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ThanxMedia – a word of warning

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 9, 2008Site Search2 comments

I wanted to send out a note of caution for those of you who may be talking to someone from one of our competitors, Thanx Media. Take what you hear from them with a grain of salt. We are getting mounting evidence that they are not being truthful to our customers and prospects.

By way of background, Thanx Media started selling Endeca on demand in April this year. Endeca’s search and navigation software is a good fit if you want to own the software, you have a capable IT team that can install and maintain it, you are prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and you are not in a hurry (Rugs Direct said it took months to install Endeca). Endeca can’t be that easy to set up, even for insiders – Endeca’s chief scientist and co-founder recently admitted that he wasn’t “quite ready to figure out how to install and maintain an Endeca instance” for his blog.

A lot of our customers are very faithful. They forward emails and voice mails from our competitors and we’ve even sat in on some of their sales pitches that our customers couldn’t be bothered listening to. This is where we have seen the Thanx Media reps being untruthful:

They exaggerate about their customer numbers. You can see in this job posting they imply they have 400 customers, whereas in this press release they claimed 28 new customers 6 months after they started selling their service. I’m guessing ThanxMedia have closer to 28 customers – it’s Endeca who have the 400 odd.
They overstate the wins they have had against us. In April (just after they launched) they were claiming in emails to our customers that they had won many SLI customers when I doubt they had any customers at all.
They are uninformed about our capabilities. A new customer expressed surprise that we were able to implement faceted search in the way that we did – the Thanx Media rep had told him that we wouldn’t be able to.

I know sales people can sometimes be economical with the truth to get a sale. But when it comes to this, the Thanx media reps seem to be having an economic crisis :-). I’m guessing that this is a reflection of the pressure they are being subject to. It smells a little of desperation to me. Endeca may be one of the enterprise search companies that Stephen Arnold suggested was in trouble – they did have to raise more capital earlier this year.

Endeca is an enterprise software company. Thanx Media is trying to fit the square peg of enterprise software into the round hole of Software as a Service. Mercado tried this and it didn’t work.

I welcome competition – they help keep us on our toes and ensure that we strive to provide the best service. My own ethics dictate that we should be engaged in honest competition and our business model encourages this. If we can’t deliver what we promise then our customers will see this in our free trial, before they have paid anything. This approach is working well for SLI. If ThanxMedia is talking to you about SLI, all I ask is that you talk to us to hear a different perspective.

Interview with Brian Walker from Forrester Research

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 6, 2008eCommerce

We’ve just posted the next episode of the ecommerce podcast: an interview with Brian walker from Forrester Research. Brian describes the services that Forrester supplies to the online retailers and some of the trends that he is seeing. Online retail is still growing and in this economic situation is one of the few bright lights in retail. It is growing and Forrester are forecasting that it will grow at 12% this year over the 2008 holidays.

Brian also talks about the popularity of reviews and how they can act as a retention mechanisms. One if the major issues that retailers have when they implement reviews is the moderation of the reviews.

Brian recommends focusing on usability as one of the most cost effective things that retailers can do. It’s not too late to make changes that will have an impact for these holidays.

SLI is in a strong position

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 5, 2008eCommerce, Enterprise Search, Site Search1 comment

Well known venture capital firm Sequoia Capital made a now famous presentation to their portfolio companies titled “RIP: The Good Times”, warning these companies about the seriousness of the economic crisis and the need for them to become cash flow positive before they need more capital.

This has been widely circulated and cited and now potential customers of venture backed companies are being warned to ask about their financial stability. This has prompted me to write this blog post assuring our existing and potential customers and partners that SLI is in a fantastic position at the moment.

We are cash flow positive and don’t need any more capital to survive or to grow further. SLI has a pure software as a service (SaaS) business model. This is good for our customers because it means that they don’t have to pay a huge sum up front and we do almost all the work. It is also great for us because it means we get recurring revenue across all of our customers (which now number in the hundreds). Being cash flow positive, this revenue gives us a very solid base from which to operate the company.

Interestingly the SaaS model means that we have a very strong incentive to focus on customer satisfaction. In order to keep our solid base of recurring revenue we need to keep our existing customers happy. This is why we have an internal policy ensuring requests from exiting customers should always take precedence over those from prospective customers. This is also one of the motivations behind our aim to continuously improve our service. In a survey we did earlier this year 100% of the customers we surveyed said they would recommend us to other website owners looking for a search.

Even in these difficult financial times we are growing strongly. Last quarter was the best quarter we’ve ever had in terms of new customers and the first month of this quarter was the best month we’ve had in over a year. We expect that most of our customers’ business will continue to grow and we are still hiring staff and investing in improving our service. Our situation has been helped by the demise of one of our competitors, Mercado and by the extremely poor attention to customer service of some of our other competitors. There is speculation that other search companies are struggling.

SLI Systems has been around since 2001. We have built the company on very little capital (we received more revenue from our customers last quarter than we have received from our investors in total). If you are considering using our services then you can be assured that we will be here for many years to come.

Shaun Ryan and Melissa Campanelli of eM+C discuss Site Search

Posted by geoffbNovember 2, 2008Site Search

SLI Systems CEO Shaun Ryan speaks to Melissa Campanelli of eM+C about the importance of Site Search within an ecommerce site http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/podcasts.

Thank you for your participation in our survey

Posted by geoffbNovember 1, 2008Site Search

As we highlighted in a previous post, we recently conducted a survey of 322 retailers asking them about the tools they give top priority to when it comes to online marketing. We were happy to find that site search and SEO are two of the top three technologies of choice for retailers today (email marketing was the third). What we didn’t mention was that, as an incentive to take the survey, we offered a $200 Apple gift voucher to one lucky winner.

We’re happy to report that Michelle Thomas of Zappos won the survey drawing and is the recipient of some new Apple merchandise.

In addition to completing our survey, Michelle’s colleague, Aaron Magness has been kind enough to accept our request to be featured on an upcoming eCommerce Podcast. In the interview, we hope to uncover a bit about the online marketing strategies Zappos has implemented to help them become the recognizable brand they are today. Stay tuned…

What impact is the economy having on on-line retailers?

Posted by Shaun RyanOctober 30, 2008eCommerce, Site Search1 comment

This is a question that we are very interested in here at SLI. Most of our customers are retailers. Through our services we are talking to these people every day. Our relationship with them feels more like it is more than just a business relationship. Their passion infects us and we really want them to succeed.

The anecdotal information we are getting about the impact of the financial crisis is mixed. Some have seen a drop in order size and volume and are feeling additional pressure from suppliers wanting to be paid earlier. Others are seeing increases. I see Amazon’s sales were up 31% last quarter. We are hearing that people are shopping on-line more to save gas – even though oil prices have fallen dramatically. Last week I asked Brian Walker from Forrester research what they are expecting these holidays. They’re predicting eCommerce to grow 12% over last holidays. This is less than the 18% growth that we saw last year but is still significantly better than retail in general.

One set of numbers we can look at is the search volumes we are serving on behalf of our customers. We have seen that the number of searches we are serving across our customers is increasing steadily. In the last month we served over 150 million queries. Part of the increase we’re seeing is because we’re getting more customers. I dug a little more deeply into the data. I looked at the search activity for a random selection of our customers for the last 30 days compared to the same 30 days last year. On average there are 28% more searches. Some are down. More are up.

Now just because people are searching more, doesn’t mean that they are buying more (Aaron Goldman had a good discussion about this in his Media Post article: Is search recession proof?). However it’s a very positive sign.

A wise man wouldn’t make predictions in this volatile market. I’ve never been accused of being wise – I predict ecommerce will be OK – just don’t bank on the huge growth we have seen in past years.

On a completely different thread

Posted by Shaun RyanOctober 29, 2008Site Search

Yesterday we announced that WEBS has implemented our Learning Search to power the site search on its all-things knitting ecommerce site Yarn.com. Aside from strengthening its online brand visibility and improving the customer experience, WEBS has discovered another benefit to an effective site search solution – more productive employees. According to owner Steve Elkins, employees are better able to find information on the company’s more than 15,000 products, which helps them market them better.

Elkins also said that they use our site search to create special landing pages for groups of products, and direct recipients of WEBS marketing e-mails to these pages by individual URLs.

I interviewed Elkins recently on our Ecommerce Podcast. Steve talks about how he and his wife took over the business from Steve’s parents and shares some interesting marketing techniques that have helped grow Yarn.com’s traffic (like podcasting). He also talks about the key technologies (like site search) that have improved their website. (Side note: you may be surprised to find out what Steve’s first online purchase was. Hint: think little blue box.)

Omniture to buy Mercado

Posted by Shaun RyanOctober 16, 2008eCommerce, Site Search1 comment

Omniture announced yesterday that they are going to acquire certain assets in our competitor Mercado. The deal needs the approval of the Israeli government and that may not happen until the end of the year. In the meantime Mercado’s customers are in limbo from a support point of view. Most of the technical staff in Israel have been laid off, as have most of their US staff (we have talked to many of them) and the Omniture deal hasn’t gone through yet. We got no answer when we tried calling Mercado. If and when the deal does goes through its uncertain how long it will take Omniture to understand the Mercado technology to a point that they can support it fully.

In the meantime I want to reiterate our offer to Mercado customers that are worried about getting through the busy holiday season. Site search and navigation is such an important part of a website – they shouldn’t be at risk during your busiest few weeks.

Jelly Belly

Posted by Shaun RyanOctober 16, 2008eCommerce, SEO, Site Search1 comment

Today we announced that Jelly Belly are using SLI’s Learning search and Site Champion. We’ve also released an interview with Jason Marrone, Jelly Belly’s e-commerce marketing manager. The interview was fun and informative. It made me hungry talking about all their candy. It was really interesting to hear about one of their most successful promotions that used reverse psychology – they asked their customers not to tell anyone about a special deal they had and before they knew it their servers were overloaded. I know reverse psychology works with my kids – it made me smile to see it working in a viral marketing campaign.

What does the future hold…

Posted by geoffbOctober 13, 2008eCommerce, Press

Have you read the news today? If you have, you couldn’t ignore the many stories related to the current economic conditions and questions about what it means for business.

According to a recent story by Kevin Ryan at Search Engine Watch, everyone wants to know what the economic meltdown means for advertising and marketing dollars, and how organizations will shift spending and strategies to put the right amount of focus on the programs that promise to yield the most in terms of revenue or brand recognition.

Just this week we released the results of a survey that highlights some of the top technology tools marketers at more than 300 retail organizations are using to help them drive business and compete for consumer dollars. The survey shows that close to all of the people we polled (90%) rank site search, search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing as the most important e-commerce technologies helping to promote their online businesses.

Interestingly, we asked these same retailers what programs they would consider omitting from their marketing plans if faced with tightening budgets, and found that those who are minimizing spend due to current economic constraints are not inclined to diminish their core marketing programs – site search, SEO and email marketing – but would rather decrease spending on activities that are less results-driven such as podcasts, static display ads and online video.

It seems only natural that companies competing for shrinking consumer dollars would look to tools they can rely on to help them better appeal to consumers and keep those consumers coming back. We’re happy to report that site search and SEO are two best practices retailers are using to continue promoting sales and customer loyalty today, and in the future.

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