1.  AI-Instant Search

It’s a rapidly changing situation, but it’s safe to say that the global Coronavirus Pandemic has defined 2020.  Nobody could have foreseen the dramatic changes to their way of life people have experienced across the world.  Every non-essential merchant has been directly impacted by the pandemic and brick and mortar stores are only now gradually reopening.  These events have resulted in unprecedented changes to consumer behavior and most transactions now moving online.

The Search Box on eCommerce sites has always been important.  After all, searching is shopping in an eCommerce context.  With so many more people currently buying online, it is even more important than usual that if your business can provide what a shopper is looking for, you get it in front of them as soon as possible.

Presenting customers with the most relevant search, product, as well as category suggestions is essential.  But it is easy to get AI-Instant Search, or Autocomplete, so wrong that it actually has a negative impact on your shoppers.

36% of autocomplete implementations on eCommerce websites do more harm than good*

Although basic autocomplete suggestions can be found on 82% of eCommerce sites, most sites do not take the opportunity to capitalize on merchandising while users are searching.

Advanced AI-Instant Search returns correct results as a user types in the search box, refining with each keystroke, à la Google.  This allows a user to stop short of typing the entire word or phrase and find what they were looking for quicker.

With Instant Search saving users 2-5 seconds for every search, do they really expect to finish typing their search?  If this is the case, it’s essential that Instant Search works well.

Here’s how to make sure your Instant Search is effective:

1. Character Matching

Often, autocomplete systems only show suggestions that begin with the typed characters, but an effective AI-Instant Search will match on characters anywhere in the search query.

Here is an example from EasyAsk customer personalizationmall.com:

The user is looking for a wedding gift and the letters ‘wedd’ have been typed into the search box on the desktop site so far.  The above drop-down panel is displayed without needing to execute the search.  We can see here that the suggestions can contain ‘wedd’ anywhere.  Typed characters are shown in bold in the list of suggestions, with the rest of the suggestion in normal type.

2. Configure which searches are shown first

The most effective AI-Instant Search systems will show trending search suggestions as the user types.  But these suggestions can be supplemented with any other suggestions, as defined by the business user.  The data seeding the search can be configured to include anything.

It’s also a good idea to display the last searches that the user made, even before Instant Search kicks in.

3. Show top products and categories as well as search suggestions

Presenting customers with the most relevant search, product, and category suggestions is essential.

As a user types, not only can you show top search suggestions, but also the top products for that search.  The search is actually happening in the background and displayed in the pop-up box.  You could even show top brands or categories associated with that top search.

In the example above, the first three characters of the search for a sofa have been typed.  The top products related to ‘sofa’ are displayed, alongside the top searches and 2 possible categories.  The order that these suggestions are displayed is based on the frequency that they’ve been searched in the last period.

When customers are searching for products that don’t belong in an obvious category, displaying the categories in Instant Search is an effective way of getting the customer to the product quickly.

For certain businesses, the addition of suggested part numbers is also very useful.

4. Option for customers to add directly to cart

If a customer has a list and knows what they want to buy, it’s really important that the journey from search to purchase is as rapid as possible for them.  These customers should be able to type in a part number, see the product appear in the Instant Search pop-up, and add it straight to their cart.  They shouldn’t have to go through numerous search pages.

5. Code-free Layout

The most sophisticated AI-Instant Search systems use templates, making it very easy for the business user to change. EasyAsk provides multiple templates to choose from, or businesses can define their own.

Having a template-driven layout means that it’s easy for business users to decide how they want to lay out their Instant Search pop-up without the need for code.  The EasyAsk system is also optimized for mobile, making it responsive to all screen sizes.

Finding the right products, first time, every time.

EasyAsk’s AI-Instant Search is a very advanced system that is designed to put the right products in front of the user at the earliest opportunity.  Displaying product, search, and category suggestions to a user as soon as they start typing makes the most of a merchandising opportunity that is often missed.

Using AI-Instant Search to improve your eCommerce search is just one of the many features of EasyAsk’s intuitive search and merchandising solution.

Find out more here

[1] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/the-current-state-of-e-commerce-search/

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The Infor Storefront marketplace has been left in chaos with many customers very unsure of the future of Storefront, others even searching for a new platform.

As EasyAsk has always been the core engine powering Storefront, we’ve been working directly with increasing numbers of Storefront customers.  We have found there is a lot of room for improvement.

Additionally, almost all Storefront customers’ UX is obsolete and visually stuck in an outdated ‘aol.com’ time warp.

The September TUG webinar, focussed on the future of Storefront and how EasyAsk and mStorefront could significantly and immediately enhance a Storefront user’s experience.  Read the summary or watch the full recording.

At the November 12^th TUG webinar, we took a deeper dive into the capabilities and enhancements that you can expect from the partnership between EasyAsk and mStorefront.  With advanced Search, Analytics and Merchandising, as well as a thoroughly enhanced, responsive, modern and user-friendly front-end, plus a Mobile Smartphone UX, you can take your significant Storefront investment forward into the next decade.

We have created a Roadmap showing what you can expect from EasyAsk and mStorefront in 2020:

• A fresh, responsive design for your Storefront site, which will work equally well on all devices

• Enhanced scanner functionality

An internal sales team would be able to scan products to retrieve product information for customer orders, etc..  mStorefront now allows scanning via Bluetooth-enabled devices and smartphones.

• Single Sign-On Extension

The ability for mStorefront to integrate with any Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) based service will allow for logging users into the application based on their sessions in another context.

This is beneficial for account managers that need to utilize different applications including mStorefront to service their customer base.

• Continuous UI/UX enhancements

mStorefront creates a consistent brand across your content website and your customers’ shopping experience.  Your customers will feel like they’re underneath one roof, and no matter what platform they’re viewing from, they’ll see the same

branding and design.

• Integration with Content Management System (CMS)

This is a fully-fledged solution where mStorefront can integrate with Drupal CMS and give users the ability to control pre-determined content, create new content pages, enable blogs, as well as control headers, images, and other sections of a company’s main marketing site.  If your customers are shopping/browsing or navigating from page-to-page, they will always feel like they are on one integrated, responsive site.

• Enhanced Google Analytics

The following Google Analytics extensions will be added:

• Enhanced Google Analytics: giving you visibility of how customers interact with mStorefront, including understanding customers’ shopping behavior, product performance, among others.
• User session tracking: giving you visibility of how particular users shop the site and allowing you to analyze the signed-in user experience.
• Tag manager: giving you the ability to add and update your own tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more.
• Ecommerce Analytics: tracking orders including order values, ordered products and more.

New EasyAsk features:

• Landing pages

An EasyAsk landing page is a set of products that the merchandising team wants to show customers, which are typically referenced by a specific URL. This URL could be referenced in email marketing or on another part of the site.

A landing page will contain products as well as banners and other content.  In EasyAsk Studio, it is possible to define which products and other content should be displayed on a new landing page very easily using natural language.

• Banners

A banner is visual content that can be triggered to be shown on predefined areas of any screen.  A banner might be an image, a video, a slider – or enter html into the definition to display anything required.  Banners can be triggered by a number of situations, such as:

• By the presence of a set of products. For example, if 50% or more of the products that a customer is looking at are tools, then you could show a banner for a tool brand that you’re currently promoting
• If a user views a certain set of products, or uses a certain category, you want to put a visual element at the top of that subcategory page
• By certain terminology used in a search. For example, if a customer uses the term ‘tool’, a banner could be displayed for a tool brand that you’re promoting

Combinations of these triggers allow any situation to be catered for.  The business user has comprehensive control. Banners can have a variety of associated actions, such as:

• Go to a URL
• Go to a product category or subcategory
• Do an attribute selection, e.g. brand = xyz, optionally qualified with a category
• Do a product search, optionally qualified with a category selection. For example, run a search for oil, but only within pump products
• No action – the banner is simply for information or aesthetics

• Messaging on EasyAsk driven Product Results Pages

Messaging on product results pages is used when users search and EasyAsk changes that search in some way in order to get better results.  It is an opportunity to show alternative products or searches when the original search may not find anything and to inform customers why this has happened.

Messaging can be used in the following instances:

• Spell correction, for example:

“sofaa” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “sofa” instead.

• Out of stock products, for example:

“Gracey Recliner” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “leather recliner” instead. The Gracey recliner is currently unavailable.

• Products not in the catalogue, for example:

Sorry, we don’t stock Canon, but Nikon are an excellent alternative.

• Part of the customer’s search has been relaxed, for example:

Sorry, we don’t have purple leather couches, but here are the leather couches we do have.

Messaging on product result pages is straightforward to set up and configure within EasyAsk Studio.  It allows merchandisers to drive a better shopping experience for their customers without relying on programmers to ‘code’ in order to explain to the searcher what they are seeing.  This can significantly reduce bounce rates.

• ‘No Results’ page content

EasyAsk allows you to control which suggested product sets and what messaging is displayed.  The ‘No Results page might contain one or more of the following:

• Show alternative products. This is an opportunity to promote specific products or groups of products.  You might display top sellers or campaign-related products, for example, summer specials.  Here is an example of promoted products from pmall.com:

• Make some search suggestions. The possibilities here for using the No Results page are numerous.  You could make some search suggestions that will return results using some of the words from the original search or suggest that the customer removes one or more filters from their search.  You could display the top trending searches made on the site (clickable).

• Invite the shopper to further action. Suggest that the shopper browses the site by category and direct them to where on the page they can do this.  You might display some clickable popular categories. Here is an example from timberland.com:

If you stock numerous brands, you might suggest popular brands or featured designers, or even just list all available brands.  It is also possible to display a ‘Still can’t find what you’re looking for?’ section, giving the opportunity for a chatbot to step in or providing a telephone number or email address.  The following pop-up was triggered from the No Results page, once again on timberland.com:

All of the above options for your ‘No Results’ page can be easily defined and controlled within EasyAsk Studio.

• Merchandising slots

A merchandising slot is a part of a screen, often on the home page, where merchandisers want to highlight certain products or sets of products, for example, own brand specials or this week’s offers. These product groupings can be defined using EasyAsk natural language rules and are completely dynamic.  For example, if a company had own-brand specials and had a rule that defines a merchandising slot to show these products, then any new own-brand products would automatically be included. This functionality is rule-based rather than product-based.

Alternatively, it is possible to specify a set of product IDs stipulated by the marketing team to be shown in a merchandising slot.  There are no limits to the number of supported merchandising slots; the front-end design dictates how much can be shown.

• Enhanced Search As You Type (SAYT)

SAYT is a very advanced autocomplete/type-ahead system that is designed to put the right products in front of the user at the earliest opportunity.  The latest EasyAsk SAYT system uses templates, making it very easy to change.  It includes features such as the ability to change how many products and suggested searches are displayed and whether to show relevant attributes.  EasyAsk provides multiple templates to choose from, or your business can define their own.

The above drop-down panel is displayed on pmall.com as a user begins to type their search.

We’d love to show you how we can easily transform your dated Storefront site into a cutting edge B2B eCommerce site without tying up valuable resources and potentially a $300,000+ investment by you to get there – get in touch with us to find out more.

The post 2020 Storefront Roadmap: How EasyAsk and mStorefront are working together to take your B2B business into the next decade appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

Customer-Specific Catalogs

Providing customer-specific catalogs is a unique search requirement for B2B companies and can present unique challenges when it comes to eCommerce. But if it is done well, the personalized experience for your B2B customers will certainly pay dividends.

There are 4 possible situations that a B2B company may need to cater for:

1. The company has products that all customers can see and buy.
2. Certain customers are only authorized to buy from a particular range or category of products. When the customer searches, it is important that they can only view the products that are available for them to buy.
3. Similarly, the availability of products may be based on location. Customers in the North-East might only see products that are stocked in the North-East warehouse. Location of the stock also limits which products a customer should see.
4. There may be custom products produced by a company that are only available to one particular customer. For example, coffee companies need branded cups, so it is important that those custom products are in the supplier’s catalog, but cannot be purchased by anyone else.

Differing needs

Within a typical B2C system, the search system would search the entire catalog and show results, but in the above situations, the catalog indexing process needs to define who can buy which products so that the search system is able to present products in the results correctly. This can become very complex, which is why out-of-the-box search systems can’t handle it. EasyAsk provides a custom implementation for each customer so that any of the challenges described above can be handled.

A paper products manufacturer became an EasyAsk customer and now has certain products in their catalog that are marked with customer IDs, while other products are marked as being global. Their coffee store customer buys branded cups, so when they log in the customer ID is passed to EasyAsk, who pass back only the right products.

The implementation of customer-specific catalogs varies completely between B2B customers, so it isn’t possible to just use defined rules; the flexibility to support all different circumstances is necessary.

B2B Personalization

Being able to search and see personalized results based on pre-negotiated terms is imperative for your B2B customers. They should never see a product that isn’t available for them to buy. Your search system should be aware of product availability for any given customer. Is your search system up to this?

EasyAsk is up to the challenge

EasyAsk offers the only site search and merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 3: Customer-Specific Catalogs appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

The complex world of part numbers

B2B shoppers are much more likely to search using specific product numbers. B2B product numbers can inherently be more complex and therefore be easily mistyped or forgotten. B2B product numbers often take the following forms:

• Groups of numbers, letters and other characters, such as hyphens and slashes
• Long numbers with some kind of structure, e.g. 123 4567 89

If your customers can’t find parts or part numbers on your eCommerce site, they will be calling your customer services, which is expensive to you and inconvenient for them. Worse still, they may take their business to your competitors.

Complex product numbers affect many businesses, but some more than others. Take print cartridges for example. It is important for customers to find the exact cartridges that are compatible with their printer. We used a print cartridge site to search for cartridges for a Kyocera Ecosys printer:

As you can see, the printer model numbers are made up of very similar combinations of letters and numbers. Scrolling through the list revealed 3 times this number of results.

A mechanic who needs a car part for a job the next day is probably not going to be the person typing the part number into a search box. Someone in the office will be asked to order the part, and when they can’t find the part due a slight error in the part number, they have to get on the phone to the supplier. This means it costs the car parts vendor more to service the customer.

The challenge for B2B eCommerce sites is clear, but what can be implemented to avoid the need for calls to a customer service line or using a competitor’s site?

EasyAsk’s ‘Begins Expander’

A ‘Begins Expander’ is EasyAsk functionality that attempts to predict the most common inaccuracies a ‘searcher’ will make when attempting a product number search using EasyAsk’s advanced autocomplete functionality. A Begins Expander can be set up for any field, but is most relevant for a part or product number field. It can be configured to start or finish on any number of characters and it will index the part number as the start parameter, then plus 1 character, then plus 2 characters, and so on until the end parameter. For example, if the product code is 1234567 with the parameters 3 and 7, the Begins Expander would index:

123

1234

12345

123456

1234567

This is an extremely effective technique as it is incredibly helpful to a searcher that doesn’t remember the entire product code, they can just start to type the beginning of the code and EasyAsk’s Search As You Type (SAYT)/autocomplete will show all possible product codes.

                         enasco.com begins to suggest product numbers after 2 characters are typed

EasyAsk’s ‘Part Number Expander’

A ‘Part Number Expander’ is especially useful for complex part numbers that include a combination of letters, numbers and other characters. A user might forget whether characters were separated by a hyphen or a slash, or might omit letters on the end. The Part Number Expander takes each part number and creates all the different versions of terms and inserts them into the searchable index so that if any of them are searched for, they will match to the product. The code is broken up into parts and the separators are substituted in all combinations. For example, if the part number is

123-HC/1345AB

the Part Number Expander would index:

123-HC-1345AB                                                                        123

123/HC/1345AB                                                                       123-HC

123/HC-1345AB                                                                        HC

123 HC 1345AB                                                                          1345

AB

amongst many other combinations.

If a customer types a part number that is slightly different (for example, using spaces instead of hyphens) the correct part will still be found.

Ecklerscorvette.com demonstrates how the Part Number Expander can avoid no results for customers:

The part number for this disc brake set is 25-261256-1. If a customer replaces the hyphens with spaces, the exact product is still returned.

We’ve got you covered

The 2 capabilities above are just a part of the EasyAsk experience. There is no effort to use them; no extra coding is needed because EasyAsk does it automatically. When your data is read the part numbers are broken up based on rules that are built internally. EasyAsk will scan the part or product numbers, and wherever they change from or to alphabetic or numeric, they will be treated as a separate part.

EasyAsk making all the difference

An EasyAsk customer recently encountered problems with product number variations and saw outstanding results when they implemented EasyAsk’s software:

EasyAsk was approached by a library and schools supplier who was a printed catalog business before launching online. Their web system only used the internal product codes, which were just numbers, whereas in the catalogs, each number had a 2-character prefix with a hyphen. So, if the internal product code was 1234, in the catalog it could be rx-1234, kb-1234, depending on the different catalogs that were issued throughout the year.

The company found that a teacher or librarian would look in the catalog, find the product they required, and then when they tried to find the product online, the search failed every time. Because the printed catalog didn’t match what was in the database, the user wouldn’t be able to find what they wanted, and so would call the helpdesk who would take the order over the phone.

When the company implemented EasyAsk software, they provided EasyAsk with their data, plus a list of catalog prefix and suffix codes for those printed catalogs that were in circulation. As part of the build process, EasyAsk indexed product numbers with and without prefixes and suffixes, and with and without hyphens. From the moment that the EasyAsk system went live, customers were able to find the products using the catalog codes and calls to the call center were reduced by half.

EasyAsk made a huge difference in this case, can your website do this?

B2B Experts

EasyAsk offers the only merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: HD Supply, Aramark, Alphabroder, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 2: Complex Part or Product Numbers appeared first on EasyAsk.

B2B eCommerce: Benefits

B2B eCommerce has many benefits for any company looking to streamline their procedures, reduce costs and increase sales.

The rise in popularity of purchasing online means that the doors are open for your business to the national or international marketplace. Your business needs to be online, where the customers are. Your B2B customers are also B2C customers of someone else, and they are used to the B2C experience. They expect functionality and UX that mimics Amazon and the like. Use this to your advantage and take tips from B2C, such as increasing order value by offering cross-sells or up-sells.

B2B commerce traditionally happens through sales reps, catalogs and call centers. These routes to purchase are expensive compared with eCommerce. Providing a great experience to B2B customers online helps your business move away from spending time and money on processes that can be fully automated on an eCommerce site. The product information can still be extensive and accurate, with specification sheets, manuals, and diagrams being easy to view and download.

When a B2C customer searches for something on an eCommerce site, they will usually see a combination of what they’ve searched for and what the business wants them to see. B2B customers, on the other hand, will need to see what they’ve searched for, but also what they usually buy. In B2B, customers are buyers, not shoppers; they’re much less likely to be browsing. They’re likely to be repeat buyers and want the quickest route to the products they’re looking for. They may even just want to click a button to reorder last week’s purchase. For this reason, personalization is key in the B2B domain. Using historical buying and browsing data, it is possible to create a personalized buying experience. B2B eCommerce can create a streamlined ordering process for customers who know exactly what they want.

B2B eCommerce: Challenges

B2B products have a different set of characteristics to B2C products. These differences can present the following challenges that we will explore in more detail over the coming weeks:

Product ‘Findability’

A B2B company may have hundreds of thousands or even millions of products that are typically complex with lots of attributes and variants. It is therefore vital that your B2B site search solution is able to cope with these complexities and shorten the path to purchase.

We will explore how to use dynamic filters and advanced search capabilities to make sure that your customers can find what they’re looking for among the many products. We will also share how to make sure that your customers are only viewing products and prices that are relevant to them.

Complex part or catalog numbers

Many organizations struggle with multiple versions and formats of catalog numbers resulting in failed searches and lost revenue. We will discuss how to ensure that however a user searches – they find the correct product.

Customer-specific catalogs

B2B buyers expect catalogs to be customized based on negotiated product assortments, warehouse locations, and pricing. The last thing that a customer wants to see on your site is products that are not available to them. Personalization can significantly affect B2B online revenue.

Dynamic Pricing

Customized pricing is a challenge unique to B2B businesses. Prices are individualized based on factors such as contract, purchasing frequency, and volume. We will explore the ways in which complex B2B pricing can be handled in the context of search.

Omni-channel B2B

B2B customers will experience your company through different channels – call centers, eCommerce site, sales representatives. All of these channels should have the same information and your business should be able to have a single view of all customer activity.

With over 60% of B2B customer research happening on mobile devices, the ability to understand more verbose, natural language queries is paramount.

Managing the Relationship

There will always be B2B customers who simply want to reorder. A good eCommerce system allows you to maintain a list of regular order items and to use analytics to spot trends. Online B2B means that you have a closer view of customer activity, so that if there are any issues, or the customer simply hasn’t logged in for a while, you can make contact.

The Global Market

If your company intends to do business outside of the U.S. there are implications in terms of language, currency, and regulations. The EU regulations may be different for your products, for example, product or product labeling may need to be modified. Using a search solution that intuitively understands multiple languages and currencies is imperative in the global market.

Customer Acquisition

Although some techniques are transferable from B2C commerce, often B2B companies have a specific buyer group, meaning that their initial customer contact will be made through channels such as trade shows or sales representatives. Once customers are aware of your business, however, they are likely to try to find your company online to continue their research. Good content and S.E.O. is therefore just as important as for B2C sellers.

Are You Ready?

There are huge benefits in putting in place a strategy to drive B2B customers to your eCommerce site. But is your site capable of maintaining the relationship and even driving more revenue through excellent functionality? When asked to cite the top features or functions they would most like from suppliers in the selling process, most business buyers chose enhanced search functionality on their website (60%).

EasyAsk offers the only merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Alphabroder, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Benefits and Challenges appeared first on EasyAsk.

Keywords-used-2018?

You’ll be familiar with the default search language of Keywords; that condensed string of search terms, void of any connecting words. Many people who are used to using web search engines still choose to use keywords. CollegeHumor illustrates Keyword Search hilariously in their ‘If Google was a Guy’ videos.

But the tides are turning with the growing awareness of Natural Language Search. Being able to phrase questions as you would ask them if you were talking to someone, using everyday language, is increasingly expected of search engines.

It would be easy to assume that keyword search systems will deal as effectively with keyword searches as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine. But this is just not the case. Not only will a good NLP search system produce the right results first time for the growing numbers of users who are familiar with natural language searching, but it will also out-perform keyword search engines when it comes to seemingly simple keyword searches.

Here’s how:

Understanding Language

A good NLP search engine understands word inflection and is able to take versions of words and create a single concept. Changes such as tenses and pluralities are reduced down to a single word, normally a noun. For example, it would be equally natural for a customer to search for either ‘jackets’ or ‘jacket’. With some traditional keyword search systems, however, business users would have to manually create synonyms to say that jackets = jacket.

Irregular plurals such as ‘goose/geese’ or ‘lady/ladies’ can confuse a keyword search engine, whereas a good NLP system will understand all pluralities and grammar. EasyAsk’s search solution will even understand these language complexities across multiple languages.

Understanding Words

Take the simple example of the keyword search, ‘red jacket’. A keyword search engine will match products that contain the words ‘red’ and ‘jacket’. It may even be configured to search in categories. But what if the category name is ‘jackets’ and the system doesn’t recognize ‘jacket’ as meaning the same thing? A good NLP system will match products containing the words ‘red’ and ‘jacket’, but it will also match if, for example, there is some text that describes the product as ‘redder than purple’. EasyAsk’s solution goes one step further. It will understand the keywords completely and realize that the words could be mapped to something else. It understands that red is a color attribute, and will bring back products that don’t necessarily contain the word ‘red’ but that are burgundy, scarlet, berry, crimson… It will also understand that ‘jacket’ is a category name, and that certain products may not include the category name, ‘jacket’, but instead a model name, such as a ‘red Bomber’.

The EasyAsk system on Nasco’s website responds perfectly to the simple keyword search ‘watercolor brush’:

enasco.com

EasyAsk’s system has recognized that ‘brushes’ in the product name matches ‘brush’ in the original search and that ‘watercolor’ describes the type of brushes. A simple keyword search system may have shown watercolor paints first in the product results and found no matches for ‘brush’.

Ranking Products

Even if your customers are running relatively simple keyword searches, there is still lots more that can be done with the results. With EasyAsk, you have the ability to rank the products intelligently, using relevant scoring. Depending on where the match is found will affect the score for that product. For example, a product name match is more important than a match in the description as it could contain misleading text. You also have the ability to search the most important parts of the product first for matches, and only search the less important parts if nothing is found initially.

Yet another option is to configure EasyAsk to only search the highest weighted fields (e.g. product and category name), and if results are found, to stop there. If no matching products are found, however, EasyAsk will go back and try the lower weighted fields (e.g. product description and keywords). In this way, it is possible to only show the less-relevant results when there aren’t any highly relevant products to show. Results pages shouldn’t be filled with less-relevant information.

Reducing No Results

Great NLP engines will avoid ‘No Results’ for keyword searches by relaxing one or more of the terms. Where there may be no results for a search for ‘pink scissors’, one of the terms could be relaxed to show either pink products or scissors. EasyAsk even allows its users to configure the priority of which term is relaxed. In our example, EasyAsk would ignore the color and show scissors rather than pink products that aren’t scissors.

Search As You Type

Search As You Type (or SAYT) intelligently finds the most common searches and shows products before the user has even hit return. This function means that customers with a simple keyword search can type the first few letters and click the search or even go straight to the product that they had in mind.

SAYT in action at enacso.com

How does your business measure up?

NLP search systems understand everyday language with all of its complexities. Intelligent, intuitive NLP systems can take the simplest keyword searches and provide a vastly superior experience to that of a traditional keyword search engine. Does your search solution provide relevant products, however your customers decide to ask?

Let us show you the full range of features that the EasyAsk solution offers.

The post Optimizing your eCommerce site for the Holiday Season 7: Why NLP does Keywords Better appeared first on EasyAsk.

Is Navigation important if you have great search?

An overgeneralization is that shoppers navigate if they don’t know exactly what they want (or if they feel they can’t trust the search engine, like an obsolete keyword search).  Conversely, shoppers use the search box when they DO know exactly what they want.  It’s critical to avoid the ‘clicking to oblivion’ syndrome via poor navigation.

How much patience do your customers have? How long will they hang around on irrelevant pages before they bounce? Does your whole Search System work in sync, providing a consistent experience whether your customers search or navigate?

Navigation is distinct from search and is typically a way of reaching a set of products without searching. Customers can navigate an eCommerce site by clicking on menus, categories, and sub-categories. Once an initial product set is displayed, customers can click on filters too.

Intuitive, Natural Language search is imperative, but great customer experience should also permeate your site’s navigation.

Here are some important considerations for the navigation of your site:

Keep it consistent

A lot of category pages don’t give users many options for what to do next. Unless your site’s landing page is to be set out in a particular way, it should reflect a search results page. It may have extra components, such as banners, but the products and filters should be the same. By presenting the same filters as on a search page (being able to choose price range or color, for example), options are provided for users who perhaps don’t know the right words for a search.

There should always be consistency between the experience of a user who searches and a user who navigates. If a customer navigates the categories mens > jackets they should expect to see the exact same products as if they had typed the search, ‘men’s jackets’. This gives the user confidence in your site. If, however, a customer performs a search that doesn’t return any results and subsequently navigates to find lots of products, their confidence in your search or navigation is undermined, having a detrimental effect on your bounce and conversion rates. Customers are likely to leave a site that they feel they can’t trust. If customers don’t see the right products, they can’t buy them.

Build navigation into the search box

When a user starts to type a query in the search box, does your search system display category or attribute links dynamically? SAYT (Search as you Type) is another form of navigation, allowing the user to stop short of typing their whole query and start to navigate using the links. Once the user has clicked a category, it is important for them to be able to zoom in as easily as possible, using a combination of filters, such as textual/numerical filters, price sliders or color swatches. These options should be visually attractive and easily recognizable.

The North Face Filters

Give your customers what they want

When offering sub-category filtering, always try to present attributes in the order that they are most likely to be used. For example, if the price filters are the most-clicked, show them first. Make use of analytics to keep an eye on where people are clicking on your site. EasyAsk can even provide analytics showing which values are the most popular within attributes. If blue turns out to be your customers’ top color click, show blue as an option before red. Don’t bury the popular clicks, especially on mobile sites and apps.

Use Mega Menus

A Mega Menu can be displayed when a user hovers over or clicks a category heading and contains everything related to that category. Think of it as Search as You Type for navigation.

The North Face Women’s Mega Menu

Users can see everything in detail and decide which sub-category to click next. With EasyAsk driving this functionality, special headings or sub-categories can be generated dynamically from derived attributes and used to pull up appropriate products, such as collections with a given name.

Easy does it…

Navigation and search should be in sync and complement each other. This is a real opportunity for your search system to resonate with your customers. It is crucial that your business does not rely on a development team to generate and tweak changes to navigation. Many systems are coded by developers, so if a business wanted to make changes, there would be time and cost implications.

With EasyAsk, merchandizers have direct access to analytics and dynamic tools in order to optimize their customers’ search and navigation experience.

The post Optimizing your eCommerce site for the Holiday Season 6: Navigation Best Practices appeared first on EasyAsk.

First Impressions

Impressive email campaigns are an essential part of your marketing strategy, but the place where your customers land after clicking through is of equal importance. Landing pages on eCommerce sites come in many shapes and sizes, but the most effective amongst them are clear, succinct and consistent, and with an obvious call to action. Consider reading these tips when planning your landing page content.

Creating Landing Pages – A technical job?

Typically, Landing Pages are created by a technical team, with merchandisers providing information about the products. But what if it were possible for the merchandising team to react to news items, changes in the market or analytics by creating and managing Landing Pages without the need to involve IT colleagues? What if they could very quickly (we’re talking minutes) create a Landing Page and have dynamic control over which products they promote?

EasyAsk’s Search solution provides a complete solution to the landing page problem, with the ability to create the whole page, not just a list of products. With its unique use of Natural Language Processing, merchandisers can quickly define products they want on the Landing Page and then add content such as banners, scrolling banners and videos.

One of the key advantages of EasyAsk’s Search Solution is its ease of use and flexibility, meaning that knowledge of the catalogue and market is more important than technical knowledge – and we think that this is the way it should be.

How does it work?

A merchandiser can use Natural Language to define a set of products, for example, “leather sofas over $2000” and then assign these products or searches to an attribute value, e.g. “Living Room Luxury”. As a merchandiser, you can see the products dynamically as you change the search terms in EasyAsk’s interface, Commerce Studio. It is also possible to select individual products.

Is there a cold spell forecast? Send an email with a link to a ‘Snow Jackets’ landing page. Is there lots of talk in the news about cyclist safety? Start a ‘Be Seen at Night’ email campaign that leads to bright-colored products on a landing page.

Complete Solution

EasyAsk makes it easy for customers to define what their searchers see on Landing Pages and to therefore respond to analytics or campaign directives. The Landing Page functionality can be used not only for one-off campaigns, but for run-of-the-mill marketing, for example providing links to several Landing Pages from the weekly email to customers.

With the effective combination of a merchandiser’s knowledge of a catalog and EasyAsk’s Natural Language Processing, Landing Pages can be created and managed dynamically, keeping your business ahead of the game and in touch with your customers.

The post Optimizing your eCommerce site for the Holiday Season 5: Creating and Managing Landing Pages appeared first on EasyAsk.

Why Messaging?

Intelligent search engines will show alternative products or searches when users search for something that returns no results. Messaging on product results pages are used when this has happened. It is an opportunity to inform customers why they’re seeing a particular set of products and it is imperative that users quickly understand what has happened so that their confidence in the search system is maintained.

Messaging might be used in the following instances:

Spell Correction

When a change has been made to the original text, it is important to inform the user how the spelling has been changed. For example,

“sofaa” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “sofa” instead.

It is, of course, necessary that your spell correct function is up to the job in the first place. An intelligent search engine will check spellings against the company data as well as a dictionary.

Out of Stock Products

Popular products may periodically go out of stock. Messaging allows your business to let customers know that certain products would normally be available and that you are showing them alternative products. For example,

“Gracey Recliner” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “leather recliner” instead. The Gracey recliner is currently unavailable.

Products not in the Catalog

If your business does not stock a particular brand, but does stock brands who produce similar products, it is important to redirect your customers to relevant alternative products. An electronics supplier might display a message such as: “Sorry, we don’t stock Canon, but Nikon is an excellent alternative”.

Simply telling your customers that you don’t stock a particular product or brand is a missed opportunity.

Relaxation

With certain customer search queries, part of a search may need to be relaxed. If a user’s search has been changed in this way, a message explaining the changes to the original search should be displayed. For example, a user may search for “purple leather couches” and see the following message: “Sorry, we don’t have purple leather couches, but here are the leather couches we do have”.

This user could have searched for leather couches in the first instance and spent a long time scrolling through the pages of results looking for any in purple. But by using messaging in this way, the user is informed immediately and is more likely to use the search system again.

Keeping the Customer Informed

The key to messaging is letting the user know what is happening. If there is a message that could be conveyed, it should always be displayed, and the more explicit you can be, the better. This gives the user confidence in the search system. Conversely, if no message is displayed when changes have been made to a search, it is confusing for the user. If, for example, an alternative brand of product is presented with no messaging to explain why, the user may assume that the search is not working, lose confidence in the search system and even abandon the site. Ideally, there would be multiple messages set up for different purposes.

Implementing messaging on product result pages is straightforward to set up and configure with EasyAsk’s intuitive search solution.

The post Optimizing your eCommerce site for the Holiday Season 4: Messaging on Product Results Pages appeared first on EasyAsk.

No Results

According to a WebLink study, shoppers using internal site search deliver a 216% higher conversion rate compared to customers that simply browse. With search playing such a crucial role, generating a generic ‘Sorry, no results matched your search’ message could be disastrous. How many shoppers would stay on your site and how many would go straight to your competitor?

Check out these common causes for ‘No Results’ pages and how to avoid them:

Spelling Errors

A large number of ‘No Results’ searches can be put down to poor spell correction. An effective Search Engine must have sensible spell corrections and synonyms, including the ability to understand plurals. For example, the adjectives ‘smoked’ and ‘smoky’ should be understood by the Search Engine as synonymous.

Most Search Engines provide a reasonably good service when it comes to spell corrections or synonyms, but can yours manage word inflection, such as changes in tense or verb conjugation? For example, will your search system recognize that ‘mattresses’ is the plural form of ‘mattress’ because it has the suffix ‘es’ rather than just ‘s’? If your business operates across different countries, and therefore languages, this becomes an even bigger challenge. Do you have a Natural Language engine that understands these complexities across multiple languages?

Specific Language

Another cause of ‘No Results’ searches is shoppers’ use of language. It could be that a search is too specific, and that by ‘relaxing’ one or more words, a relevant set of results can still be shown. A good Natural Language tool will be capable of understanding that words such as ‘over’ and ‘under’ relate to a price indication. As people become increasingly used to using voice searches, they may include phrases like ‘show me’ or ‘I’m looking for’. Although typically searches would fail with the addition of these phrases, a Search Engine that can understand Natural Language will still make sense of the query.

You don’t sell particular products

When a shopper searches for something that is not stocked by an eRetailer, it may seem that a ‘No Results’ message would be inevitable. But a successful Search System will show results for alternative searches when a company doesn’t have what users ask for. The system should allow the business to set up redirects based on likely search queries (see our first blog post in this series to find out how to best use Search Analytics in this way). For example, if a company doesn’t stock Nike products, a redirect could be set up to show Adidas products (that they do stock) instead. Redirects allow businesses to redefine the terms a customer uses in order to point to different terms and therefore different products.

Products are Out of Stock

If a popular product has gone out of stock, most Search Systems will display a ‘No Results’ message. This is no longer a reason for a wasted opportunity with EasyAsk’s unique tool, ‘Conditional Redirects’. The tool enables businesses to set up a redirection to a separate set of products when their customers search for a popular product that is out of stock. For example, if a company usually sells Gracey Recliners, they may find that they sometimes have an issue with the supply, due to the product’s popularity. The merchandiser could set up a conditional redirect rule using EasyAsk software, so that when Gracey recliners are unavailable, a message displays explaining this, along with a redirected search for ‘leather recliners’. When the Gracey recliners are back in stock, they will once again be shown in the search results. It is not necessary for a merchandizer to remove the rule; the Search System will automatically show the product again.

No Results? No way!

Avoiding ‘No Results’ searches is a simple yet valuable way to ensure your customers find, and buy, what they are looking for. It is essential to use a Search Engine that is flexible and can understand the multitude of ways that a user might phrase a query. Quite simply, you won’t resolve the underlying causes of ‘No results’ without an intuitive Natural Language engine. With flexible merchandising and search tuning, you can make sure that you’re not hard-wiring the way that search works.

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