Hello again! In my last post, I outlined the nature of e-commerce search in relation to the the traditional sales process. I outlined that a very important purpose of online retail search is to compensate for the loss of some of the more “human” elements of the sale process. Namely, the ability of the a sales person to pick up on verbal and non-verbal queues from a likely buyer and help guide this client or customer to the appropriate product or service. I illustrated that in order to be effective in this aspect of the sales process, a website’s search feature must be error-tolerant and user friendly. I promised that I would outline why Exorbyte Commerce is a step ahead of the competition in the small to medium e-commerce market. This post will address that promise!
Exorbyte has been in the enterprise search space for more than a decade. We are one of the elite providers of structured data search. Our enterprise solutions, like many others in this space, are too cost-prohibitive to appeal to the small and medium e-commerce market. But many of the features our enterprise solution offers are in dire need in just this space. We took it upon ourselves to find a solution, and Exorbyte Commerce is what we devised.
Exorbyte Commerce is a SaaS based, e-commerce specific version of our core enterprise product. The same proprietary algorithms that power our enterprise product, power it. Because of its SaaS model, we can offer this solution for a couple of thousand dollars a year, well in line with what search generally costs in this space. As you will see below, the functionality we provide is light years ahead our similarly priced competitors. Let’s examine this.
I will use one of our latest clients, a flower shop called Fiori Belli, to illustrate my point. Go to, http://outlet.fioribelli.com/search/search.aspx, and use the search query, “silver.” You’ll notice that we auto-complete the query and show about 8 products from the site’s product catalog. If, by chance, you find your product in the autocomplete, you can go directly to the item’s product page, and buy the item in 3 or 4 clicks (as opposed to 10 or more if you had to browser through search results for it). More importantly, please experiment with misspellings of the word “silver”. Because of the proprietary algorithms we’ve devised, it does not matter if you type, “silber”, “xilver”, ”silvar”, “sliver” or any number of other misspellings, we will find the appropriate products and allow the customer to purchase the product in a very quick manner.
Let’s say that you can’t find your product in the autocomplete and have to go to the search page, as I have done here: http://outlet.fioribelli.com/search/search.aspx#q%3Dsilber. You’ll notice that you can refine your search by facets like “category”, “brand”, or “price” (these facets are customizable, if your catalog is more complex, by the way). If you click on some of these refinements, you’ll notice that we update the search results on the fly, the page does not have to reload (using AJAX technology). Again, this is all geared at getting your customers to the item they are looking for, and to the checkout, as fast and as easily as possible. This maximizes their probability of buying from you and not the competition.
Another issue important to the small to medium e-commerce site owner is ease-of-implementation. We have found that many owners of these sites are extremely pressed for time, and wear many hats within their organizations. They may be the tech person, the sales person, the accountant, and the marketing person, et cetera, for their site! Because of this, a very time consuming integration process is something they just can’t handle. At Exorbyte Commerce, we’ve addressed this, too! For example, if you have a Yahoo! Small Business store (formerly Yahoo! Stores), all you have to do to integrate this product is cut and paste about 20 lines of JavaScript in the <head> tag of your site. It’s literally less than 10 minutes of work, our servers do the rest. Implementation remains this easy for most of the leading e-commerce platforms on the market today, hosted or not.
Exorbyte Commerce, through its SaaS solution, has found a way to provide enterprise class search for a couple of thousand dollars a year, and has found a way to make the integration process manageable for even the most thinly spread shop owner. I encourage you to look at the competition in this space, and see if they provide true, error tolerant search, that is as easy to implement as we are! I think you’ll find that we provide an exceptional, game changing product!
