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2009

Posted by Shaun RyanJanuary 12, 2009Search Conferences

Welcome to my first blog post for 2009. I’ve had a few weeks off relaxing in a fantastic New Zealand summer and only checking my email when I feel that buzz in my pocket. I’m refreshed and ready to go. 2009 is certainly going to be an interesting year. I’m starting off with a trip to Miami next week attending the Internet Retailer Web Design conference where I hope to meet a bunch of current and future customers and partners and learn a thing or two about web design. If you’re going to be there then come along and meet us at our booth or drop me an email: shaun.ryan at sli-systems.com.

I often hear from our customers and partners that SLI is one of the most responsive vendors they have ever worked with. One of my goals for this year is to ensure that we continue to provide a remarkable level of service as we grow. As always, we are looking to add new features to our service that will help our customers’ businesses.

Last year we updated our merchandising console, introduced Auto Complete, improved the speed of our search, and upgraded our infrastructure to provide improved redundancy. All of these were provided at no additional cost to our customers. We also continued to improve our best practices as we gained experience running the search on over 350 sites. We have several more improvements in the works – that you will see rolled out in 2009. I look forward to telling you more as we release these and I wish you all a prosperous 2009.

See us at Internet Retailer Web Design and Vote for SLI in Shop.org’s Innovation Contest

Posted by geoffbJanuary 11, 2009eCommerce, Search Conferences

Happy New Year to everyone! 2009 is barely underway and there are already many exciting things happening…

Internet Retailer Web Design Conference
While the U.S. makes history with the inauguration of president Obama, we’ll be busy – along with many other ecommerce technology companies – showing our wares at the Internet Retailer Web Design conference Jan. 19-22 in Miami.

Stop by our booth (#43), or join us at the SLI-sponsored cocktail receptions on Monday and Tuesday nights. (The theme of Tuesday night’s reception will be Chinese New Year and a celebration of the “Year of the Search B-Ox.” Come have a drink on us!)

Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum
We’re also looking forward to Shop.org’s Strategy & Innovation Forum Feb. 2-4 in Orlando.

We’re participating in the Innovation contest, the winners of which will be announced on Feb. 3 at the show. If you have a few minutes, go to the web site and take a look at the entries – and if you think SLI’s idea shows true innovation, feel free to cast a vote our way. (Note: this contest is open to retailers’ votes only.) You may vote for up to 5 entries. The deadline is 11:59 EST on Friday, Jan. 16.

If you’re planning to attend either event, let us know – we’d love to see you!

Mini Poll – Search vs Navigate

Posted by geoffbDecember 30, 2008Site Search

We’re currently running a mini poll on LinkedIn. When on a site, do you search or navigate more often? Which do you do first? Take the poll and see the results here www.tinyurl.com/8wyuvq.

The State of Comparison Shopping Engines

Posted by geoffbDecember 28, 2008eCommerce

Our friends over at Merchant Advantage posted an interesting summary of the history and the current state of the various Comparison Shopping Engines.

Focus focus focus?

Posted by Shaun RyanDecember 16, 2008Site Search, Web Search2 comments

I was reading Jacob Neilsen’s Alertbox article on Interaction Elasticity today. In the newsletter he mentions that shorter navigation paths are usually better. “4 easy clicks are more usable then 5 easy clicks, because the extra click is more work for users”. This sounds obvious and it got me thinking about how it relates to site search (I pretty much do that for everything I read).

One of the nice things about search is it is a very efficient way of navigating on a site. You click on the search box, you type in your search term and press enter (or click on the search button). Then if the search is relevant the page you are looking for will be above the fold and you can click on it. If the results are not relevant you may need to click on a facet, a sort option, a related search, scroll down, go to the next page of results – or do another search. This is why relevancy is the single most important feature in a search. If the results are relevant it reduces the amount of work you need to do.

The auto complete functionality that we released a few months ago shortens this path further by reducing the number of keystrokes you need to make – by 8 on average. I see Google is testing enhancements to Google Suggest to not only show search terms but also results and ads as you type. Showing search results as you are typing reduces the path even more – you don’t need to see the search results page. For this reason I think this type of functionality will become more widespread – both in web search and for site search.

Another idea that we are starting to encourage our customers to investigate is to put the focus on their search box on most of the pages on their site – essentially any page that doesn’t have a more important form on it. This again reduces the navigational path – you don’t have to do that first click on the search box before you start typing. You also don’t have to do the work of finding the search box (which on some sites can be surprisingly difficult) – you just start typing after the page is loaded.

You don’t see many sites that put the focus on the search box. Google does it on their homepage. They’ve done a lot of usability testing – so it must be a good idea. Amazon doesn’t do it. They’ve done a lot of usability testing – so it can’t be a good idea. Mmmm. Personally, I really like it. I think Amazon should do it – let’s see if it catches on elsewhere.

Interview with Alan Lim from Purely Gadgets

Posted by Shaun RyanDecember 8, 2008eCommerce, Podcast

Yesterday we released an interview with Alan Lim from Purely Gadgets on the ecommerce podcast. Alan is one of our UK based customers and is our first non US guest on this podcast. Alan is from Singapore, has an office in London and one in Hong Kong (from where he sources a lot of their product directly from the manufacturers). Purely Gadgets sell through out the UK and Europe and are planning to expand further – this podcast has quite an international flavor to it.

Although Alan has many plans for expanding the business he talks about some of the tactics he’s had to employ to ensure his business thrives during the recession.

Alan uses and recommends Web loyalty and Live Chat.

Cyber Monday bigger than Black Friday online.

Posted by Shaun RyanDecember 2, 2008eCommerce, Site Search

I was just looking at the data from our search logs and noticed that we served 20% more queries on behalf of our customers on Cyber Monday than we did on Black Friday. To be clear these are search and navigation queries – primarily on ecommerce sites. Black Friday is the biggest retail day for bricks and mortar stores. This data indicates Cyber Monday is significantly bigger for online stores.

Interview with Aaron Magness from Zappos

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 24, 2008eCommerce, Site Search

We have just released this interview on the ecommerce podcast with Aaron Magness, the Business Development Manager from Zappos.

Aaron talks about the approach Zappos takes to customer service and it particularly resonated with me. One of the ways that Zappos ensures that every employee is focused on customer service is by insisting that everyone spends two weeks in the call center on the phones with customers as part of their training. This is a fantastic investment – making sure that everyone at Zappos understands their customers – how they interact with the company, what they like and what they don’t.

Aaron talks about the huge growth that Zappos have had. This has mainly happened by word of mouth, fuelled by their outstanding customer service. He mentioned that one of the drivers for expanding their product range beyond shoes was that they noticed people searching for other product categories in their site search. This is another very good reason for paying close attention to what people are searching for on your site. Not only can you use it to improve the conversion rate of people who are searching and for keyword research for search marketing, but it also gives you continuous feedback about other products customers expect to find on your site.

There is plenty of other useful information in the podcast. Particularly interesting is the way Zappos have embraced Twitter – both to communicate within the company but also with their customers.

Improved redundancy in time for the holidays

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 20, 2008Site Search

Over the past few months we have been upgrading our infrastructure to provide improved redundancy to our customers. Specifically we’ve enhanced our geographic redundancy so there is now no single point of failure.

We’ve always had redundancy – so that if a server fails then there will be no interruption to the service of our clients. This is absolutely necessary because servers can fail – particularly disks. However we used to be vulnerable to a whole data center going off line. The data centers we use go to a lot of effort to ensure that they don’t go off line – they have multiple internet connections, a lot of redundant power systems, and lots of security. However even if they guarantee 100% up time – it doesn’t mean that you always get 100%. And despite all of these efforts we have had our data centers go off line for short periods. When this happened our customers experienced a temporary loss of service (while we execute our disaster recovery plan) and even a small loss of service is unacceptable to us so we have been looking for a solution. This upgrade is a major part of the solution.

The technique we use to achieve the geographic redundancy is the same as that used by many of the big players, like Google and Microsoft- but as far as we can tell not by our competitors – like Mercado (what’s left of them now belongs to Omniture), Atomz (now run by Omniture), ThanxMedia, or Celebros. Now if one of our data centers goes off line then the others will take the load and we will continue providing service to our customers.

This change is transparent to our customers and costs them nothing extra. It is part of our effort to continuously improve our service. Web site owners need to know that their search and navigation is going to be running continuously. Last week Evan Schuman predicted that e-commerce site crashes will soar this holiday season. This upgrade will help ensure that our customers’ sites will function continuously.

NRF / Shopzilla Ecommerce Survey

Posted by geoffbNovember 11, 2008Site Search

In case you missed it, last week the National Retail Federation (NRF) released the results of an ecommerce survey conducted by Shopzilla® for Shop.org, which show that a majority (56%) of online retailers expect holiday sales to increase at least 15% this year over last. While the number of retailers expecting that level of sales growth is smaller than last year (77%), the announcement highlights ways retailers are trying to drive more sales, like offering free shipping and other promotions.

The survey also revealed that retailers are improving areas of their ecommerce sites that can ensure a positive customer experience, like site search, in order to capture their share of online purchases:

“In addition to free shipping promotions, many retailers have rolled out new website features to improve the customer experience. Features like improved site search, which 42.9 percent of retailers added or improved since last holiday season, will help customers navigate sites more easily. Other features like product video (42.6%) and customer reviews (32.7%) can give shoppers more information to make buying decisions…”

These findings are very much in line with our own ecommerce survey, which we released last month. Our survey showed that a great majority of retailers viewed site search as critical in strengthening brand visibility and improving the customer experience – in fact, 91% of the retail companies we surveyed cited site search as critical, very important or important to their online businesses, while 54% said that adding new site search capabilities resulted in an increase in sales; 44% experienced greater conversion rates and 40% cited better customer satisfaction.

We’ve said it before, but now is absolutely the right time to make necessary improvements to your site search and make sure you don’t miss out on the mass numbers of people who will be spending money online this year. It will not only help you get through the holidays but will continue to have a positive impact on your business going forward – and why not take advantage of the busiest shopping time of the year to give your customers the best online experience possible?

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