Come visit us at our Shop.org booth (#807), and we will give you a free site critic review. We’ll let you know how you can improve the search and navigation experience of your users, and run a few tests with you to determine how accurate your site search is. We’ll also be able to demonstrate some of the search techniques our customers use, which can be the perfect way for your etail site to capture more conversions during the holidays. While you’re there, you can enter our drawing for a new iPad.

Many retailers feel their online storefronts are all dressed up and ready to go for the holidays. If you’re not one of them – or even if you are, but you somehow didn’t include a dynamic site search in your plans – we would love to talk to you. We can discuss with you the many features and enhancements, such as Rich Auto Complete, AJAX-based site search and incorporating social media content into your site search results, that can dramatically help your site performance.

Please also check out our “Big !dea” session on Wednesday at 1:30pm, where our own Ed Hoffman will discuss the importance of understanding the language of your customers to increase sales and conversions online.

We hope to see you in Dallas!

It’s only September, but many consumers have already starting their holiday shopping. And the outlook for this year’s holiday spending online looks fairly bright. So if you’re an online retailer and haven’t yet gotten your site ready for the holiday shopping frenzy, now is the time!

If you’re not already doing so, start paying attention to your customers’ online buying preferences. One way to do this is by looking at the most commonly used search terms on your site – this can help you understand what products will be in demand this season and what you should be stocking your inventories with.

In addition, there are a host of other options you can consider to give your site the boost it needs to meet holiday shopping demands, which are included in our new, free downloadable guide: “SLI Holiday Guide: 10 Steps for Preparing Your Online Retail Site Search for the Holidays” which you can download at www.sli-systems.com/holiday-guide.php.  Below are some highlights:

Capitalize on the mobile revolution: Mobile commerce sales are rapidly increasing and will continue to do so. Jump on the opportunity this holiday season by launching a mobile version of your site. Be sure to keep site search front and center as its critical to helping users navigate among choices on a small screen.

Put social media content to work: Social media content will increase this holiday season with the increase in promotions, discounts and product reviews. Integrating this content with site search let’s visitors helps shoppers stay more informed about the products they are researching.

Offer refinements: Help your site visitors cross gifts off their shopping lists faster by offering refinements that allow them to sort through products by common gift-buying filters, such as gender, price, or type of recipient (e.g., coworker, child, friend, age, gender).

Help shoppers complete their thoughts: Shorten the shopping journey for your customers by providing auto complete functionality that automatically offers suggestions for search terms as they start typing.

Never let your site fail: During the holiday rush it’s even more critical that your website is stable. Working with an on demand search provider will reduce pressure on internal technical resources and ensure site search is up-and-running on even the busiest days.

Here’s to a happy and fruitful holiday season!

At 4:30am on Saturday morning Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. This is the location of our New Zealand office. Amazingly no one in the city was killed and there were very few injuries, despite there being widespread damage. Our staff are all well and, with one exception, have escaped major damage to their houses.

Our core services were uninterrupted by the earthquake. We did experience approximately a 10 hour outage of our email and our merchandising console. I apologize for that and we are working to build more redundancy into these systems.

Our office is on the 10th and 11th floors in a building in down town Christchurch. We had staff in the building at the time and they had a terrifying experience. Luckily they escaped unscathed. The office was a mess with bookcases toppling over and everything being thrown around. However our building is sound and  there was very little damage, so we were able to quickly return things to normal.  Our staff have been working from home but we expect them to be back in the office in the next day or two.

Approximately 60% of houses in Christchurch have been damaged and many buildings in the city will need to be demolished. We are lucky that as a company we have escaped relatively unscathed. The team is still in shock at what has happened – made worse by the continuing aftershocks. I expect it will take us a while for us to return to normal.  Thank you for your understanding as we work through this.

Here are a few pictures:

This is typical of what our offices looked like after the quake. Although, to be fair, this guy was always pretty messy.

This is the road outside of the house of one of our team.

This is the roof of my house after the quake. One Chimney fell down during the quake and the other one had to come down soon after. This is common across the city.