If you were unable to attend our webinar on Thursday you can watch the recording from the Merchant Advantage website.

Best Practices for CSE Marketing and Site Search
Michael Lambert, CEO, Merchant Advantage & Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems
The 30-minute webinar was held on Thursday Feb 19, 2009.

By watching this webinar you will learn:

• How Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) can bring you new customers – without bringing you tech hassles.
• How to select the most effective CSE’s for YOUR business out of the hundreds out there.
• How to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of your CSE choices and make changes in real time.
• How to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes a site visitor to find what they’re looking for.
• How to implement a system that learns from your visitors’ behavior over time so that you can better meet (and anticipate) their needs.
• How to list products in their predicted order of popularity and automatically optimize pages for search engine spiders.

Watch Webinar Now

I spotted a post by Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow listing the top 10 online retailers by conversion rate. First of all – I was pleased to see three SLI customers in the list – FTD, Blair.com and Drs Foster and Smith.  Before you start comparing your conversion rate to these sites and trying to work out why you can’t achieve anything like this you need to look at the types of online retailer that have made the podium here.

Schwan’s - an online grocery store will have a lot of loyal customers who buy their groceries every week. These people will have a conversion rate of close to 100% and so will skew the numbers. Similarly Drs Foster and Smith will have many loyal customers who regularly buy pet supplies.

On the other hand catalogers like Blair will have visitors who have already decided to buy based on the information in the catalog. In this case the website is functioning as an order taking system. It doesn’t have to do a great job of attracting people to the site and compelling them to purchase. The catalog has already done that. One small site search tip here – if people type a catalog number into the search box then you should navigate directly to the product page. This can help conversions because it saves a step (you don’t have to view the search results page and click on the product).

Of course the retailer you should be paying close attention is Amazon. In the ecommerce podcast I usually ask retailers for an example of a site they particularly admire. Amazon is by far and away the most common answer. They are undoubtedly the gold standard by which to measure yourselves.

Next week we’re heading down to Phoenix, AZ for the eTail West 2009 conference.

This event  is one of the largest conferences in the ecommerce industry and has an impressive list of speakers as well as a good mix of vendors.

When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks.  As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.

In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.

All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.

Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search  sway-control:

1. Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
   
2. They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
   
3. They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it

SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If  you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.

Yesterday we released a podcast interview with our customer Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty. During this interview Ian talks about how he started off as a stock boy while he was at school and is now General Manager.

Century Novelty started with a physical store in 1951 but is now is exclusively online. Focusing solely on their online store has given them some valuable experience. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Ian share some of the secrets he has discovered from this experience.

Also see our press release which summarises the ROI Century Novelty achieved from using SLI’s Learning Search and Site Champion services.

Merchant Advantage and SLI Systems are hosting a webinar this week on Best Practices for CSE Marketing and Site Search.

The 30-minute webinar will be held Thursday Feb 19, 2009 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern.

By participating in this webinar, you will learn:

• How Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) can bring you new customers – without bringing you tech hassles.
• How to select the most effective CSE’s for YOUR business out of the hundreds out there.
• How to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of your CSE choices and make changes in real time.
• How to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes a site visitor to find what they’re looking for.
• How to implement a system that learns from your visitors’ behavior over time so that you can better meet (and anticipate) their needs.
• How to list products in their predicted order of popularity and automatically optimize pages for search engine spiders.

Register Now

Last week I spotted an interesting blog post by Anna Skaya and Adam Salamon – over at Bazaarvoice. They described how our UK based customer Boden is using social tags to enhance their site search. I’ve been a fan of integrating ratings and reviews with site search for some time and I think the idea of using social tags as refinements is a good one. If you’re using social tags I recommend you try surfacing them in your search.

If you’re an SLI customer then this is easy to try – the social tags are passed via the feed we receive from Bazaarvoice just ask your SLI customer success manager and they’ll make it happen.

This week SLI is exhibiting at the SMX West Conference. The event is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center which is nice as its only 15 minutes from our office.

SLI is exhibiting plus we are running a Theatre Presentation -Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:20am on Internal Search & Navigation Best Practices & Their Impact on SEO.

We have just released an interview with the CEO and founder of our partner DMinSITE, Larry Kavanagh. Larry talks about their SaaS ecommerce platform for catalogers and the experience they have gained from the 78 sites that they run. This includes information about improvements they made to the checkout process of one of their customers that increased their conversion rate by 16%.

Larry also talks about their approach to email marketing, in particular about how sending less emails to those who don’t open them can improve deliverability to all recipients. I found the conversation informative – I hope you do too.