We have just released this interview with Ben Harness from Interflora UK.

Interflora is a little different than a lot of the retailers that I have talked to. Rather than having one or two distribution centres they have 1800 florists who put together the bouquets. This means they have people who are passionate about flowers (passionate enough to run a florist) who are ensuring the quality of the delivered product. Having this many people fulfilling their orders makes it a lot easier to handle their peaks during Mothers’ Day, Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

Ben is currently considering adding ratings and reviews to the Interflora site. They are also a little different from a lot of retailers in that most of the purchases on their site are gifts – so often the purchaser may never see the product they bought. This makes it a little hard to review – but they may be able to reflect the feedback they got – “Mum loved the flowers”. Another option they’re considering is encouraging the recipients to write reviews.

We will be at the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this week.  To find our more about the event check out http://www.searchmarketingexpo.com.au/.

Evan Schuman mentioned the idea of being able to search within an individual store - so you can see if your local store has the product you’re looking for. I like this idea and I would use it. There are a few ways it could be implemented.  It could be presented as a refinement in the search and navigation – so you could select a store from a drop down box. If there are many stores then this could be a little cumbersome so it may be nice to remember your local store – or use the visitor’s IP address to guess their location and show some local stores at the top of the drop down.

If you do allow people to select their local store (and you store this in a cookie for example) then when they do a normal search you could show the availability of the each product at their local store. This is one example of how you can personalize site search results.

One problem with this idea is often the people who are running the ecommerce store struggle to get recognition for the contribution they make to off line sales. A search within the store feature is only going encourage off line sales. If this applies to you then you’ll probably be reluctant to implement this type of feature – even though it may be better for your customers.

I know we’ve discussed this with some of our customers in the past – but I don’t think we’ve ever implemented it.

I promise this will be the last time I write about this fairly trivial feature about putting the focus on the search box….

In our February newsletter we ran a poll asking: “Do you think the cursor focus for a website should be on the search box?”. We’ll leave this open – but the results to date of this unscientific poll show the majority are in favor of it.

We also published this small video about this topic:

Yesterday, I was speaking with Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google after a lecture at the local University. One of the things I asked him about was tracking off line conversions. For our customers with bricks and mortar stores this is a common challenge.

Hal suggested one way of measuring off line conversions was to run a Google campaign and use the geotargeting options to exclude an area around a subset of your stores which can then be used as a control. You can then compare the in-store sales data for the control group to the others to measure the offline impact of the AdWords campaign.

This sounds like a good idea to me – it’s similar to the technique used to measure the impact of traditional advertising. I presume if you look at the proportion of your total traffic that came from the Google campaign then you can extrapolate to estimate the total offline sales contributed by your website. This is really useful information. I know a number of our customers struggle to get recognition for the contribution the website makes to offline sales. I’m sure it is significant.

You could run a similar trial with your email marketing – using the addresses of your customers who receive your newsletters to restrict the newsletter to certain geographies. 

On a kind of related note - I remember my father telling me that he always sold more chicken in the months when the TV ads were running. Thanks to YouTube you can see his chicken advert:

We have just posted our first interview with an Australian retailer: Luke Hilton from Dick Smith Electronics.

Dick Smithis part of Woolworths (ASX: WOW). DSE is Australia’s largest online electronics retailer and they have over 200 retail stores. Luke is the Web Manager at Dick Smith and in the interview he shares plenty of his experiences. I particularly like their viral promotion around the launch of the iPhone in Australia and their plans to introduce user generated support.

SLI is powering the search and navigation on the Dick Smith site. They have recently updated of their whole site including their search and navigation. I really like the way it looks. It starts with the auto complete functionality on their search box, on the search results page the facets are on the left hand side their are plenty of products above the fold, the prices are big and bold and the navigation has a similar look as the search. The search and navigation is all search engine friendly and it is helping to drive a lot of traffic to their site.

We are also powering the RSS feeds of the popular searches and the hottest products for their main categories. This is something a little different and is a service we developed for Dick Smith.

Luke says that their conversion rate has improved significantly since the release of their new look.

I saw an excellent write up about winning strategies for no results pages by Greg Nudelman. Greg includes plenty of examples of what does and doesn’t work.  I recommend reading it. Here is a list of some of the things that we do around the no results page.

First of all we try to reduce the number of times that the no results page is shown through the following techniques:

• The auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have results.
• We report on the search terms that have no results. Often this is caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. This can be remedied by either using that language on your site or adding synonyms. It can also indicate products/information that your visitors expect you to have that you don’t carry. You can use this information to help expand your product lines – based on what your visitors are asking for. Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty talks about doing this in this interview
• Similar to the Amazon example that Greg gives, we fail over if there are no results that contain all of the words in the query – we will show results that contain some of the words, with a message describing what we are doing. Note: Not everyone reads the message so in some cases this causes confusion.
  

On the no results page we will:

• show spelling suggestions using the Did you mean language. These suggestions are drawn from the language on the site
• show popular searches – I’m a fan of this
• show popular products – this can also cause confusion – visitors may not read the message that you have no results for their search term and assume that the popular products are the search results.
• show keyword specific banners – for example if there is a search term for a product that you no longer stock then a banner may be a good way of saying “we no longer carry this product range – here are some alternatives.”

As an aside – one of Greg’s examples that highlighted the ”Did you mean” functionality was a Google search for asdasdasdasdasdasddfgh. If you do that search – his page is the top result (undoubtedly this page will be in the results set shortly as well).

We’re heading over to Boston this week for the NEMOA Spring Conference. To find out more about this event and what the New England Mail Order Association is all about check out www.nemoa.org.

We’re hosting a round table on Thursday morning (7:45am – 8:45am), come along for breakfast and join the discussion.

I read an article in the Ecommerce Guide recommending that online stores should blog. The article covers some of the basics of blogging and its benefits – including helping to engage your customers and getting more visibility in the search engines. As I often do, I started thinking about what this meant from a site search point of view.

First of all your main site search should index all of your content, including your blog articles – not just your products. Understandably, you may feel a little reluctant to do this – showing blog or other content from your site may distract your visitors from the purchasing process and so could reduce your conversion rate.  However your blog articles should be informing and engaging your customers so it would seem to be a shame to not make them easy to find.

There are a variety of approaches you can take:

1. Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – eg on the left or below the search.  Doing this ensures that the products have prime position on the results page. One problem with this is that if the blog content is the most relevant content for the search then it may end up being shown below the fold – by showing products first you may be missing out on engaging the visitor which may mean you end up missing out on a sale.
2. Have refinement options so people can restrict the results to just the blog articles or products.
3. Allow product and blog content to surface in your search – showing the most relevant first. You could adjust your ranking settings to place more weight on the products – so products generally show higher. If you do this I would recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them so if they are the most relevant for a particular keyword then they will end up at the top of the search results.

In addition, I recommend you have a blog search so people can search just your blog articles. For this search the blog articles should be the most prominent – but I think you should show products in your blog search for example – down the side.

You put a lot of effort into producing content for you blog. It is a fantastic opportunity for you to engage your customers with your unique perspective. This content should be accessible through your site search. If you’re unsure how to present your blog content in your search – ask your customers (maybe through a blog post), try some options and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Contact us if you would like our opinion.

We have just released an interview with Jack Love, President and CEO of Vertical Web Media – better known by their brand Internet Retailer.

Jack discusses his career in publishing from starting as a journalist through to Internet Retailer. He talks a lot about the upcoming Internet Retailer show in Boston (June 15-18) which is going to be their biggest and their best. A lot of online retailers I talk to say this is their favorite show. But don’t take my word for it - listen to what Jack has to say about it.