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Black Friday Roundup – eCommerce Sales Exceed $1 Billion

Posted by Kemberly GongeCommerce, Mobile/Tablets, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Web Search

Black Friday spending was up from last year

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 a mobile site on their phone, an increase of more than 10 percent from just last year.

Sales on mobile devices accounted for more than 16 percent of all online sales, up from 9.8 percent last year, which points to customers’ increasing comfort with mobile shopping. Of all mobile devices, 14.2 percent of sales came from iPhone and Android smartphones, while 9.8 percent of all mobile purchases came from an iPad. Of purchases only from tablets, 88 percent were completed from an iPad.

So while lines were still wrapped around buildings for doorbuster deals and parking lots were still crowded, there was an increase in sales from those of us who prefer to do our shopping couchside as we recover from our Thanksgiving food coma.

Holiday promotions are starting earlier with some sales beginning Thanksgiving night, and customers are definitely getting into the spirit of online shopping. You could be losing them if your eCommerce site’s search isn’t optimized for a variety of web and mobile devices. Whether your customers are surfing from their laptop, on the couch browsing from a tablet or in a store comparing products on their smartphone, they’re looking for a shop and purchase experience that meets their expectations. If you can exceed those expectations, that’s even better.

There are a number of ways to do that by optimizing your site’s search features with highly-relevant search, refinements and features like Rich Auto Complete, which visually display relevant products.

Space is at a premium on mobile sites, which is why features like expandable navigation that stays hidden until users need to refine their searches, or auto complete, which matches a partial search term with possible suggestions, have such great impact. The fewer words your customers need to type or clicks they need to make to get to their product, the more likely they’ll be to revisit your site because of a good user experience.

Bad usability not only turns off customers from a purchase, it also erodes their perception of your brand. During the holidays, you’ll have thousands, possibly millions of customers navigating to your site – don’t be caught with a poorly-navigable site. Instead, invest in the rapidly-growing eCommerce space by optimizing the site search and merchandising features on your eCommerce and mobile platforms to take advantage of a steadily growing channel.

If your eCommerce site could use an update, you can learn more about the best features to improve your site by downloading our Big Book of Site Search Tips.

Plus, check out other interesting Black Friday results in this infographic.

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Bad Search is Everywhere

Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Web Search1 comment

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 or a baseball mitt on an athletic goods store and those searches return irrelevant or no results, it is a clear indication that the search function isn’t finely tuned. These days, customers are becoming even more fickle because they’ve experienced great search and are easily turned off by a bad experience.

According to user experience research posted by usability expert Jakob Nielsen, in a study of users’ within-site queries, their first search was successful only 64 percent of the time. Furthermore, when users could not find the item, instead of reformulating their search, they often assumed the site did not carry the item and left the site. Even for those who still think you carry the item, it’s a frustrating experience if their search doesn’t give them the results they were expecting. As you can see, bad site search can have lasting impact on not only the specific sale, but also on customers’ perception of what types of products you carry or do not, and what type of business you’re running.

Some bad searches will ultimately return the product, but will also have other irrelevant or ancillary products intermingled in with results. If, for example, you search the term “pants” on the Demandware-powered athletic clothing website www.lucy.com, the results page shows five shirts or jackets, before pants appear as a result. And further down in the search results, there are additional shirts, dresses, sports bras shown higher than some pants. Instead, the most relevant results should be at the top.

A search for “pants” shows six shirts before displaying the first images of pants.

In other cases, the most ancillary products may push down the relevant products so they aren’t even seen immediately, or “above the fold” of the webpage. An example is the Australian electronics website Dick Smith, which uses FredHopper. When searching “laptops”, the first 39 results are laptop cases, chargers and power adapters. The first laptop doesn’t appear until the bottom of a long results page, which is too far to expect most customers to scroll.

Now both of these examples do follow a lot of the best practices for site search. They have clear images, plenty of filters and sort options, integration with reviews, add to cart information and more. However both searches have poor relevance. This is difficult to get right, but it’s vital.

This is the reason we’re in this business and feel so strongly about site search relevance. We created our learning search platform because of our own frustrations when searching within websites. It may seem like the simplest concept and one that isn’t as important as flashy graphic design, the latest multimedia widgets or the other website bells and whistles that may seem like a priority. But if your customers can’t find what they’re looking for, no amount of cool features will make them stay. Your site’s search is the foundation of a good user experience. It is therefore vital to make sure you have a finely-tuned, learning solution that will deliver highly-relevant results time and again.

Have you experienced bad site search while shopping online? Please share with us what searches you like and don’t like.

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Online Shopping Forecasts are Looking Merry and Bright

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Site Search

This holiday season, online retailers are expecting to see a much stronger surge in holiday sales – Forrester has predicted online revenues of $68.4 billion this holiday season, a 15 percent increase over last years’ holiday sales, and 3 percent higher than the overall annual online retail growth rate.

With the effects of the economic recession finally starting to ease, slight gains in job growth and signs of recovery in the housing market, many research organizations are predicting an increase in spending.

According to an article in the International Business Times, eShoppers “are expected to spend more in the fourth quarter than in the third on online sales, as they have since the firm started tracking such data in the first quarter of 2007, when Americans spent $28 billion on online purchases.”

Retailers are getting the jump on the expected increase in shopping by starting promotions earlier this year. According to a report by eMarketer, 42 percent of retailers started promotions as early as October, and it was reported that last year, “half of all consumers had completed their holiday shopping before Black Friday.”

Many shoppers will look forward to the deep discounts and large sales offered the day after Thanksgiving with the start to the holiday shopping season. In 2011, the top 500 retail websites had more than 170 million unique U.S. shoppers between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and online retailers can expect stronger growth this year.

Even with the economy continuing to recover, many shoppers are still price-sensitive. Many online sites feature various offers such as daily deals, free shipping or large discounts during specific periods of time. Because of these promotions, online retailers have become “synonymous with value” according  to Forrester Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. Online retailers should look at these promotions, as well as loyalty rewards or personalized offers to customers, to determine a workable mix of offers that will make holiday revenues merry and bright.

Are your holiday sales starting to heat up? We’d love to hear from you.

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Surprise! Older Shoppers are More Likely to Purchase Online

Posted by Kemberly GongeCommerce, Merchandising, Navigation, Site Search

A surprising fact was just reported: older consumers are most likely to make holidays purchases online this year.

The study, conducted by Velaro, highlighted some interesting facts that online retailers should keep in mind this holiday season when running promotions and thinking about their target audiences.

The study found that 20 percent of shoppers ages 55-64 and will do some portion of their holiday shopping online, which was the highest percentage from any age group surveyed, followed closely by shoppers age 45-54 (19 percent).

Comparatively, shoppers aged 18-24 were least likely to do holiday shopping online. This is an interesting statistic because it’s often assumed that younger shoppers are more technologically savvy and have a higher tolerance for complicated sites to complete transactions.

So, what does that mean for online retailers? When considering an older audience, it’s important to keep in mind that excellent usability and ease of finding products and navigating through your site will be essential to helping your users make purchases. It’s also helpful to make sure your merchandising shows customers the hottest products and special promotions, such as free shipping and free returns, in a variety of ways such like merchandising banners, ribbon overlays and highly-visual pages full of product images.

Additionally, if you are selling electronics, gaming, apparel and other products aimed at the 18-24-year-old demographic, it might helpful to modify your online marketing strategy and aim promotions at parents, not young adults.

Excellent site usability is necessary for all sites – those targeted toward younger demographics may actually have older shoppers accessing them.

Overall, the trends look good for online retailers; 53 percent of respondents said they intended to do at least 25 percent of their holiday shopping online, and some studies are predicting that holiday shopping this season will be up 15 percent overall from last year.

What are your thoughts on the holiday shopping season so far? Please leave your comments below.

 

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Shift Your Paid Campaigns into High Gear Using PPC Links

Posted by justinmeCommerce

The holidays are an important time for almost all online retailers, and it’s in full swing with Halloween now come and gone. For almost everyone, this means ramping up on paid search engine advertising, email blasts, and for the fortunate few, television spots. Since most sites, including your competitors, are moving full steam ahead, making sure these paid campaigns are being tracked accurately and are relevant to what shoppers are looking for this season will make your dollars go further.

A simple way to do this is by using URLs in your campaigns that have the best merchandise available and can be precisely tracked. Use campaign-friendly search results pages tagged with a PPC identifier, like SLI Systems provides, with what we call PPC links.

Let’s say you have a set of specific products you want to promote for the holidays. You can group those items into a search results page with a clean URL, or PPC link, that you can use in your email or AdWords campaigns to direct customers back to that page of specially-grouped items.

Instead of linking your AdWords campaign or email blasts to a plain category landing page, PPC links provide great merchandising from Learning Search pages. Additionally, you can easily separate these pages from your normal search results via the reporting section in the Merchandising Console or your analytics provider. Using PPC pages for landing pages is also a simple way to create pages that are relevant to the keywords that you’ve purchased on AdWords or specific campaigns you are promoting.

Another great feature is that the traffic from these pages will be tracked separately from your normal search traffic, so you’ll be able to see your best performing URLs quickly and easily and track the success of each campaign. The URLs generated are in a clean format, for example: “cname.yourdomain.com/ppc/keyword”, so you don’t have to worry about unsightly links or relying on hyperlinking.

If you’re ready to shift your paid campaigns into high gear and are interested in using PPC links on your site, please contact your Customer Success Manager or send an email to customersuccess@sli-systems.com.

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Built-in Redundancy to Prepare for Natural Disasters

Posted by Shaun RyanAbout us1 comment

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, many areas of the North American East Coast were hit with massive storms and power outages. As record-breaking storm surges and heavy rains flooded cities, millions of homes and businesses have lost power and may be without electricity for days.

When natural disasters strike like this, it reinforces why we set up precautions to guard against natural disasters. SLI Systems has built various redundancies into our service to protect our customers’ search and navigation, so that in the event that a server or data center fails, the load will automatically be redirected to another location.

We were fortunate that our data center in New Jersey remained in-tact and our servers continued to function fully throughout the storm. Even with redundant power supplies and back-up generators, sometimes a data center goes off line. If that did happen what would happen to our services? Well, for customers, they would continue to see normal, uninterrupted service.

We have servers in eight data centers located around the world and multiple servers in each data center to help process the billions of queries conducted through SLI’s services. If there is an issue that shuts down a data center, our system will automatically divert all traffic to different geographic locations. If the issue occurs within one server, a load balancer will automatically remove that server from service,. In this way, we provide multiple layers of protection against our servers failing so that your business is safe.

Additionally, our solution is multi-homed, which means that our clients are duplicated on multiple servers in multiple data centers. If there is an internet connection issue between a specific user and one of the data centers, the user’s browser will ignore the address of the faulty connection and use one that is working.

We’ve taken the steps to have multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers so that our search functionality will operate without a hitch, regardless of where a failure might occur. It is during moments like these, even where there was no failure, where we’re glad we took the necessary steps to ensure undisrupted service for our customers.

If you have more questions about SLI Systems redundant architecture, please feel free to reach out to us.

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Site Search Horror Stories: Horrific Hidden Search boxes and Menacing Merchandising

Posted by Kemberly GongeCommerce, Merchandising, Site Search

The market for online shoppers can be dark and perilous territory for eCommerce sites. Customers come and go, and it can be easy to disappear forever in a forest of competing stores. Don’t be snatched up by the myriad threats to your site by keeping a keen eye focused on optimizing your site’s usability to welcome visitors and urge them to stay longer, make purchases, and visit often.

Your site’s search should not be full of booby traps and hidden passageways. According to Ian MacDonald, of Party Supplies Delivered, the best sites offer clear pathways to products, clever product merchandising and an easy-to-find search box.

Improving your site’s usability through site search and making products easy to find is essential. But instead of warding off vampires and werewolves, many sites scare off customers by hiding the search box. Mark McTamany from Cell Bikes said one of the worst site searches he saw was from an Australian retailer’s site, which didn’t even have a search box. “How could you have a website with no search function?”

Instead, your search box should be a harbinger of safe, effective site search, clearly visible at the top of the page. Then give customers a prompt such as “What are you looking for?” to lead them to begin shopping. When customers search for products, they are more likely to buy because they have a clear idea of what they want, and are looking for it directly. Make sure they find it.

MacDonald also said showing results by popularity and relevance and then refining those results help your customers find exactly what they want. Giving too many results will awaken hordes of dead, irrelevant items that will overtake any customer and cause them to flee.

Dr. Frankenstein had an easy time finding the perfect bolt using SLI’s site search

Allowing refinements of search attributes such as brand, color, rating, size or other product specification lets customers quickly narrow down results to find their desired product. Instead of searching for “bolt” and finding thousands of options, Dr. Frankenstein can narrow the selection by material, diameter, length and thread pitch to make sure it’s just the right fit for his monster.

You don’t need a magic potion to create a spellbinding eCommerce site; these simple tips can help encourage your customers to have a happy ending.

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Site Search Horror Stories: Texas Relevance Massacre

Posted by Kemberly GongeCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips

For eCommerce sites, there is nothing more terrifying than discovering your products are buried six feet under. Ineffective site search can bury relevant results to the point where your customers won’t find what they’re seeking. If your customers are looking for black hooded cloaks or wooden brooms, they may not even find them when they search using those specific keywords. Site search relevance can mean the difference between the life or death of your eCommerce website.

“The standard site search we were using was a horror movie of ‘Paranormal Activity’ proportions!” said Mark McTamany from Cell Bikes. “Unlike SLI’s relevant, targeted, and always-learning visitor-based results, our ‘built-in’ site search grabbed any and all results, whether they were relevant or not.”

According to McTamany, if a visitor, for example searched ‘bike tire’, they would get any and every result from the website with the word ‘bike’ and ‘tire’ in it. To make matters worse, the very first results tended to be seemingly unrelated to tires, such as a ‘car bike rack’, because the description had “secure your bike tires” in it.

“Ask many a visitor and they’d probably say our site search was possessed,” he said.

Good luck trying to sleep after visiting a retail site with horrific search!

A good site search will distinguish between keywords and surface the most relevant results with every search. SLI systems does this by learning the behavior of the visitors and their shopping experience and precisely tailoring the search to ensure the visitors find what they need.

Conversely, highly-relevant site search can be thrilling. When items that customers want materialize in front of their eyes, they are more likely to click through and make a purchase. A great eCommerce user experience is dependent on showing customers want they want quickly and reducing the number of pages that they need to click through to purchase the product.

“Our sales from site search were a paltry half of one percent!” said McTamany, of their initial site search solution. “Since using SLI, that figure has grown exponentially.”

Site search doesn’t have to be horrifying. Pick up your torch and pitchfork and take a stand against possessed site search results and exorcise the demons that return irrelevant and downright scary results.

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