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Maximize Ratings and Reviews by Integrating them Into Your Site Navigation

Posted by Terry CostaAugust 18, 2011Navigation, Site Search

Most e-commerce sites, and even non-ecommerce sites, have customer ratings and reviews. The ratings give people a quick view at how well a product (or content) has fared among people who’ve already purchased it, and ratings offer a more detailed explanation of a product’s pros and cons. If you’ve already gone to the trouble of having this content on your site, you should maximize its value by making sure it’s included in your site navigation. There are many ways you can go about this, depending on the lay-out of your site and the products or content you feature.

To get you started, below are a couple of suggestions to consider. You can find more by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips” which we just released last week. And be sure to check back, as we’ll post more tips from the Big Book in the coming weeks.

1. Show ratings and review information in the navigation — You can add ratings and reviews as part of the product information displayed on the navigation pages. This highlights early in your customers’ interaction that you provide ratings and reviews, and it’s also good practice to show the number of reviews for each product to illustrate which products have reviews and to help put the ratings into perspective.

2. Provide options to navigate through reviews — If you have a lot of reviews for some of your products, it can be cumbersome for your visitors to read through them. To help your visitors find the information they’re looking for efficiently and improve their user experience, you should offer ways to navigate through the reviews. For example, you can help them quickly access the positive reviews. You can see in the Abe’s of Maine example that the site allows visitors to navigate reviews by pros, cons, best uses and to sort by newest, oldest, highest rating, or most helpful. This is extremely effective, and reduces the amount of steps visitors will take before making a purchase decision.

BNET Podcast – 10 ways to improve your site search

Posted by Terry CostaAugust 17, 2011eCommerce, Site Search

The relevance of the search results is critical to helping your visitors find the products they are looking for quickly, as well as keeping them browsing to increase the order values.

Last week, Mark Brixton, Country Manager for Australia, sat down with Phil Dobbie from BNET Australia to discuss 10 things ecommerce sites can do to keep their site search performing efficiently. Mark explains that site search accounts for 30-40% of a site’s revenue so there’s a huge benefit to making search a priority. Mark also highlighted the fact that etailers should be continuously monitoring their analytics to understand visitors’ behavior on the site and particularly within the search. You can listen to all of Mark’s tips on the BNET site: http://www.bnetau.com.au/blog/aussierules/10-ways-to-improve-your-on-site-search-btalk/8381.

For more tips on how to improve your site search and navigation, download our e-books:

Different prices in different countries: Adidas All Black jersey mess up

Posted by Shaun RyanAugust 11, 2011eCommerce2 comments

The rugby world cup is coming to New Zealand next month and the biggest news story recently has been about the price of the All Black jersey. The jersey retails for NZ$220 in New Zealand (about $182 US dollars), but can be bought from our customer, World Rugby Shop for just US$89.00. The New Zealand public has been outraged and there has been a backlash against Adidas who have failed to justify why there is such a huge difference in price. I’m sure our customer has benefited greatly from the publicity.

I suspect that Adidas’s market research indicated that Kiwis would be willing to pay more than the rest of the world for their team’s jersey. However somehow Adidas neglected to take into account the Internet. At best this was naive. And they now have a lot of work to do to rebuild the damage to their brand, although they’ll probably sell more jerseys as a result of the publicity, even though it’s negative.

The broader question is what should Adidas have done and how should manufacturers set prices around the world? Should there be a global recommended retail price? If I look at the price of an iPad in NZ it is about 30% higher than in the US. I think most of that difference is due to the US dollar dropping significantly in value since the prices were set. In my mind there shouldn’t be a significant difference in price. You have to assume that the consumers know how to use the internet and will find out and the market research should take that into account.

If Adidas had set the price a little higher in the US and significantly lower in NZ then they would have sold less jerseys in the US and more in NZ, but they probably would have made more money overall and they wouldn’t have damaged their brand. However, they wouldn’t have got this publicity, so there may not have been as much interest in the jersey. Obviously international pricing is difficult to get right.

What do you think? In the meantime I’m going to go buy one of those jerseys from our customer.

Download our ‘Big Book of Navigation Tips’ for Design and Usability Tips

Posted by Terry CostaAugust 9, 2011eCommerce, Navigation Tips

Our latest e-book – “The Big Book of Navigation Tips” – is now available for download from our website. We crafted the tips, taken from our many years of experience in guiding clients in search and navigation best practices, to help others in the industry understand how simple tweaks in navigation can significantly improve site usability. Similar to the “Big Book of Site Search Tips” we offered last year (and which is still available on our site), we wanted to shed light on the challenges site owners face in presenting content and information in a visually appealing way, while also guiding visitors to the items they’re most interested in. As we discuss in the book, good navigation is an art rather than a science – and while there are no black and white answers to how to approach particular elements, there are guidelines you can follow to understand what might work best on your site. Ultimately, as we discuss in the book, whatever approach you take, it’s important to do some testing to see if you’re really getting most value or if something else might work better.

Over the next several weeks we’ll post a couple tips from the book here on our blog, so be sure to check back frequently. To get us started, below are the first tips from the “Site Navigation Design” category. If you’re interested in seeing all the tips at once, just go to our download page.

Make site search and site navigation consistent

Visitors should only have to learn one interface, so keep the feel of the site search and site navigation similar to ensure a seamless browsing experience across your site. Too many retailers use different practices for site search and site navigation pages, resulting in different designs visitors have to learn to find the information they’re looking for.

Provide different ways of ranking products on navigation pages

You should offer your visitors a way to easily reorder the products they see on a navigation page. Even though they might choose to rank by least expensive, best rated, or most recent, you should propose a default display that is most advantageous to your business – for example, the most used default options are “Most Relevant” or “Most Popular.” You should then allow visitors to reorder by options they prefer, such as best sellers, most expensive, most clicked on, newest, or highest rated. These options should be featured at the top of the navigation page. Once visitors pick a new order, you should remember their preference, to avoid frustrating them, and cause potential site abandonment.

3. Allow visitors to navigate throughout your site from

any page.

This may sound obvious, but visitors may enter your site

in different ways: from an Internet search engine, directly

from your homepage, from special offers or ads on another

website or from a link on a blog. It’s important to show

visitors where they have landed on your site, and allow

them to navigate to other pages without having to start on

your homepage, no matter which page they land on. Once

they’re on your site, provide a navigation bar and include

it on all the pages so visitors can easily browse from page

to page.

Allow visitors to navigate throughout your site from any page.

This may sound obvious, but visitors may enter your site in different ways: from an Internet search engine, directly from your homepage, from special offers or ads on another website or from a link on a blog. It’s important to show visitors where they have landed on your site, and allow them to navigate to other pages without having to start on your homepage, no matter which page they land on. Once they’re on your site, provide a navigation bar and include it on all the pages so visitors can easily browse from page to page.

Top 10 2011 MCM Awards Puts Spotlight on Great Site Search & Navigation

Posted by Terry CostaAugust 4, 2011eCommerce, Navigation, Site Search

The 2011 Multichannel Merchant (MCM) Awards are out, and we now know which are the top 10 retail sites with the best search and navigation. It’s great to see such an influential industry publication drawing attention to sites with outstanding usability features where good search and navigation have a clear influence on higher click-throughs and conversions, lower site abandonment, and improvement in brand loyalty.

We were also excited to see that 3 of our own clients were called out on the list – including Folica, The Pond Guy and Century Novelty. These 3 sites were recognized for the ease with which people can find products and other content on the site and the overall look and feel. You can find more specific attributes that were highlighted in the article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/photo-gallery/2011-mcmawards-website-top-search-navigation/index4.html.

Congratulations to all the winners!

10 years in business

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 31, 2011Site Search2 comments

SLI cake
Today marks the 10th anniversary since SLI Systems was incorporated. So we’re celebrating. We’re having parties, giving gifts to our staff and I though I would take a little time to reflect on the past decade.

In the beginning

SLI started from the ashes of NBCi. We had sold our search company, GloblaBrain to NBCi in 2000, only to find that it was closing down in about April of 2001. We saw then that there was an opportunity to use the GlobalBrain technology to improve site search, which at the time was either non existent, or extremely poor. So we formed SLI Systems, bought our technology back from NBC and started selling our software as a service site search, which we called Learning Search.

Fast forward
When you look back it is amazing how quickly a decade seems to have passed. We now have over 300 customers, and almost 500 sites that we run the search and/or navigation for. Our product suite has broadened and we have over 70 staff in 4 countries. We are growing as fast now as we ever have, with our last quarter being our best ever.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. We started in the depths of the dot com crash. September 11 happened soon after the company formed. They were tough conditions under which to run a company. It meant we really appreciated any customers we were able to acquire and we did anything we could to keep them satisfied so we could keep them as a customer. This has helped form our culture of a fanatical focus on customer satisfaction which is now one of our core differentiators. I am constantly hearing from our customers that we are one of the best vendors they deal with.

In more recent times we have come through the global financial crisis strongly and, in the last nine months, survived the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. We are still unable to access our office in the middle of the city and the fate of our building is unknown. But we are working productively from temporary offices.

The knowledge that we have weathered these storms means that we are we are confident that we can survive anything that the future will throw at us.

Our secrets to success

This sounds like business 101 – but our focus on our customers has been key. Ensuring that they get great service and value for money is core to what we do.
Our willingness to change. We are constantly seeking to improve our product and the way we do everything in our business. It’s part of our name and part of our DNA.
Our staff. We employ smart people. We stimulate them and ensure that they enjoy being part of the company. As a result we have a great team that is dedicated to our customers.

I’m very proud of what our team has achieved. We have huge opportunities ahead of us and I’m looking forward to the next 10 years.

SLI 10 UK SLI 10 NZ

The story of the outage that wasn't

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 14, 2011Site Search3 comments

Earlier this week we had a problem at one of our data centers. The way it was successfully handled makes for an interesting story that I’d like to share.

The outage
We use multiple data centers in different locations. One of them lost power at two of their core switches which meant our servers in that data center were not connected to the internet for about an hour and 40 minutes. Now this isn’t supposed to happen. The providers we use have all sorts of processes in place to try to ensure that they are online all the time. However from our experience over the past 10 years of doing this, we see that every now and then a series of unforeseen events happens and they do go offline. To deal with this unlikely eventuality we have designed our hosting architecture to provide uninterrupted service even when these outages occur.

What would have happened in the past?
Depending on when in our 10 year history this happened, we could have had the following outcomes:

Loss of service for all of our customers during all the outage
Loss of service for some of our customers during the outage
Loss of service for a portion of our customers’ visitors for a part of the outage

In any case, it would have been all hands to the deck while we tried to find a solution and there would have been a lot of communication with our customers letting them know that there was a problem and what we were doing to fix it, and then afterwards, what we had done to reduce the possibility of it happening again. In short there would have been a lot of stress all around.

So what was the impact?

We have over 100 sites whose search and navigation are partially hosted in the data center segment that had the outage.

For the first 50 seconds a third of the visitors searching on those sites experienced a single 30 second delay while their browser timed out and then tried our next data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
For the next 100 seconds a third of the visitors to those sites experienced a single subsecond delay while their browser got a connection refused response and tried another data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
After that the data center was automatically removed from the DNS and no further requests will have been sent to it
Once our servers came back on line the data center was added back into the DNS and operations continued as normal

The data center has informed us that they have made some changes to their processes and hardware so this type of fault won’t happen again. So they are a little stronger now than they were before. However I’m sure they will still suffer another outage at some stage.

In summary, during a 150 second period, a third of the visitors searching on the effected sites will have experienced a single delay, but after that delay they will have been able to use the services as normal. We didn’t hear anything from any of our customers and it was all handled without any stress. This is a significant improvement over what we’ve done in the past.

I wanted to highlight this story because it shows one of the unseen benefits of our service. Our less experienced and cheaper competitors don’t offer this sort of redundancy. Most website operators that are hosting their own search are also unable to provide this level of redundancy. Our customers expect our services to be running all of the time. The reason we are able to provide the level of service that we do is a combination of our dedication to continually improve the way we do things, combined with the knowledge gained through years of experience.

The story of the outage that wasn’t

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 14, 2011Site Search3 comments

Earlier this week we had a problem at one of our data centers. The way it was successfully handled makes for an interesting story that I’d like to share.

The outage
We use multiple data centers in different locations. One of them lost power at two of their core switches which meant our servers in that data center were not connected to the internet for about an hour and 40 minutes. Now this isn’t supposed to happen. The providers we use have all sorts of processes in place to try to ensure that they are online all the time. However from our experience over the past 10 years of doing this, we see that every now and then a series of unforeseen events happens and they do go offline. To deal with this unlikely eventuality we have designed our hosting architecture to provide uninterrupted service even when these outages occur.

What would have happened in the past?
Depending on when in our 10 year history this happened, we could have had the following outcomes:

Loss of service for all of our customers during all the outage
Loss of service for some of our customers during the outage
Loss of service for a portion of our customers’ visitors for a part of the outage

In any case, it would have been all hands to the deck while we tried to find a solution and there would have been a lot of communication with our customers letting them know that there was a problem and what we were doing to fix it, and then afterwards, what we had done to reduce the possibility of it happening again. In short there would have been a lot of stress all around.

So what was the impact?

We have over 100 sites whose search and navigation are partially hosted in the data center segment that had the outage.

For the first 50 seconds a third of the visitors searching on those sites experienced a single 30 second delay while their browser timed out and then tried our next data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
For the next 100 seconds a third of the visitors to those sites experienced a single subsecond delay while their browser got a connection refused response and tried another data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
After that the data center was automatically removed from the DNS and no further requests will have been sent to it
Once our servers came back on line the data center was added back into the DNS and operations continued as normal

The data center has informed us that they have made some changes to their processes and hardware so this type of fault won’t happen again. So they are a little stronger now than they were before. However I’m sure they will still suffer another outage at some stage.

In summary, during a 150 second period, a third of the visitors searching on the effected sites will have experienced a single delay, but after that delay they will have been able to use the services as normal. We didn’t hear anything from any of our customers and it was all handled without any stress. This is a significant improvement over what we’ve done in the past.

I wanted to highlight this story because it shows one of the unseen benefits of our service. Our less experienced and cheaper competitors don’t offer this sort of redundancy. Most website operators that are hosting their own search are also unable to provide this level of redundancy. Our customers expect our services to be running all of the time. The reason we are able to provide the level of service that we do is a combination of our dedication to continually improve the way we do things, combined with the knowledge gained through years of experience.

Use Site Search Data to Capture a Nice Conversion Lift from Search Engine Traffic

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 7, 2011Newsletter, SEO, Site Search2 comments

This month, we have a tip on boosting conversions from people who land on your product pages from searches via Google and other Internet search engines. The tip is to show a tailored product banner to these visitors.

You have little control over how Internet search engines will rank your product pages so by showing (on the product page they land on from Google, Yahoo or Bing) your own list of products based on the search term used on Google, Yahoo or Bing you can make sure visitors find what they are actually looking for.

To do this we create a product banner using site search results for the search term they used on the Internet search engine (extracted from the referral URL).

A product that is ranking well in Internet search engines may have gone out of stock, out of fashion, or may simply not be your best seller. This technique allows you to put popular, in-stock items in front of the user that are relevant to what they’re looking for.

Our customer Motorcycle Superstore, an online retailer of motorcycle gear and accessories, is using this technique on its product pages. In the example below, the user searched on Google for “scorpion exo,” and clicked on the “Scorpion EXO-1000 Helmet” from Motorcycle Superstore.

When the user clicked, the relevant product page was shown and a banner dynamically added showing the site search results for Scorpion EXO helmets. Thus the user sees a range of products that may interest them, as well as the actual product that they clicked on.

Soon after creating these dynamic banners with SLI’s assistance and search data, Motorcycle Superstore experienced higher sales revenue: the retailer is seeing an average conversion lift of 2–5% for the items featured in the banner. In addition, the site search results banners are consistently in the top four most-clicked merchandising methods on the site.

We love seeing this type of innovation from our customers. We worked closely with Motorcycle Superstore to optimize these pages and were able to launch this feature in just a week. If you’d like to try this on your product pages, please contact your customer success manager. We would love to help you.

Bring Social to Search, and Search to Social

Posted by edkJune 28, 2011eCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips1 comment

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.