiting at some excellent conferences around the world. At many conferences we have telescope drawings to win a Stanley London 30-inch brass telescope. We’d like to take a moment to recognize a couple of our winners this year. From the Internet Retailer Web Design conference in January our winner was Carl Winter, and from the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation conference in February our winner was Andy Carpenter from Vera Bradley. On behalf of the SLI team, we congratulate you and hope you are enjoying the telescopes! Keep an eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by our booth and have a chat with our team.

A critique of the Marketing Sherpa search

Posted by Shaun RyanMay 5, 2009Site Search1 comment

I was on the Marketing Sherpa site today, reviewing the article that published last week about our customer Jelly Belly and I noticed that their site search could do with some improvement. The search is powered by our competitor Omniture/Atomz – hopefully this will help them do a better job :-).

First the index is out of date. A search for Jelly Belly returned no results – even though the article is linked to from their homepage and was published a week ago.

The no results page could be a lot better. They could show some popular searches. At the very least they should tell you that there were no results. The links at the top didn’t do anything. And it seems strange to have the option to sort a list of 0 results by relevance or by date.

I tried searching from the SherpaStore and got a 409 page. The Login link takes you to an Atomz page. I suspect Marketing Sherpa need to change the form code on the SherpaStore page – to point to their regular search.

When you do manage to get search results they are categorized. There may be some situations where this makes sense but I think they are few and far between and I don’t think this is one of them. Categorizing the search results can push the most relevant results way down. For example if you search for summit you have to go through case studies, research, how to, interviews and articles before you get to the events (where I think you would find the most relevant results). They do have a sort option that promises to bring the most relevant results to the top. They also have a sort by date option – but I think it would be good if the dates were shown with the results when this option was selected.

Some other nice to have features that are missing include facets, related searches and auto complete.

Bring blogging into site search results

Posted by Shaun RyanApril 29, 2009Newsletter, Site Search, Social Media2 comments

If you’ve been putting off blogging because you’re not sure how it will help your business, it may be time to get on the blogging bandwagon. A recent article in E-Commerce Guide points out that a blog linked to your online storefront can be a great way to build visibility for your business and get customers more engaged with what you have to offer.

We agree that blogging presents a good opportunity to talk directly with your customers – and we also think that if you’re going to spend the time necessary to maintain a blog, then you should make the blog content findable on your site. Naturally, you might be concerned that blog articles would be a distraction to your online shoppers – after all, aren’t they using your site search to find the things you’re selling, and not to catch up on your blog?

However, if you do your blog right -with useful, interesting posts that relate to your shoppers’ needs and questions, then visitors would benefit from your posts – and you want to make the posts easy to find. Here are some approaches you can take to make blog content searchable:

Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – for example, on the left, or below the regular search results. This ensures that products have prime position on the results page.
Create refinement options so visitors can restrict the results to just blog articles, or just products.
Allow product and blog content to surface in your search, showing the most relevant first. Consider adjusting your ranking settings to place more weight on the products, so that products generally show higher. (If you do this, we recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them, so that if they are the most relevant results for a particular keyword, then they will end up at the top of the search results.)
Consider offering a search box on your blog so that visitors can search just blog articles. (In this case, the blog articles should be the most prominent, but we suggest also showing products in your blog search, perhaps along one side of the results.)

If you’re not sure how to present blog content in your site search, you may want to ask your customers (maybe through a blog post), try some options, and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Feel free to contact us if you’d like any assistance.

Also, watch our latest video for more tips on blogging and site search. And take our new LinkedIn poll, and tell us what you think about this idea.

Refining search results by color/colour

Posted by Shaun RyanApril 19, 2009Site Search, Web Search

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 the top. When you click on it you see a selection of 12 standard colors that you can filter the results by.

Goolge will be doing some analysis of the images to work out which are the main colors in each images. For the few test searches I have done this works well. Google shows the same 12 colors in the drop down even if there are no results. I think it could be improved slightly if they only showed the colors in the drop down for which there were results. Nevertheless, I imagine this will be a popular feature.

I recommend having a similar feature in your site search if you have results where color is important to your visitors. We normally recommend that you don’t use drop downs for the refinements because the drop downs make it slightly more difficult to use (one extra click) and you have to click on them to see what refinements/facets are available. The trade off is the refinements take up more screen real estate. By putting the refinements on the side and using a grid view you can still get plenty of results above the fold.When displaying a color filtering option – you should only show the colors for which there are results (this is the same for other refinement options as well).

Some problems

Color filtering can get a little tricky if you have products that come in several colors – if you don’t have a photo for every color of every product then the results may look a little strange. For example if you have a shirt that comes in blue and green but you only have an image of the blue shirt – then when you filter the results to show those that come in green – the blue shirt will show in the results. This is strange for the user because they’ve asked to see only the green products yet the image shows a blue shirt. It’s a valid result because the shirt does come in green but you need to tell the user somehow.

One solution is to take an image of every product in every color available and show the appropriate product when a color filter is applied. This can be very expensive and time consuming and if you’re custom making the products (for example sofas) then you may not have every combination available to photograph. Another solution is to show the available colors in the search result. Your Blinds do this in the example below. When you mouse over a color a larger image of the color pops up along with it’s name.

Choosing multiple colors

The example below from Jelly Belly shows an implementation that allows you to select more than one color. In this case blue and pink are selected. Jason Marrone, Ecommerce Marketing Manager at Jelly Belly mentioned in the ecommerce podcast that they have many visitors who are choosing candy to match a color theme for a function. These filtering options definitely help those people. I like this implementation – with the ticks in the colors that are selected.

Automatically pulling color from images

We did some experiments a few years ago where we analyzed the product images on a customer’s site and automatically tagged them with the major colors that appeared in the images. This worked reasonably well – but we didn’t have a technique for excluding background colors – which meant it didn’t work perfectly. I’m sure there are techniques for removing background colours – such as ignoring any colors that are on the edge of the image – or something more sophisticated. In any case we haven’t had much demand for this. If you don’t have your products tagged with their colors then let us know if you’d be interested in having a service like this. It will help us work out whether this is something we should be putting some more effort into.

Show Reviews and Social Tags in Site Search Results

Posted by Shaun RyanApril 6, 2009Newsletter, Reviews, Site Search, Social Media1 comment

Our primary aim is to help create a better online experience for our customers’ visitors, and help improve our clients online business, through more relevant search. As we’ve discussed in recent newsletters, there are many ways to deliver a better search experience – beyond more relevant results – by integrating additional content, such as video, into your search results. So here’s another idea: incorporate user-generated content, such as customer reviews and social tags, in your site search results and give customers an even easier way to search your site.

I’ve talked in the past about the benefits of allowing user reviews on your site – and incorporating the reviews into your site search. For instance, reviews keep customers on your site – if they can find product reviews on your own site, they won’t need to go elsewhere to get them. You can also use ratings to weight search results, giving the products with better ratings more prominence.

One of SLI’s clients – an online gift retailer, who also works with our partner PowerReviews has taken this process a step further, allowing shoppers to narrow their search results based on social tags. For instance, they can refine the search by such tags as “Best Uses” or “Kind of Buyer.” People place a lot of faith in what others say about a given product, so if you can bring these compelling testimonials into search, you stand a greater chance of convincing shoppers to make a purchase.

We’re fans of the idea of Social Navigation. What do you think? Do you offer user ratings and reviews or social tags on your site? Do you include this information in your search results? Take a minute to answer our one question LinkedIn poll.

It’s easy to test if searching by social tags will help your business, since we collect social tags via our feeds from our partners Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews. Please contact us at sales@sli-systems.com, or watch my site search video tip demonstrating the integration of site search, ratings and reviews if you’d like to learn more.

Interview with Ben Harness from Interflora UK

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 30, 2009eCommerce, Podcast

We have just released this interview with Ben Harness from Interflora UK.

Interflora is a little different than a lot of the retailers that I have talked to. Rather than having one or two distribution centres they have 1800 florists who put together the bouquets. This means they have people who are passionate about flowers (passionate enough to run a florist) who are ensuring the quality of the delivered product. Having this many people fulfilling their orders makes it a lot easier to handle their peaks during Mothers’ Day, Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

Ben is currently considering adding ratings and reviews to the Interflora site. They are also a little different from a lot of retailers in that most of the purchases on their site are gifts – so often the purchaser may never see the product they bought. This makes it a little hard to review – but they may be able to reflect the feedback they got – “Mum loved the flowers”. Another option they’re considering is encouraging the recipients to write reviews.

SMX Sydney

Posted by geoffbMarch 29, 2009Conferences, SEO

We will be at the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this week. To find our more about the event check out http://www.searchmarketingexpo.com.au/.

Searching within a store

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 29, 2009eCommerce, Site Search3 comments

Evan Schuman mentioned the idea of being able to search within an individual store – so you can see if your local store has the product you’re looking for. I like this idea and I would use it. There are a few ways it could be implemented. It could be presented as a refinement in the search and navigation – so you could select a store from a drop down box. If there are many stores then this could be a little cumbersome so it may be nice to remember your local store – or use the visitor’s IP address to guess their location and show some local stores at the top of the drop down.

If you do allow people to select their local store (and you store this in a cookie for example) then when they do a normal search you could show the availability of the each product at their local store. This is one example of how you can personalize site search results.

One problem with this idea is often the people who are running the ecommerce store struggle to get recognition for the contribution they make to off line sales. A search within the store feature is only going encourage off line sales. If this applies to you then you’ll probably be reluctant to implement this type of feature – even though it may be better for your customers.

I know we’ve discussed this with some of our customers in the past – but I don’t think we’ve ever implemented it.

Focus poll

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 19, 2009Site Search

I promise this will be the last time I write about this fairly trivial feature about putting the focus on the search box….

In our February newsletter we ran a poll asking: “Do you think the cursor focus for a website should be on the search box?”. We’ll leave this open – but the results to date of this unscientific poll show the majority are in favor of it.

We also published this small video about this topic:

Tracking offline conversions

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 18, 2009eCommerce

Yesterday, I was speaking with Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google after a lecture at the local University. One of the things I asked him about was tracking off line conversions. For our customers with bricks and mortar stores this is a common challenge.

Hal suggested one way of measuring off line conversions was to run a Google campaign and use the geotargeting options to exclude an area around a subset of your stores which can then be used as a control. You can then compare the in-store sales data for the control group to the others to measure the offline impact of the AdWords campaign.

This sounds like a good idea to me – it’s similar to the technique used to measure the impact of traditional advertising. I presume if you look at the proportion of your total traffic that came from the Google campaign then you can extrapolate to estimate the total offline sales contributed by your website. This is really useful information. I know a number of our customers struggle to get recognition for the contribution the website makes to offline sales. I’m sure it is significant.

You could run a similar trial with your email marketing – using the addresses of your customers who receive your newsletters to restrict the newsletter to certain geographies.

On a kind of related note – I remember my father telling me that he always sold more chicken in the months when the TV ads were running. Thanks to YouTube you can see his chicken advert:

Interview with Luke Hilton from Dick Smith Australia

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 16, 2009eCommerce, Podcast

We have just posted our first interview with an Australian retailer: Luke Hilton from Dick Smith Electronics.

Dick Smithis part of Woolworths (ASX: WOW). DSE is Australia’s largest online electronics retailer and they have over 200 retail stores. Luke is the Web Manager at Dick Smith and in the interview he shares plenty of his experiences. I particularly like their viral promotion around the launch of the iPhone in Australia and their plans to introduce user generated support.

SLI is powering the search and navigation on the Dick Smith site. They have recently updated of their whole site including their search and navigation. I really like the way it looks. It starts with the auto complete functionality on their search box, on the search results page the facets are on the left hand side their are plenty of products above the fold, the prices are big and bold and the navigation has a similar look as the search. The search and navigation is all search engine friendly and it is helping to drive a lot of traffic to their site.

We are also powering the RSS feeds of the popular searches and the hottest products for their main categories. This is something a little different and is a service we developed for Dick Smith.

Luke says that their conversion rate has improved significantly since the release of their new look.

No results page

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 15, 2009eCommerce, Site Search3 comments

I saw an excellent write up about winning strategies for no results pages by Greg Nudelman. Greg includes plenty of examples of what does and doesn’t work. I recommend reading it. Here is a list of some of the things that we do around the no results page.

First of all we try to reduce the number of times that the no results page is shown through the following techniques:

The auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have results.
We report on the search terms that have no results. Often this is caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. This can be remedied by either using that language on your site or adding synonyms. It can also indicate products/information that your visitors expect you to have that you don’t carry. You can use this information to help expand your product lines – based on what your visitors are asking for. Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty talks about doing this in this interview
Similar to the Amazon example that Greg gives, we fail over if there are no results that contain all of the words in the query – we will show results that contain some of the words, with a message describing what we are doing. Note: Not everyone reads the message so in some cases this causes confusion.

On the no results page we will:

show spelling suggestions using the Did you mean language. These suggestions are drawn from the language on the site
show popular searches – I’m a fan of this
show popular products – this can also cause confusion – visitors may not read the message that you have no results for their search term and assume that the popular products are the search results.
show keyword specific banners – for example if there is a search term for a product that you no longer stock then a banner may be a good way of saying “we no longer carry this product range – here are some alternatives.”

As an aside – one of Greg’s examples that highlighted the “Did you mean” functionality was a Google search for asdasdasdasdasdasddfgh. If you do that search – his page is the top result (undoubtedly this page will be in the results set shortly as well).

NEMOA Spring Conference

Posted by geoffbMarch 9, 2009Conferences, eCommerce

We’re heading over to Boston this week for the NEMOA Spring Conference. To find out more about this event and what the New England Mail Order Association is all about check out www.nemoa.org.

We’re hosting a round table on Thursday morning (7:45am – 8:45am), come along for breakfast and join the discussion.

Blogging, ecommerce and site search

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 8, 2009eCommerce, Site Search1 comment

I read an article in the Ecommerce Guide recommending that online stores should blog. The article covers some of the basics of blogging and its benefits – including helping to engage your customers and getting more visibility in the search engines. As I often do, I started thinking about what this meant from a site search point of view.

First of all your main site search should index all of your content, including your blog articles – not just your products. Understandably, you may feel a little reluctant to do this – showing blog or other content from your site may distract your visitors from the purchasing process and so could reduce your conversion rate. However your blog articles should be informing and engaging your customers so it would seem to be a shame to not make them easy to find.

There are a variety of approaches you can take:

Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – eg on the left or below the search. Doing this ensures that the products have prime position on the results page. One problem with this is that if the blog content is the most relevant content for the search then it may end up being shown below the fold – by showing products first you may be missing out on engaging the visitor which may mean you end up missing out on a sale.
Have refinement options so people can restrict the results to just the blog articles or products.
Allow product and blog content to surface in your search – showing the most relevant first. You could adjust your ranking settings to place more weight on the products – so products generally show higher. If you do this I would recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them so if they are the most relevant for a particular keyword then they will end up at the top of the search results.

In addition, I recommend you have a blog search so people can search just your blog articles. For this search the blog articles should be the most prominent – but I think you should show products in your blog search for example – down the side.

You put a lot of effort into producing content for you blog. It is a fantastic opportunity for you to engage your customers with your unique perspective. This content should be accessible through your site search. If you’re unsure how to present your blog content in your search – ask your customers (maybe through a blog post), try some options and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Contact us if you would like our opinion.

Interview with Jack Love from Internet Retailer

Posted by Shaun RyanMarch 3, 2009Conferences, eCommerce, Podcast

We have just released an interview with Jack Love, President and CEO of Vertical Web Media – better known by their brand Internet Retailer.

Jack discusses his career in publishing from starting as a journalist through to Internet Retailer. He talks a lot about the upcoming Internet Retailer show in Boston (June 15-18) which is going to be their biggest and their best. A lot of online retailers I talk to say this is their favorite show. But don’t take my word for it – listen to what Jack has to say about it.

Webinar Recording Available Now – Best Practices for CSE Marketing & Site Search

Posted by geoffbFebruary 23, 2009Webinar

If you were unable to attend our webinar on Thursday you can watch the recording from the Merchant Advantage website.

Best Practices for CSE Marketing and Site Search
Michael Lambert, CEO, Merchant Advantage & Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems
The 30-minute webinar was held on Thursday Feb 19, 2009.

By watching this webinar you will learn:

How Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) can bring you new customers – without bringing you tech hassles.
How to select the most effective CSE’s for YOUR business out of the hundreds out there.
How to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of your CSE choices and make changes in real time.
How to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes a site visitor to find what they’re looking for.
How to implement a system that learns from your visitors’ behavior over time so that you can better meet (and anticipate) their needs.
How to list products in their predicted order of popularity and automatically optimize pages for search engine spiders.

Watch Webinar Now

Top 10 retailers by conversion rate

Posted by Shaun RyanFebruary 22, 2009eCommerce, Site Search1 comment

I spotted a post by Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow listing the top 10 online retailers by conversion rate. First of all – I was pleased to see three SLI customers in the list – FTD, Blair.com and Drs Foster and Smith. Before you start comparing your conversion rate to these sites and trying to work out why you can’t achieve anything like this you need to look at the types of online retailer that have made the podium here.

Schwan’s – an online grocery store will have a lot of loyal customers who buy their groceries every week. These people will have a conversion rate of close to 100% and so will skew the numbers. Similarly Drs Foster and Smith will have many loyal customers who regularly buy pet supplies.

On the other hand catalogers like Blair will have visitors who have already decided to buy based on the information in the catalog. In this case the website is functioning as an order taking system. It doesn’t have to do a great job of attracting people to the site and compelling them to purchase. The catalog has already done that. One small site search tip here – if people type a catalog number into the search box then you should navigate directly to the product page. This can help conversions because it saves a step (you don’t have to view the search results page and click on the product).

Of course the retailer you should be paying close attention is Amazon. In the ecommerce podcast I usually ask retailers for an example of a site they particularly admire. Amazon is by far and away the most common answer. They are undoubtedly the gold standard by which to measure yourselves.

eTail Phoenix

Posted by geoffbFebruary 18, 2009Conferences, eCommerce

Next week we’re heading down to Phoenix, AZ for the eTail West 2009 conference.

This event is one of the largest conferences in the ecommerce industry and has an impressive list of speakers as well as a good mix of vendors.

Incorporating video into site search

Posted by Shaun RyanFebruary 17, 2009Conferences, eCommerce, Site Search1 comment

When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks. As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.

In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.

All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.

Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search sway-control:

Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it

SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.

Interview with Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty

Posted by Shaun RyanFebruary 17, 2009eCommerce, Podcast, SEO, Site Search

Yesterday we released a podcast interview with our customer Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty. During this interview Ian talks about how he started off as a stock boy while he was at school and is now General Manager.

Century Novelty started with a physical store in 1951 but is now is exclusively online. Focusing solely on their online store has given them some valuable experience. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Ian share some of the secrets he has discovered from this experience.

Also see our press release which summarises the ROI Century Novelty achieved from using SLI’s Learning Search and Site Champion services.

Free Webinar – Best Practices for CSE Marketing & Site Search

Posted by geoffbFebruary 16, 2009Webinar

Merchant Advantage and SLI Systems are hosting a webinar this week on Best Practices for CSE Marketing and Site Search.

The 30-minute webinar will be held Thursday Feb 19, 2009 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern.

By participating in this webinar, you will learn:

How Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) can bring you new customers – without bringing you tech hassles.
How to select the most effective CSE’s for YOUR business out of the hundreds out there.
How to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of your CSE choices and make changes in real time.
How to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes a site visitor to find what they’re looking for.
How to implement a system that learns from your visitors’ behavior over time so that you can better meet (and anticipate) their needs.
How to list products in their predicted order of popularity and automatically optimize pages for search engine spiders.

Social tags and site search

Posted by Shaun RyanFebruary 15, 2009eCommerce, Site Search

Last week I spotted an interesting blog post by Anna Skaya and Adam Salamon – over at Bazaarvoice. They described how our UK based customer Boden is using social tags to enhance their site search. I’ve been a fan of integrating ratings and reviews with site search for some time and I think the idea of using social tags as refinements is a good one. If you’re using social tags I recommend you try surfacing them in your search.

If you’re an SLI customer then this is easy to try – the social tags are passed via the feed we receive from Bazaarvoice just ask your SLI customer success manager and they’ll make it happen.

SLI to Exhibit at SMX West

Posted by geoffbFebruary 8, 2009Conferences, Search Conferences

This week SLI is exhibiting at the SMX West Conference. The event is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center which is nice as its only 15 minutes from our office.

SLI is exhibiting plus we are running a Theatre Presentation -Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:20am on Internal Search & Navigation Best Practices & Their Impact on SEO.

Interview with Larry Kavanagh from DMinSITE

Posted by Shaun RyanFebruary 5, 2009eCommerce, Success Stories, User Experience

We have just released an interview with the CEO and founder of our partner DMinSITE, Larry Kavanagh. Larry talks about their SaaS ecommerce platform for catalogers and the experience they have gained from the 78 sites that they run. This includes information about improvements they made to the checkout process of one of their customers that increased their conversion rate by 16%.

Larry also talks about their approach to email marketing, in particular about how sending less emails to those who don’t open them can improve deliverability to all recipients. I found the conversation informative – I hope you do too.

Shop.org Innovation Contest Winner

Posted by geoffbJanuary 29, 2009Conferences, eCommerce

We found out recently that we were one of five companies selected for Shop.org’s Innovation Contest as part of the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum. Alongside companies like BazaarVoice (an SLI partner) and others, we have the opportunity to give a short presentation about our innovative idea – leveraging site search data to dramatically improve the results of email marketing campaigns.

Our “idea” was based on a few client projects where we teamed with our partner ExactTarget to create highly targeted, personalized email marketing messages tailored to individual shoppers at our clients’ sites. By incorporating site search data about visitors’ search activity and data about their shopping preferences and behavior, companies can create email messages that contain popular search results for preferred items (e.g. “women’s shoes”), brands and styles of each customer, and see amazing results. In some cases, our customers saw a 250% higher open rate, a 400% increase in click-troughs, and 300% increase in sales. They also saw a 400% decrease in un-subscribes, a pretty significant measure for email campaigns.

There is so much marketers can do with site search data beyond showcasing products in search results – and many marketers aren’t even aware. Using the data for highly targeted email messages is just one way to extend the ROI of site search and make it worthwhile for your business. If you have any thoughts to share about this, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’ll be at Shop.org in Orlando next week (Feb 2-4), drop by our booth (#307) or come hear us talk about our Innovation Idea. It might be something you can replicate too.

Interview with Mark Dirks from Beacon Technologies

Posted by Shaun RyanJanuary 15, 2009eCommerce, Success Stories1 comment

Beacon Technologies Logo

This week we released an interview with Mark Dirks, president of Beacon Technologies. Beacon Tech are a partner of SLIs and we have a number of customer’s in common. Mark has a wealth of experience – he’s been working with web based applications since the early 90s. One of Becon Tech’s strength’s is their Google Analytics consulting – they are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and Mark talks about the importance of analytics and some of the challenges their customers have.

Interview with Jeff Zwelling from YLighting

Posted by Shaun RyanJanuary 14, 2009eCommerce, Podcast

Ylighting Logo

We posted this interview with Jeff Zwelling from YLighting just before Christmas but I was a little busy and did not get a chance to blog about it. Jeff is very entrepreneurial – he co-founded Ylighting and is currently working on an opportunity he sees to improve analytics for ecommerce. I’m sure you’ll find it enlightening :-).

Jeff discusses an print advertising campaign he is proud of called Life Illuminated. I’ve uploaded a copy of the Life Illuminated ads so you can take a look at them.

Jeff mentioned a Yahoo group that he has found to be a valuable resource. I’m pretty sure it’s called Web Advertising Roundtable. It is a retailers only group – so you aren’t hassled by any annoying vendors (like me).

SLI Blog