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 businesses optimize the eCommerce experience for their customers. 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.

Fast-track your Customers

B2B buyers typically know exactly what they want. Being able to find it quickly and without unnecessary clicks or searches is key. Your B2B buyers need to search and navigate your site easily so that they can find what they are looking for and get on with their day. Don’t forget that your B2B buyers are also B2C customers of other companies, and it’s likely that they are used to experiencing good product findability.

We can break product findability down into two main areas: Navigation and Search.

Navigation

B2B products can be complex, with a huge number of attributes, products and ways to buy. The manageability of navigation filters is important so that your business can quickly create new filters as products are changed or added. Make these filters visually attractive and easy to use, for example by creating sliders for numeric options.

Remember to adjust the number of attributes that are displayed according to how far down the navigation tree the buyer is. At a broad level of products, it would slow down the buyer to show the attributes for every single product. Limit this to broader attributes, such as brand and color. Depending on the user interface, we suggest showing 5 to 6 attributes. As the buyer progresses in their navigation, it becomes more important to show the detailed attributes.

EasyAsk’s search solution allows complete business user control over navigation, including:

• Category Management – The ability to restructure categories to better suit the needs of the buyer.
• Dynamic Attributes – The ability to create attribute groupings based on numeric data. For example, dynamic price groupings.
• Multi-Select Attributes – EasyAsk allows attributes to be multi-selectable or single select.

All of this functionality is under the control of the business user, not the IT department, which could take days or even weeks to implement. EasyAsk keeps your B2B site agile and current.

Search

Your B2B site search needs to be accurate and to understand the terms that your business uses. It should also allow any non-standard terms to be defined. The higher the number of products in your catalog, the greater the importance of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is the ability to understand the different ways that people might describe the same product. Understanding the terminology of your users and the ability of your search engine to intuitively and instantly map that to the correct products is extremely important in B2B. Analytics are invaluable in showing how your users are interacting with your site, but are you able to implement any resulting changes rapidly and easily?

Does your site search implicitly understand prices, sizes, lengths and other weights and measures, allowing customers to search using alternative forms of input? Your site should enable your customers to buy how they want to, not how your search system dictates they should.

Of course, users may well be searching using complex part or product numbers rather than words on B2B sites. This can be an issue for regular site search engines and we will cover this challenge in our next blog post.

Search As You Type (SAYT), aka autocomplete/instant search, is a really useful tool for B2B buyers on your site. As a user is typing, the pop up can show the products that are most likely to be sought, for example recently searched or purchased products. It’s also a good idea to display the last searches that the user made even before SAYT kicks in. B2B buyers are often buying the same products repeatedly.

With all search results pages, it is important that your search engine only displays products that your customer is entitled to buy. We will explore customer-specific catalogs later on in this blog series.

The Power to Perform

Although B2B buyers interact in differing ways to B2C shoppers with your search and navigation, it’s equally, if not more important that your search system performs well when faced with the unique demands of B2B eCommerce. You need a powerful system to cope with that.

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.

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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.

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We currently live in a time where five generations make up the overwhelming majority of our country: Baby Boomers I (1946-1954), Baby Boomers II (1955-1965), Generation X (1966-1976), Generation Y (1977-1994), and Generation Z (1995-2012). And Millennials bridge Gen Y and Gen Z. These are the main generations that make up your customer base. That’s a 76-year age gap you’re trying to connect with. A rather daunting task.

Over this 76-year gap, the way people search has changed dramatically. Baby Boomers up through Generation X went to a library and owned an encyclopedia. Generation Y started this way but adapted to current forms of search via the internet. Early generations hoarded multiple maps in their glovebox. Later generations relied on printing the specific route you needed before you departed (anyone remember Map Quest?). Today we instantly look up directions complete with turn-by-turn instructions. Yes, there are still people who go to the library, own an encyclopedia, and use paper maps, but their numbers are dwindling.

These generational side-effects also change the way we all do one common thing: Shop.

Shopping is something that will never go away, but it will always change. From Sears and Roebuck’s catalogs beginning in 1886, to mega malls in the ’90s, to having your order delivered same-day by a drone. And it is the way people shop that brings us to the point of this very long-winded diatribe.

People shop online. The way they find products is through search. Whether it’s on Google to find information, on your maps to find a location, or on your eCommerce site to find a product – Search is the one aspect that is constant. How people search is not, and much of it goes back to the generational differences. Some will type, while others will speak. Some will begin with old Keyword search (i.e Nike Shoes), and then drill down via Navigation (i.e. choosing a color, choosing a size, choosing price-point, etc.). Others will say exactly what they want, using Natural Language Search, to begin the search (i.e. Red and White Nike basketball shoes under $150). Some will search on their laptops, others on their tablets, while a full 67% will search on their phones.

The point is this: Your audience is made up of many different generations, and each has their own way of doing something as simple as Search. There is no correct or incorrect way… but you, as an eCommerce Retailer, better be able to return the right results. Here at EasyAsk, our Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language Search Engine allows us to span that generational gap.

Update: We will be putting the generations to the test as we ask a member of each to go through our Search Challenge. Results coming soon… Stay tuned!

The post Retailers are Marketing to more than Five Generations, is your Site-Search Flexible enough to help them all? appeared first on EasyAsk.

Voice as a Computing Interface is exponentially faster than typing, it is easier than typing, and computers are finally intelligent enough to understand 95% of what is said… compared to just 70% in 2010.  And people are using it more and more.  Just as Responsive Web Design has become a necessity since more people search on their phones and tablets, so too is having a Natural Language Search Engine that understands what these millions of shoppers are saying.

Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street securities analyst and venture capitalist, as well as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world according to Forbes, recently released a 213-page Internet Trends Report for her firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  In it she releases some remarkable findings on how the internet is trending today, including the graphic above.

As the internet continues to evolve and increase in intelligence, we as a people need to evolve with it.  We’ve gone from giant desktops, to thin laptops, to smartphones with more intelligence than those giant desktops ever could dream of having.  As the capabilities increased we’re moving from typed keywords to natural language voice entry.  And thanks to these increases in technology and capability, we’ve reached the tipping point in voice computing.

To see more of Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, click here.

This message brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood, EasyAsk.

The post Research Shows Voice Input is Overtaking Typing on Smartphones appeared first on EasyAsk.

What caused the site to lose a potential sale? It was unable to understand what the customer meant. Let’s look at an example. Consider a shopper looking for wedding flowers. The bride has chosen yellow as the theme color and checks an online site for pricing. She searches for ‘yellow flowers for a marriage’. Seems simple; the occasion is a wedding, the item is a flower and she wants them to be yellow. It seems pretty straightforward.   The site returns all the yellow wedding flowers it has. But what if the site doesn’t have exactly “what she wants”? No eCommerce site wants to return the dreaded ‘no results’ page, so most sites start to ‘relax’ or remove words from the search to return something close but still appropriate.

That’s easy, right? Well if the site search didn’t understand the meaning of the words, it might remove a critical part of the search. If the site doesn’t have ‘yellow wedding flowers’, it might return ‘wedding flowers’. Or it might return ‘yellow flowers’ for any occasion, like a funeral. If I used a site that showed me wedding flowers in a different color, I would continue shopping. Show me yellow funeral flowers and I’m off to another site.

How can you avoid these misunderstandings? One approach is to employ search software that understands the words in the search and how they relate to each other and the site’s catalog. These search engines are called ‘Contextual Search’ and employ ‘Natural Language Processing’ software. Remember diagramming sentences in elementary school and identifying the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Knowing the role of a word in a website search helps find the right products.

This advanced search software is available for eCommerce sites today. It stops treating every search word as the same and understands what the customer is looking for. Customers get the right results when they search. As Mick and Keith would say, for these customers,

“You get what you need.”

The post “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – The Realities of eCommerce Search appeared first on EasyAsk.

What’s behind your eCommerce search box? You’re not going to like the answer

As an eRetailer, one of the most critical functions on your website is your search box.  This is where your shoppers go to find things they want to buy.  The truth is that, deep down; you know it just doesn’t work very well.  Most eRetailers think that “search” is just “search” and that all search tools are just about the same.  They expect that their search has some navigation, basic spell correction, and maybe type-ahead.  If that’s all search offers, then what’s the difference, really?

I hear this mantra all the time when I attend the Magento Imagine conference, IBM Amplify and Internet Retailer.  It is the general consensus, all search is basically the same.  There’s a reason for that, all of the largest eCommerce platforms, Magento, hybris, IBM WebSphere Smarter Commerce and NetSuite all base their search on an open source keyword engine called SOLR.  Each one of these companies has an army of software engineers trying to make SOLR smarter, make it return better results, make it . . . actually work!  And, by the way, each of these platform companies knows that their search is, in a word . . .  awful.

Search giants like Google faced the same dilemma for almost a decade.  Google was originally a keyword search engine with hundreds of software engineers working on algorithms for years, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get the engine to become intuitive.  Google foresaw the future of search when Apple launched Siri, and acquired a natural language, contextual based search engine and quietly replaced their existing engine.  As an internet user, I’m sure you’ve noticed how much more intuitive Google has become.  Their search-as-you-type works brilliantly and has been extended to OKGoogle for mobile voice search.  If you haven’t tried mobile voice search, you should.

Wouldn’t it be great if your eCommerce site worked like that?  Go ahead, close your eyes and envision your mobile site with one-button, voice-enabled search.  Your shoppers will become buyers as they press one button, speak their request and have exactly what they are looking for pop up on the screen.  As an eRetailer, if your shoppers find what they want the first time, with the first search on the first screen, don’t you think they will buy that item from you?

Well you can actually have all of that and more in about two weeks time.  Our search engine, EasyAsk, gives your eCommerce site the edge by offering spell correction that is automatic and accurate, and type-ahead that is intuitive and serves up the exact products you are looking for before you finish typing.

When it comes to all other eCommerce keyword search engines, search IS just search.  If you want to improve your results, have higher conversions and delighted buyers, you can bank on a smarter, more intuitive search solution.  Come join The NorthFace, Timberland, True Value and 400 other eRetailers who have already made the switch to EasyAsk.  The last thing you want to do is to bet you business on a free, obsolete, open source search solution.  Sometimes, you get what you pay for and ‘free’ might just be the most expensive decision you could make.

The post You’re Betting Your eCommerce Business on . . . SOLR ??!! appeared first on EasyAsk.

To make your site tolerant of misspellings and the like, you have two options: Either manually enter all the various misspellings and whatnot into your search engine, which will take you God-knows-how-long… Or, the better approach, use an eCommerce search engine that offers Automatic Spell Correction and stemming against terms in your product catalog.

This gives you out-of-the-box tolerance of these visitor errors, enabling them to find the right products and keeping them on your site as opposed to going to your competitors.

Watch this one-minute video and see how Coldwater Creek uses EasyAsk’s automatic spell correction to convert more visitors into customers.

The post Automatic Spell Correction in eCommerce Search Saves you Time and Money appeared first on EasyAsk.

In the world of online shopping, your site search box is like your personal shopper.  You know, like the ones who ask you, “How may I help you?” when you walk into a department store.

In the real world, if you’re asked that, you’re going to tell them how they can help you.  But in the eCommerce world, most of the sites you go to can’t help you the way a personal shopper can. Why?  Because of Keyword Search limitations, and the fact that most people don’t know what’s possible with their eCommerce Site Search.

In the early days of the Internet, way back in 1995, the Keyword attribute was popularized by search engines like AltaVista.  But even as early as 1997, which was 15 years ago, they discovered keyword search was unreliable.  But people still continue to use it!  Why?

Yahoo! and Google…

If you use a long-tailed search (i.e. “Women’s black long-sleeved dresses”), the chances of your search returning the right product, are very slim. And now you’re reduced to clicking through page after page to try and find what you want. Or, if you’re like me, you leave the site altogether.

Let’s flip it around and compare it to real life. What if you told a personal shopper that you wanted a “Women’s black long-sleeved dress,” and she returned with long-sleeve shirts, coats, jackets, short-sleeve dresses, strapless dresses, etc. You would look at her like she’s… how do I put this nicely?… AN IDIOT. Because you made it clear you what you wanted and she didn’t understand you.

You wouldn’t accept this in real life, so why are you accepting this with eCommerce websites? Because you’re used to it? That’s just ridiculous, especially when your eCommerce Site Search has the ability to understand the entire intent and context of your request.

If you’re using the right technology…

Natural Language/Semantic Search has been around for years, but has not gained steam until fairly recently with IBM Watson and Siri on the iPhone. It’s a SMARTER and FASTER search than Keyword, and can understand long-tail searches, price constraints, and synonyms.  Flip-flops, sandals, thongs, slippers are all the same thing, you know it, I know it, your search box should know it.

It’s time to stop accepting below-average as the norm. Upgrade your eCommerce Site Search to a Natural Language Engine. EasyAsk has done wonders with companies Large (Lands’ End) and small (Schuler Shoes).

Take a look for yourself and see what can be accomplished with the right Searchandising tool.

The post If Your Search Box Was a Personal Shopper, Would You Fire It? appeared first on EasyAsk.

Therefore, it’s a reasonable question to ask: “What changes should I make in search at my commerce site to keep pace with customer expectations?” Beyond keeping pace with expectations, there is another even more important reason to invest in semantic search on your site — increased conversion rate. Analysis of Neilsen netRatings conversion rate studies across similar e-commerce sites has not only confirmed the impact of natural language semantic search, it has actually measured it!

What is Semantic Search?
The literal definition of semantic search is searching on meaning rather than searching on words. Google is now knocking at the door of semantic search by associating word groups as concepts. If some people search on “beach sandals” and other people search on “beach flip-flops”, while both groups click to show interest in the same item set, then the concept “sandal” and “flip-flop” may be related. The distillation of words into concepts is one part of the greater field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Searching on concepts in their various forms delivers more complete results and is more tolerant of user search variations. As you have seen, semantic search is quite valuable – but there is more power available when you go deeper using more NLP techniques.

A semantic search with deeper NLP (let’s call this Natural Language Search, or NLS) support brings even more converting power to a commerce site. Lets look at these two commerce searches, “return policy” and “sweaters under $100”. Searching all your product descriptions for the words “return” and “policy” will clearly lead to ridiculous results. Clearly, the intent of this search is to display your policy on returns – treating this as a phrase and recognizing its special nature are important to the shopper, and easy with NLS.

Similarly, treating “under $100” as a keyword search will yield undesirable results. The intent of the user is to restrict the products based on price. Recognizing that “$100” is not a word, but rather a price requires something smarter than a keyword search. This occurs in other forms when the user wants to express a range restriction, not just on price, but any other numerical product attribute such as length, weight or wattage.

Units of measure commonly stump keyword search engines. For example, keyword searching for “12 volt 24 amp motor” will unfortunately return all motors with 12 or a 24 anywhere in the description. Thus, both 24 volt 12 amp motors as well as 24 watt .5 amp motors with a 12″ shaft will be shown! If your site gets lots of dimensional/size searches, the capabilities of NLS is absolutely critical. A semantic search with NLP is aware of units of measure, such as “volt”, “v” or “amp”, “A”. This unit of measure awareness automatically creates a phrase around “12 volt”, and to include searches on variations like “12V” or “12 V”. When a shopper searches for “Nike size 10”, NLS will recognize that “size” is an attribute with numeric values & therefore select the products with “size=10”. These capabilities impact countless unique searches that would otherwise stump almost all search engines.

These examples illustrate how easy it is for dumb keyword searches to yield embarrassing results. Have you ever searched a site only to see hundreds of irrelevant results? This not only reflects poorly on your brand, but can actually cause you to lose customers! Nearly all of us have had the experience of getting such poor results from a search on a commerce site. We get frustrated and leave the site altogether to buy from another site. This illustrates how improving search can improve conversion rate.

In order to measure the correlation between semantic search and conversion rate, we used Nielsen netRatings to compare the conversion rates of sites that were similar except for their use of semantic search. We compared sites for catalog companies and non-catalog companies separately. In both groups, the sites using semantic NLP search had about 20% higher conversion rate than the sites using keyword search. Of course, there are many other phenomena that impact conversion rate, but these would generally balance out across all the groups. Furthermore, the 20% improvement is consistent with the uplift we see when customers switch from keyword search to semantic search. Details of the Nielsen study are available on request.

Google is moving the world towards semantic search. Eventually user expectations will demand it from your commerce site as well. Switch sooner rather than later – you’re leaving money on the table every day until you make the switch!

The post Intelligent Search: What Google’s New “Semantic Search” Means for Search on your e-Commerce Site appeared first on EasyAsk.

EasyAsk, the leading provider of natural language solutions and technology, and Explore Consulting, a professional services company that provides innovative technology solutions for managing business data and a cost-effective approach to completely outsourced IT in the cloud, today announced a partnership to deliver natural language e-commerce solutions to retailers using the NetSuite e-commerce platform. Additionally, the companies announced a successful deployment at Fusion Beads (www.fusionbeads.com), an online store offering a wide selection of products and information to the beading community.

“The Fusion Bead deployment is a good example of what the Explore Consulting and EasyAsk partnership is aimed at providing,” says Steve Jones, CEO of Explore Consulting. “The partnership offers all types of e-commerce retailers the most advanced search and navigation and intuitive merchandising tools – cost-effectively and very quickly – especially on the NetSuite platform.”

EasyAsk’s NetSuite integration works from within the NetSuite pages, ensuring that page content is search engine friendly and utilizes the item records in NetSuite accounts to maintain centralization of data. Item attributes are configured in NetSuite and the EasyAsk Business Studio is used to configure search and navigation rules based on the attributes a merchandiser wants to use. EasyAsk is similarly tightly integrated with Magento, as well as other popular e-commerce platforms.

After selecting NetSuite as a new e-commerce platform, Fusion Beads turned to Explore Consulting and EasyAsk because they wanted to make it easier for their customers to navigate the wide range of products offered through their website – more than 50,000 items. Not only does Fusion Beads offer a lot of products, but they also catalog a tremendous amount of product and project data to ensure their customers are getting what they need. With the EasyAsk solution, Fusion Beads can now configure down to the item level the product attributes that should be used for search and navigation from over 600 custom item fields they currently use.

“We turned to NetSuite when the Fusion Beads Website became too large to maintain manually,” said Gunilla Eriksson, Director of Online Operations at Fusion Beads. “Additionally, we needed EasyAsk to help us manage search and navigation with our large product catalog and to display, in parallel, relevant projects ideas to our customers. Now shoppers can own their own search and view projects and products in one page. People love it and we love it. It works so much easier.”

“EasyAsk is very excited about the Explore Consulting partnership and the value we are adding at Fusion Beads,” said Marc Schnabolk, VP of Sales and Business Development at EasyAsk. “Explore will help us deliver the EasyAsk eCommerce search and merchandising solutions throughout the NetSuite user-base – both on-premise or as a service (SaaS). We are offering unique capabilities, including intuitive natural language search, relaxation, spell correction, integrated faceted navigation, easy to use merchandising tools and advanced analytics. EasyAsk and Explore Consulting are perfectly aligned in their vision to help Internet retailers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase e-commerce revenue.”

About Explore Consulting
Based in Bellevue, Wash., Explore Consulting was founded in 2001 and is a professional services company dedicated to providing innovative and cost-effective solutions for their customers’ database and IT systems needs. With a heavy focus on SaaS web-based business systems like NetSuite (NYSE: N) and Amazon Webstore, Explore has developed industry-leading PC and mobile platforms for seamless data integration in the Cloud. Additionally, Explore develops custom solutions ranging from eCommerce web stores that are fully integrated to back-office systems to highly specialized business applications written in Microsoft’s .Net and SQL platforms. Explore was recently ranked among Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies for four straight years as well as the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies three years running. Explore Consulting is the largest NetSuite Solution Provider and reseller in the Northwestern United States and was recently named as 2011 NetSuite Partner of the Year, Americas. For more information, visit www.exploreconsulting.com.

About EasyAsk
EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through the company’s ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results on demand. The EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boosts online revenue through increased conversion rates, better customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Quiri & Business Edition revolutionize enterprise decision-making, moving beyond traditional business intelligence solutions with easy, low-cost deployment and a unique natural language interface that extends access to information anywhere in the organization.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, Hartford Hospital, Ceridian, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and e-commerce operations daily.

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