Posts Tagged ‘eCommerce’
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Exorbyte just released some news from our customers which makes us quite proud. Conversion increases of up to 45%. That’s impressive by any count. Conversion rates are the ratio of buyers to visitors to an online store. Typically retailers with 10% are pretty happy. Even 5% is acceptable, which would mean that 1 in 20 visitors to a store leaves a buyer. In such a case, a retailer experiencing a 10% increase would see its conversion rate go up to 14.5% after some improvements, such as implementing Exorbyte Commerce.
Now, the question remains, how could Exorbyte Commerce generate such an improvement in conversion rates? Rather than listing our product features which you can view on our site, let’s answer this question from the retailer’s point-of-view. The table below lists a number of features which retailers are advised to pay particular attention to when engaging in Conversions Rate Optimization (CRO). For each of these CRO tactics, Exorbyte Commerce provides an innovative solution.
| CRO TACTICS |
DESCRIPTION |
HOW DOES EXORBYTE COMMERCE RESPONDS? |
| Identify and Pursue Lost Opportunities |
Do you know why your visitors leave without buying? Making conjectures about why visitors leave without buying doesn’t help you. In the real world store owners talk to their clerks, cashiers, and sales staff to find out what sells and what doesn’t. |
Exorbyte Commerce introduces actionable reports about what users search for, what they find, what they don’t find. Retailers can finally find out what people are searching for and not finding. There are many easily identifiable lost opportunities for which Exorbyte Commerce Ranking and Alias rules can become an immediate answer. No need for experts and guesswork anymore. |
| Catch Visitors Before Flight |
Countless online store surveys show how short the attention span of visitors is. In a matter of seconds retailers have a chance to catch a visitor’s attention or never to see a transaction from them. |
The Exorbyte Commerce Autocomplete which features product pictures, prices, categories, and other relevant data based on the first couple of characters typed will instantly catch users attention. Do not doubt the search box is the place to catch a user’s attention. This is the moment of truth for online retail. |
| Make Your Products Visible |
Online stores can easily feature hundreds of thousands of products. They have no floor space limitations like in the brick-and-mortar world. How do you make sure your products are found when you carry thousands of them. |
Exorbyte Commerce always gets users to the product of their choice because its proprietary search engine is far better at decreasing the number of fruitless searches and at ranking relevant search results than any other search engine in the market. |
| Define and Improve Landing Pages |
Landing pages are pages that feature products, promos, marketing programs that may have a stronger visitor appeal than single product pages, pages about store’s policies or the store’s transcriptional process. Landing pages could be about seasonal promotions, an exclusive brand that the store carries, etc. They get picked up easily by web search engines but they don’t show in the store’s search results. |
With Target Pages Exorbyte Commerce allows online retailers to add new landing pages anytime they want. They can be associated with keywords of their choice and will be featured in the site search results when a user’s query seems relevant. |
| Increase Page Load Speed |
Slow stores do not fare well with online visitors. They expect fast page loading times. That’s a known fact. However, it is challenging to balance this requirement with that of featuring rich content like lengthy descriptions, suggestions, large images, etc. |
Exorbyte Commerce is an AJAX-based application. It means that interacting with the Exorbyte Commerce interface users won’t wait for pages to re-load. The page’s contents change on-the-fly in a fraction of a second and there is never a delay. Rather than frustrated and impatient, users are surprised and in awe at the speed and quality of their experience. |
| Reduce Clutter and Messy Interfaces |
Messy pages, clutter, and too many choices almost guarantees visitor flight. Beyond a certain point, information overload pushes visitors to leave so they can breathe the fresh air of a lighter store design somewhere else. |
Exorbyte Commerce’s interface is light and well organized. It is the fruit of years of experience with online retail. We have reduced the presence of buttons, images, text, and other elements to an elegant set of well recognizable tools which visitors will feel are natural and relevant. |
| Make the Process Simple and Natural |
Don’t re-invent the wheel. Users don’t expect your store to redefine the process of finding and buying products on the web. They want a simple and natural experience that feels familiar. Unfamiliarity breeds risk and uncertainty in the minds of consumers. Buyers like control and a risk-less environment to make their purchases. |
Exorbyte Commerce follows the principles of good user interface design with simple, yet fast and sophisticated tools that will feel all but new to visitors. We take the best of what we have learned with some of the largest online retailers we have done work for and bring it to your store. |
| Use Images Whenever Possible |
Nothing replaces a good quality image in terms of removing the uncertainty that comes with buying a product off a strange new store. Seeing is believing. |
Exorbyte Commerce automatically pulls images from your store catalog and features them in search and suggestions. |
Tell us what you do to improve conversions and how much quality search factors into your conversion maximization efforts.
Tags: conversion rates, conversions, CRO, eCommerce, online retail, shop search, shops, site search, store search
Posted in Exorbyte, Merchandising, Technology, Usability, eCommerce | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
An excellent article on the BBC caught our attention this summer. Charles Duncombe, a Brtish ecommerce entrepreneur, says an analysis of his website metrics shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been “shocked at the poor quality of written English”. Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website’s credibility, he says. Worse many site search engines for online stores are incapable of finding a product based on a misspelled query of if a company employee has misspelled a product’s name or description.
Needless to say, only a store search engine capable of cutting through misspelled queries, data, typos and all the unexpected inputs from visitors is capable of guaranteeing satisfied buyers and maximized revenue. Exorbyte Commerce does that better than any other store search engine.
See the article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14130854
Tags: commerce search, conversions, eCommerce, misspellings, online store, revenue conversion, revenues, search, search engines, spelling, typos
Posted in Merchandising, Technology, Usability, eCommerce | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Why do it?
This previous article about the long tail of search in ecommerce makes already a good case for better site search in ecommerce sites. This said, it is also important to remind people that past studies have shown that about half of all visitors gravitate straight to the search box. They don’t waste their time browsing for products to buy in the directory structures of your store catalog’s categories, they want something specific and Google has taught them to find this with search. This little roundup of the state of industry aims to show you where we think ecommerce search engine products are coming from and where they are going.
What is it?
The Search Legacy
Search software has been all the rage since the late 90s. When I worked for Netscape, and later Infoseek, I saw the search software industry explode and split into multiple major segments. The Internet search segment (Google, and co.) found pursued growth opportunities in media with added value portals and other advertising-supported business models. The cost of entry in this category became so high eventually, however, that the late arrival of Google on the Web was seen as a miracle-of-sorts. Search software editors on the other hand kept sprouting with new products and new approaches.
Some search products were outgrowth of web search ventures: Ultraseek, Inktomi, Google Appliance, etc. Others aimed straight at the enterprise with a mix of full-text search tools and database and ERP connectors (Endeca, Microsoft/Fast, Autonomy, SLI, etc.).
While that was happening no-one paid too much attention to the relatively small ecommerce opportunities. Enterprise search contracts often started at around $250K (sometimes yearly). So why focusing on ecommerce where the only enterprise-size businesses (eBay, Amazon, and a few others) mostly hired their own R&D and software development staff.
The Ecommerce Legacy
Strangely enough (as Tobi Lütke the founder of Shopify pertinently explains here) search remained anafterthought for most of the ecommerce software developers. Their initial focus was to automate the brick-and-mortar processes of the real world through advanced database powered applications. They never envisioned the volume of traffic that some ecommerce properties see these days and the very small portion of visitors, surfers, and product researchers who actually complete transactions.
Many ecommerce platforms were developed based on a mix of full-text search technology (crawler-indexer). These technologies are just not what the ecommerce platforms need because their data (products, services, customers) is already structured in databases. Furthermore, the search results logic that presides over content (documents, web pages) is very different from the way a shopper behaves with the catalog of an online store. Retailers need ways to serve search results that help the visitors find what they want to search for. Not just results to a well-prepared query. Online merchants also need to cross-sell, cross-promote, and present visitors with as many relevant opportunities to transact as possible.
What is Site Search for Ecommerce?
So at the end of the day, running simple queries against a database just isn’t enough anymore for powerful ecommerce search experiences. What is needed in terms of features is a mix of the following features:
- a powerful structured data search facility which can handle fast recall with error-tolerance like:
- misspellings
- synonyms
- taxonomies (related terms, catagories, facets, etc.)
- advanced interfaces like real-time AJAX search results controls and autocompletes (like the Google Suggest)
- Search Reporting and Analytics to allow continuous improvement of catalog inventory and descriptions to match highly sought after products (this data also needs to be exportable to third party business intelligence tools like Google Analytics or Omniture)
- advanced search-powered merchandising modules like “related products”, “contextual promos”, “you might also like” which can only get better if they are based on the same error-tolerant features cited above
- full-text search for non-catalog content on the store’s web site (web pages, support pages, corporate content, etc.)
What’s Ecommerce Search made of These Days?
Search-only offerings:
- Exorbyte Commerce
- Endeca
- Omniture / Mercado
- Celebros
- SLI
- Fast
- Nextopia
- Baynote
- Shoptivate
Ecommerce platforms with better-than-average search features:
- Prestashop
- Volusion
- Demandware (not on all stores)
What features and technologies?
Clearly, at Exorbyte, we have taken one orientation which we firmly believe in. Here are some of the features we believe every search app should offer to ecommerce users:
- a proprietary search engine that allows high error tolerance, very fast recall (for autocomplete) and phonetic, edit distance, and more matching algorithms
- merchandising features for easy control of search ranking, faceted search, and more.
- advanced reporting showing what people are search for, what they are finding, what they are not finding and allowing conversion tracking
- a system that allows for multilingual product data search (any language for product catalog data, any language for search matching logic above)
- hosted software-as-a-service mode for delivery (considerably more affordable for the online retailer)
- complete integration using AJAX technology ( no more jumping to a special domain or complex DNS integrations, search is delivered as if it lived on the store’s own servers)
- easy customization for special custom data attributes about products for rich catalogs and faceted search
So what do you think? Please comment.
Tags: conversion rates, eCommerce, factfinder, industry, merchants, nextopia, online retail, product catalog, revenues, search, search engines, shoptivate, sli, sli systems, transactions
Posted in Exorbyte, eCommerce | No Comments »
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
If you are familiar with exorbyte, you have read me and others boasting our unique error tolerance again and again and you may still wonder why this is so important to ecommerce. This is why: The “Long Tail of Search”
Search Logs Blog.exorbyte.com
The term “Long Tail” is recognized as a key concept to grasp the differences between the main categories of search queries online users submit into any search engine, on an online store or even a web search engine like google.com. The main idea behind the “Long Tail” is that while most people look at the top of a list of search logs (list of all search queries submitted by users on a web site during a given period – see chart above), the real important terms lie at the bottom of that list in what’s also called “The Long Tail”. The bottom of that list is what matters because that’s where most of the search queries lie. In many search engines on online and elsewhere the long tail is reported to be over 80% of the search queries for any given period. In other words, 80% of all queries made into the search engine are unique, while 20% are popular queries.
The Long Tail of Search
The first lesson here is that popularity doesn’t matter as much as some would like you to think. If you are selling lots of products, which most online stores are (because they can – no floor space limits, drop shippers, etc.), then you care about selling all these products not just the same few popular products over and over again. Inventorying is costly.
The second and most important lesson for Exorbyte was that many long tail search queries are unique because they contain typos, misspellings, phonetic spellings, and related but not matching queries. This is where error tolerance comes in. We can match more of these search queries than any other search engine. And this translates into more sales. Many of our customers report improvement of 5% to 20% of their conversion rates after implementing Exorbyte Commerce for instance. It’s that simple! So if you have an online store, wait no longer, try us out, it’s free, takes 10 minutes to install, 10 minutes to remove and it will change your business performance and the satisfaction level of your customers forever.
High conversions are a direct result of the wide search query coverage of Exorbyte's proprietary search technology
Tags: conversions, eCommerce, long tail, online store, popular, popularity, query frequency, revenue, search, search distribution
Posted in Merchandising, eCommerce | 6 Comments »
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Check out this important article by Adam Audette closing a year of intense changes in the search engine industry with great impact for store owners.
3 Important Ecommerce Trends To Watch.
Enjoy!
Tags: eCommerce, online retail, online store, online stores, search, seo
Posted in eCommerce | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
There comes a time in every new industry where the players can’t rely on the hype and land grabbing tactics anymore to ensure easy profits.
I think the online retail industry is definitely well into such a stage now. It’s becoming virtually impossible to build a business around ecommerce alone if you don’t have exclusivity around a product, a territory, or a unique service angle (Zappos) which really sets you apart. Everyone else is left to partner and compete at the same time with the top ecommerce destinations (Amazon, eBay, Shopping.com, Google Shopping, etc.). Some succeed for a while with increasingly convoluted affiliate-type automated marketing schemes. But building a loyal customer following is difficult.
Just like in the brick-and-mortar world when big box stores arrived decades ago, independent retailers have to catch up constantly with the leaders of the retail industry and they have become strangely dependent on them and threatened by them at the same time. They feed their products to Google, Shopping, or eBay, get visits in return but sometimes have to pay for them. Next time the same consumer searches for that product again, where does he go? Google again. So is it time to create better, more unique, more unforgettable ecommerce experiences on small online stores or what? If you don’t believe just ponder the following:
Ok. You get the idea. The ecommerce frontier is not a frontier anymore. Everyone or so has staked their claim. So how do you create opportunity in that kind of an environment? Precisely by forgetting about new territories and investing in what’s already available to you as a retailer: visitors. It’s not enough anymore to invest in SEO, adwords and product feeds. You want visitors in but no visitors out. Abandonment and bounces are your worst enemy. You need visitors in and buyers out. Because buyers come back. Because buyers are now in your customer database. What small retailers need are the same tools used by the largest players: advanced search, merchandising, and analytics to turn more visitors into loyal and satisfied customers, to improve conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
At Exorbyte, we have been helping top retailers with custom solutions for almost 10 years and we now bring the same automated enterprise tools and techniques to small retailers for free or just a small monthly subscription. Come see more at http://commerce.exorbyte.com. Every day or so, I talk to small retailers obsessed with product feeds, upset about paying the high fees charged by shopping.com, Shopzilla, or eBay, worried about Amazon’s or Google’s possible competitive threats to their business. There is only one way forward for them: use these dominant platforms to attract users but then offer them the best web store you can and make sure they leave satisfied so they can come back and buy again. Leave them no chance to leave without the product they came to search or the products they didn’t know you carried. Make product search better, faster, and more intelligent. Automate suggestions based on categories, trends, etc. Make sure you know what users are looking for and hat they are not finding. Learn to know your visitors like you know your neighbors.
To do so, you need much more than what the average ecommerce platform can offer alone. Whether you are using a hosted platform (Yahoo, Volusion, StoresOnline, Nexternal, etc.) or your own installed version of some shopping crt software (Zen Cart, Magento, OS commerce or other), we can help make your search, reporting and merchandising capability state-of-the-art in just under an hour without any complex integration. Come see more at http://commerce.exorbyte.com.
Tags: amazon, competition, ebay, eCommerce, Exorbyte, findability, Merchandising, nextopia, online retail, online stores, product findability, search, search engines, top 100, top 500
Posted in Business, Exorbyte, Industries, Search, Software, Technology, Usability, eCommerce | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
It’s well know travel ecommerce is a price game. You either have the lowest price or you are out. But there is a another big success factor hiding behind the price obsession of online travel vendors: usability. For us at Exorbyte, the term “usability” associated with the large structured databases of travel products that the industry builds its online business on, means we can help.
I believe that the sheer complexity of the travel process makes usability a primary focus for travel customers. If you are buying a book on a poorly designed online store, all you risk is probably 2 or 3 clicks more until you figure our how to find, order and pay for your book. On a travel site, things can get 10 times uglier: flights, layovers, hotel descriptions, multi-airline trips, car rental insurance, rewards program preferences, dates, times, and countless other parameters factored in a complex trip design. That probably why Exorbyte is regularly approached by travel companies looking for a solution to complex catalog search problems. We have designed several solutions for the travel industry that I describe below.
Online Travel Bounce Graph
In an early 2010 survey of online travel stores (PhoCusWright – see right) high prices were the main driver to visitor bouncing off the sites. However, a long list of other reasons follow (not wanting to register, slow sites, frustration, information clutter, confusion, site crash, etc.) of which most could be defined by the term “bad usability”.
Gomez online travel loyalty
Loyalty is in short supply on the buyers side. Travel site operators have learned the hard way that users rarely give them more than a couple of chances to impress with their usability. 36% of users report in another study by Gomez (see above) in January this year that they wouldn’t stick around after a couple of bad usability experiences. 17% would even switch after the first failure. That’s an impatient bunch of people. If you travel once-in-a-while you can equate this phenomenon to the low tolerance for bad service and tendency to shout at ground airlines staff which airport travelers demonstrate when a flight is late or overbooked. At least, online they can just switch to a different vendor. So they do.
We have dabbled in travel usability at Exorbyte for a while. Here is an example of a European travel site that uses our intelligent autocomplete to set millions of airport transfer pick-up and drop-off locations: http://hotelshuttle.com/
See also the video below of one of our nicer travel UIs. One of the most neglected area is the sales of complex packages. As a user of sites like LastMinute you could think that the feeling of clutter and lack of context is purposeful because most packages are unsold low quality items for other travel agencies. However, this is often far from the truth. If you think advanced flight search is a big barrier to the free flow of traffic towards purchasing the ideal product (not sure about the exact name or ATA code for an airport for example), imagine what it looks like when the form is supposed to include parameters for flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, airport transfers, etc. All-in-one. That’s what we have been working with L’Tur (LastMinute’s biggest competitor in Europe) to resolve using a very advanced autocomplete we called FlexSearch. We must admit to failing to convince L’Tur to keep this up at their site because the conversion rate performance wasn’t proved but if you know anything about usability, you’ll enjoy and dream of the possibilities. See video below.
Tags: autocomplete, eCommerce, internet, online, price, search, travel, Usability
Posted in Banking, Business, Exorbyte, Government, Industries, Insurance, Online Travel, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Seth Godin (http://www.sethgodin.com) just posted a great little post on his blog today: The Sales You Don’t Make
There is not much I need to add to Seth’s post because at Exorbyte we know why many online stores see their visitor to buyer ratio remain terribly low. And also because we agree 150% with the reasons outlined by Seth: visitors don’t buy what they can’t find. Our search engine for online stores (http://commerce.exorbyte.com) is getting great interest and just about every store owner or operator we talk to admits to spending most of their marketing dollars in attracting visitors, not in converting them in buyers.
So, thanks Seth for putting in a few words what we have from the back office of our customer’s shops: Every store deserves the advanced search features which the largest buy at great expense. It doesn’t need to be expensive. We’ll prove it. And it should always pay for itself because if your search is error-tolerant, fast, maintenance-free and if you get great search analytics, you will see your conversion rates and revenues increase.
And by the way, research has proven this already. See one of our very first posts here: Low hanging fruit for most online stores better search features.
Tags: conversion, eCommerce, online retail, online stores, sales, search, search engine, search results, set godin
Posted in Business, eCommerce | No Comments »
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Ecommerce has been one of the earliest identified benefits of the Internet along with email, web pages, and few other early features that engendered large investments in the late 90s. Tobi Lütke, CEO of the now famous ecommerce platform Shopify, puts it this way:
…my theory of what happened in the ecommerce industry is that Netscape is to blame. (…)
When Netscape filed for the first big Internet IPO (mid-1990s) they needed to convince Wall Street and the rest of the world that the Internet would be successful. (…) People understood commerce, everyone sees it around them every day, so Netscape convinced the world that the Internet would be big because of ecommerce. They did such a good job of convincing everyone that a lot of companies were created to supply the software for this imminent gold rush.
This meant that most software in the ecommerce space was written in the 90s, long before we figured out how to make a good web application. (…)
The net result is that you have two things: a lot of merchants with post traumatic ecommerce stress syndrome, and a lot of software that is stagnant because of lack of growth. This nuclear winter existed until well into the last decade.
(source: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2378-qa-with-tobias-ltke-of-shopify)
Toby might be right or wrong but a quick look around the online retail industry in search of great search software does lead one to wonder how neglected this key feature of online stores and shopping platforms seems to be. Amazon and eBay had decent search infrastructures and UIs but as one who worked with some of these large ecommerce organizations to better their search, I can tell you two things:
- I can count on one hand the companies that can afford the massive investments they have chosen to make in this area
- The results are not necessarily impressive. In many cases the search experience is not optimized, leading to dead ends, zero results searches, useless suggestions, and rarely capable of locating rare products without some unusual persistence.
That’s one of the several reasons why we are so excited about Exorbyte Commerce Search and Autocomplete (if you are in the UK: http://commerce.exorbyte.co.uk):
- There are not many choices for advanced product catalog search features like what we offer with our SaaS ecommerce search add-ons for existing online stores.
- It works with many ecommerce platforms (hosted or installed).
- It’s affordable because we mutualized the resources across many customers.
- It’s installed in minutes.
- It comes with amazing performance: searching millions of products with sub-10 milliseconds response times.
- Error-tolerance: ability to automatically correct spelling mistakes and entry errors, in any language, based on on actual products available in your catalog.
- Autocomplete feature: allows to install on top of your existing search engine and helps people find what they are searching for.
- Advanced reporting allows you to see what people are looking for, what they find, whith what keywords, what’s missing from your stores, etc.
incremental search and autocomplete for ecommerce
It’s simple to understand the business goal here: visitors who find products are more likely to buy them, thus enhancing conversion rates and growing revenues. Additionally, it’s easy to understand how, with tens of thousands of small and medium online stores in the US, there is a huge market for these improved search features. Users have been educated by Google to be used to great search software and they now expect it everywhere. So, boost your store’s revenue with Exorbyte Commerce Search and Autocomplete (if you are in the UK: http://commerce.exorbyte.co.uk).
Tags: auto-suggest, autocomplete, autosuggest, commerce search, eCommerce, google suggest, online retail, online store, search, suggest, typeahead
Posted in Business, Technology, eCommerce | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
We just launched the public beta version of Exorbyte Commerce Search and Autocomplete (if you are in the UK: http://commerce.exorbyte.co.uk). It’s a hosted SaaS monthly subscription version of our popular search products (MatchMaker and SearchNavigator) especially designed for ecommerce.
We also serve a large selection of other industries with the same core products for search within structured data. However we chose ecommerce, and we did so on purpose. There is plenty of data showing how many online stores are behind in terms of satisfying users with better search features to help them find what they want to buy. Here are some of the reasons why Exorbyte Commerce is worth many times the very short time (only minutes) setting up its free trial requires:
While ecommerce catalogs are structured database tables, many online stores still use lame full-text search engines or slow database queries to provide catalog search results to their users. This is a real problem for the following reasons:
- Full-text search engines usually have to crawl pages to index the data, making the update mechanism of search results slow and often out-of-date (not reflecting frequent changes in inventory levels, prices, and descriptions retail database undergo daily).
- Database queries and full-text queries are simply not capable of handling advanced fuzzy search like structured data or database indexing engines can. Too slow or simply impossible to implement.
Just try to build an advanced multi-field fuzzy search facility for a database of millions of SKUs (ex: online travel store, industrial parts, online electronics store, etc.) and keep it fast (under 10ms round trip) using a database query or full text search engine! Have fun and let us know if you want tips on how to make it work with a different approach.
Something that would be much better, much simpler, much faster and much more natural. An ecommerce search system that yeilds more conversions. Simply a system that guesses what you want to find even if you don’t know what it’s called: That is what we strive for every day at Exorbyte! What do you think?
Tags: better search, conversion rates, eCommerce, hosted, metrics, online retail, online store, plugin, saas, search, software, stats, subscription, user flight
Posted in Business, eCommerce | 1 Comment »
