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!
Posts Tagged ‘search’
3 Important Ecommerce Trends To Watch
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010Usability is the Key to eCommerce Growth
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010There 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.
Travel Sites are Usability Centric or Dead
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010It’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.
The Sales That You Will Make
Thursday, October 21st, 2010Seth 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.
Did You Mean: Gqqgle? Very Bad Typos in Google Suggestions.
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010Google suggests horribly misspelled query through the “Did you mean” feature on their results pages. Apparently this happens when misspelling and common keyboard typos co-occur. Is this good practice? What do you think?
I don’t want to upset anyone at Google. They do a great job. As we often say at Exorbyte, they have developed a fantastic search engine for the web and large document repositories, but it’s far from perfect. It needs to cater for so many use cases, user behaviors, expectations, content formats, etc. etc. that it seems sometimes to stumble on itself in its eternal quest for search results quality refinements without performance costs. The following is a good example.
I ran into an interesting bug in the Google “did you mean” functionality which suggests better queries to users when queries seem obviously misspelled, typos, or erroneous entries. The code that generates these suggestions is all but a mystery. However, it’s pretty obvious that it is generated by a matching process between the user’s search query and a dataset containing popular search keywords, search phrases, and double-checks that there is indeed results in the Google index, or something of the sort.
Now, take a look at this: I did a search in French language for a the query “dictuionnqire frqncqis qnglqis” which if spelled correctly would read “dictionnaire francais anglais”. The source of my errors were twofolds:
- I use some French keyboards (AZERTY) and US-English keyboards (QWERTY) interchangeably but forgot to set my input language to English and therefore replaced all [A]s with [Q]s.
- I made one spelling mistake by introducing a [U] in the word “dictuionnaire” which is not supposed to be there (“dictionnaire”).
The query can be seen at:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=dictuionnqire+frqncqis+qnglqis
What’s bad about this is clearly that the query suggestion is quite clearly misspelled too (“Did you mean: dictionnqire frqncqis qnglqis Top 2 results shown“). What is more interesting is that it has one of the two errors above corrected though:
- the spelling mistake by introducing a [U] in the word “dictuionnaire” which is not supposed to be there (“dictionnaire”).
I would venture to say that what probably happens is that Google uses (among other methods):
- spell checking,
- and a common keyboard errors corresponding table (such as [A] and [Q] permutation between AZERTY and QWERTY keyboards).
The first error actually gets corrected in the suggestion but the second doesn’t. The little geniuses at Google just never thought or tested for the co-occurrence of both issues. Result is: the suggestion can be returned with a horrible set of typos.
The proof of this is that if the query is made with just typos and no misspelling, the “Did you mean” feature doesn’t kick in:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=dictuionnqire+frqncqis+qnglqis#hl=en&safe=off&q=dictionnqire+frqncqis+qnglqis&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=d3bae2c42dcb65aa
So what do you think about this? Tell us what your interpretation is.
Better Ecommerce Search for All Online Stores
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Ecommerce 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).
Low Hanging Fruit for Most Online Stores: Better Search Features
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010We 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:
- More than 47% of online shop visitors don’t become buyers because of poor search or navigation features.
“According to iPerceptions’ E-commerce Industry Report Q2 2009, 38.6% of the 360,000 or so visitors to the 160 websites tracked were in the research stage of the buying process, while just 17% were at the buying stage.iPerceptions was able to establish several reasons why visitors aren’t purchasing. The main reason was that visitors weren’t able to find what they were looking for (34%), while price and navigation/usability issues tied in second place (13%) followed by shipping policies (9%).
- In his book The Humane Interface, renowned user interface guru Jef Raskin compares incremental and delimited search: “With a delimited search, the computer waits for the user to type a pattern and delimit it, after which it is the user who waits while the computer does the search. When using a delimited search the user must guess, beforehand, how much of a pattern the computer needs to distinguish the desired target from other, similar targets. With an incremental search, he can tell when he has typed enough to disambiguate the desired instance, because the target appeared on the display.”
Jef Raskin goes on to say: “In spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches on the part of both designers and users, almost all interface-building tools make it easy to implement delimited searches and difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches.”
Jef Raskin even ventured to say in a footnote that search is either “incremental or excremental”. We kind of agree with him.
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?
