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FREE Webinar: Search and They Shall Find – The Anatomy of a Great Ecommerce Site Search

Posted by geoffbJuly 22, 2009Webinar

SLI Systems will be hosting a webinar in August on the anatomy of a great ecommerce site search and improving the user experience.

The 30-minute webinar will be held on Thursday August 13, 2009 at 1pm PDT.

Ed Hoffman, VP of Worldwide Field Operations will:

Discuss recent trends in site search
Explain how implementing these features can improve the user experience and in return increase sales and conversions
Conduct site search critiques – to be considered, indicate your interest on the registration page
Have a short Question & Answer session

Scents make sense and cents (and dollars)

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 15, 2009Site Search

I apologise for the title of the post – it’s fairly scentsless. Earlier this week I was listening to a Jared Spool webinar on site search: Search, Scent and the Happiness of Pursuit. In this webinar Jared discusses why people search, what a good search looks like and how you can improve your search.

Jared describes search, rather provocatively (from a site search vendors perspective) as an error condition. What he means is that people normally resort to search when they can’t find either what they want , or a “scent” that looks like it will lead them to what they want. Normally the scent is in the form of a “trigger word” – a word that triggers the user into clicking on the link associated with the word.

The trigger words are found by the users scanning the page and the most effective trigger words match the language of the users. Jared described a great way of discovering trigger words – examine your site search logs – that is look at what your users are searching for on your site. This resonates with me.

We encourage our customers to examine the popular searches reports and use these to influence the language used in their navigation. We even provide these popular searches reports broken down by category – which is particularly useful for large sites. We use these search terms in a variety of creative ways – they populate the auto complete list, the are used to generate related searches which are shown on the search results page, navigation pages and on product pages. We also use them to generate a page showing search terms. All of these help to provide a trigger word rich environment as you browse through our customers’ sites.

When talking about search results Jared said the most important aspect is relevance. I agree. He described four different types of relevance:

Match relevant – the actual content users are looking for – this should be at the top (SLI’s learning algorithms are very good at bringing these results at the top)
Relevant – These results will eventually lead the users to the content they are looking for.
Irrelevant
And no results (see my previous post on no results).

If you can produce relevant results then your site search will be helping your users achieve whatever tasks they are trying to complete on your website, eg buy something if you are an ecommerce site. This is the core value of site search.

One final point of interest I would like to highlight from the presentation was the assertion Jared made that the search vendor you use isn’t important – the implementation is. Surprisingly, I agree with this as well. You can build a good search with free software, like the open source Lucene and you can build a terrible search with expensive software (like Endeca) if you’re not indexing the right content, presenting the search results optimally or you mis-configure the search any one of hundreds of ways. Implementation is crucial. It pays to have someone experienced (like SLI) to implement your search because there are so many subtleties in setting up a good search, each business is unique and the best practises are continually being refined. Search is not a commodity – there is a lot of innovation happening in search and we’re proud to be contributing to that.

So if you’re interested in search then I recommend you take a look at this webinar – it’s not free – but it is informative.

Netbook Winners

Posted by geoffbJuly 14, 2009Conferences

It delights me to say that I’m convinced after IRCE that E-retailing remains a bright spot in this dark economy and it was fantastic to see people searching for new ways to improve the performance of their websites.We met a lot of enthusiastic online retailers at the show and to those who dropped by our booth I’d like to say thanks for taking the time out to talk to us.

If you left your business card behind then you probably went in the drawing to win our prize – an Acer Netbook! Angela Walker from Christian Cinema won the Netbook so I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate her for winning and I hope the netbook is getting plenty of use.

We have also been exhibiting at shows in the UK and the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelming with Internet World and Ecommerce Expo North both exceeding expected attendee numbers. We also gave a Netbook away at Internet World so we’d like to take a moment to recognize Tim Broughton from Confetti. Thanks Tim!

We look forward to seeing everyone at future events all over the world and we’ll do our best to keep you excited by providing new and innovative ways to improve your website.

Attend to No Results Pages and Improve Your Customers’ On-site Experience

Posted by Shaun RyanJuly 2, 2009Newsletter, No Results, Site Search1 comment

About 10% of all searches on your site have no results. The “No results” page is an important part of your site and you can benefit from giving it some attention. Your site search logs should show you what search terms visitors use on your site, and what terms generate no (or poor) results. If you already know the answer to this question but you haven’t yet addressed No Results pages, here are some simple ways you can deal with them and give your customers a better site experience:

Use the Language of Your Customers. Often No Results pages are caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. A simple remedy is to incorporate those terms on your site or add synonyms via your site search.
Expand your Product Lines. Sometimes No Results pages come up simply because you don’t carry the item(s) your visitors seek. So you can use this data to help determine what products to add to your offerings, which can only help you increase sales. Ian MacDonald from SLI customer Century Novelty talks about doing this in this EcommercePodcast interview.
Incorporate an Auto Complete Feature. Similar to Google’s Auto Suggest, which helps people formulate their query as they type, an Auto Complete feature on your site search will make searching your site easier. And the suggested phrases should always have results – so this helps improve your customers’ experience.

Show Results with Some of the Words. As explained in his recent blog post “Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages,” Greg Nedelman suggests that rather than state that no results contain all of the words in the user’s query, show results that contain some of the words. In this example from Smith & Hawken’s site, you can see how we handle this for a search on “sofa bed” (which would normally produce no results).

Show Spelling Suggestions. Using the Did you mean? To offer spelling corrections for unknown phrases. Spelling suggestions should be drawn from the words on your site so that corrections can be made to site specific search terms including brand names.
Show Popular Searches. I’m a fan of this because it can help your customers search by knowing what others are searching for when they get no results.

Show Popular Products. Doing this may cause some confusion, as 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. But, if presented well it can be better than showing no products for the query.

Show Keyword-specific Banners. If there’s 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.”

Do you have other suggestions for handling No Results pages? Or, do you have an anecdote to share about how addressing No Results pages helped you business? If so, we’d love to hear about them.

Interview with Bliss Dake from Mighty Leaf Tea

Posted by Shaun RyanJune 29, 2009Podcast

Today we released an interview with Bliss Dake from Mighty Leaf Tea. Mighty Leaf Tea sell high end tea pouches and loose tea and they seem to be at the forefront of a growing trend.

Bliss described how Mighty Leaf Tea get a lot of their traffic in a unique way. A lot of people have their first experience with their tea in a restaurant. It comes with a tag that has their URL and phone number on it and a lot of people save the tag and then check out their site later.

Bliss also discusses the technology they’re using and their social media presence (you can follow them on @MightyLeaf).

For some reason I’ve found myself drinking more tea since my chat with Bliss. Time for a cuppa…

Interview with Josh Hansen from HansenSurf

Posted by Shaun RyanJune 18, 2009Podcast

This week we released an interview with Josh Hansen from HansenSurf on the ecommerce podcast. Josh is the youngest son of the founder Don Hansen. HansenSurf started as a surfboard manufacturer before moving into retail in 1971. I enjoyed listening to the story of this family run store and how ecommerce is playing a larger and larger role in their success. I hope you do too.

Add Some Color to Your Web Site – and the Site Search

Posted by Shaun RyanJune 8, 2009Color, Newsletter, Site Search2 comments

Over time companies have come to recognize that populating a web site with lots of images significantly improves the user experience. This is especially true for e-commerce sites, where people shopping online always like to see a picture of what they’re going to buy. For many sites it’s even more compelling when shoppers can view items in all the different color options available. Well, guess what? Adding the ability to refine results by color to your site search can also have a positive impact.

Let’s look at our customer Jelly Belly. If you search their site for a particular flavor or mix of flavors of jelly beans, you will see an option to refine by one or more colors – so you see only results in the particular color(s) you like (as shown below).

Jason Marrone, ecommerce marketing manager for Jelly Belly, mentioned in the recent Ecommerce Podcast interview that they have many visitors who are choosing candy to match a color theme for functions like bridal or baby showers, and graduation, birthday and other types of parties. As such, they appreciate being able to refine the results by particular colors – such as seeing jelly beans in the school colors of the recent high school graduate.

Google recently added a color refinement option to its image search, allowing you to search for particular images (e.g. “rose bush”) in a particular color, like pink. (When Google adds a new feature, it’s generally a good idea others can borrow – although you should still test and measure with your visitors to make sure.)

Refining search results by color can get a little tricky if you have products that come in several colors – especially if you don’t have a photo for every color of every product. Of course one solution is to take an image of every product in every color available and show the appropriate product when a color refinement is applied. This can be very expensive, time consuming and often just not practical. A common solution is to take one photo of each product and show swatches of the color or material that the product can come in.

As you can see in the example below, Dover Saddlery, another SLI customer, approaches this in a useful way, by showing available colors for each item below each site search result. When you mouse over a color a larger image of the color pops up along with its name. If you click on the result, you’re then able to see the item in the different colors available.

We’re starting to do more work with customers in this area and would be happy to give you some guidance on how best to incorporate color refinements into your site search. It could be another way to increase conversions and improve the user experience on your site. If you would like more information, feel free to contact us, or take a look at our new video with some quick tips on adding color refinements to site search.

Interview with Tim Ash from Site Tuners

Posted by Shaun RyanJune 3, 2009eCommerce, Podcast

We have just released an interview I did with Tim Ash from Site Tuners. I met Tim by chance at a Search Engine Strategies show a few years ago. We had a lot in common – both running companies that helped ecommerce sites improve their conversions – and we had both done PhDs in artificial intelligence focusing on neural networks. Tim has since written a book called Landing Page Optimization – that is the topic of this podcast and I recommend you read this.

Tim talks about how web sites are designed by people inside the company but the majority of their visitors are from outside. These different perspectives usually mean the design of the website is far from optimal. Tim is a big fan of testing alternative designs with your visitors and measuring what works best for them. He compares the visitors to lab mice and your job is to make it easier for them to find the cheese.

During this podcast you will hear plenty of useful tips from Tim’s experience. There’s also a special offer to the podcast listeners giving a discount for an Express Review. Enjoy!

Interview with Time Ash, President of Site Tuners

Site Search and Improving Conversions – Webmaster Radio

Posted by geoffbMay 29, 2009Podcast

Last week Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems was interviewed for Landing Page Optimization on Webmaster Radio by Tim Ash, CEO of Site Tuners.

Tim and Shaun discuss various ways to improve your site conversion rates.

Listen to the interview with Shaun Ryan & Tim Ash.

FitBase

Posted by geoffbMay 27, 2009eCommerce

At SLI we help visitors to an ecommerce site find the products they want, but how can you, as an ecommerce manager, find the best solutions for your eCommerce business? What strategies work in your vertical? What new features are going to add to your bottom line vs. just adding to your expenses? Who has the solutions that are the right fit for your business? Traditionally you had to do your own research into the solutions available that fit your needs, but now there is a new way – FitBase from FitForCommerce.

Our friends at FitForCommerce, the eCommerce consultancy, saw a need in the industry for a comprehensive, well-organized, knowledge base. A place where you could find 1000s of features, best practices, pitfalls, expert opinions, whitepapers – in short, everything you need to educate yourself, find the right resources, make the best-fit decisions.They put together a team of experts, did a tremendous amount of research and launched FitBase.

For the second year FitForCommerce have been asked by Internet Retailer to run the Navigation Desk at the Internet Retailer Conference. Seek them out and they will help you find what you’re looking for.

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