With the holiday shopping season well underway, there is talk of recent ecommerce site failures and anticipation of how these failures will impact online businesses during this season’s shopping frenzy. Nearly one year ago, Internet Retailer reported on major site failures experienced during Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) – two of the busiest shopping days of the season. Often, these outages are caused by the high volume of site visitors during peak shopping times and servers that can’t keep up. Or, they may be caused by natural disasters, power outages or software glitches. When entire sites go down there is tremendous impact: business is lost, customer loyalty suffers and a brand’s reputation is seriously compromised.

While site failures are extremely costly for online retailers, there are also individual aspects of a site that can lose functionality and also impact the online experience for shoppers; for example, site search, the shopping cart, product videos, etc. For these functions, it makes sense to entrust your site to a hosted services (or SaaS – software-as-a-service) provider so you can offload that traffic to a 3^rd party – particularly one that has built-in redundancy in its architecture and implemented business continuity policies, to protect you from these types of failures. For example, SLI Systems has implemented redundant servers in multiple data centers around the world to ensure that if a server goes down for any reason, another will step in to take over.

The Internet Retailer article from last year indicates that according to web performance measurement firm Gomez, Inc. the top 50 retail sites have an average of 97.60% availability, and an average site response time of 2.25 seconds (Gomez also says research shows there is a 2-second “standard” – referring to the length of time the average person will wait).

Like most retailers, you’re probably turning up the volume on your marketing efforts to drive as much traffic to your sites as you can in the coming weeks. But are you certain your site will be able to perform – and respond quickly? It’s not too late to offload your site search to a 3^rd party expert if that’s an area you have concerns about or haven’t looked closely at. Have questions? Feel free to comment below.

I had a surprising experience this week. I failed to find one of the most popular books in the world in the world’s biggest bookstore.

It all started when my son picked up the first Harry Potter book and started reading it. He got into it and loved it. In the way of siblings, this inspired his sister to want to read it too. The problem was there was only one copy – so she would have to wait. I thought I would download the sample on my Kindle app on my iPad so she could read the first part of the book and find out if she would like to read the rest of it. This was the task that I failed to achieve.

I won’t go through all the steps I went through before I finally gave up. I got close. I found the simplified Chinese version and an Arabic version. When I told him the story, my CTO shed some light on why I failed. The reason I failed is that I live in New Zealand where the book is sold under its original name of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone where as in the US it is sold as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and I was on Amazon’s US site. Apparently the publisher didn’t think American children would want to read a book with philosopher in the title.

The reason I failed when I searched Amazon for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is that even though Amazon showed the Sorcerer’s Stone at the top it wasn’t what I was looking for and there were other results that had the image that I knew was on the cover of the book – they had a stronger information scent and so I skipped the top result. Unfortunately I quickly got to the Latin and Irish versions.

Last week Google unveiled Instant Previews. This gives you the ability to preview a page by clicking a magnifying glass icon next to the title.

This is a cool feature, although I’ve found that I haven’t been using it since it went live. I’m typically happy with the information that is shown on the SERP. However Google are confident that it improves the experience – saying that people who use it are 5% happier with the results. What they didn’t say is what portion of people use it. I guess they’ll be learning more about it as they roll it out.

Lessons for site search?

As with all search innovations I look to see if there is anything that we might be able to apply to our site search customers. I’ve written before about how site search and web search can learn from each other. In this case many of our site search customers have already been doing something similar. They haven’t been showing a full preview of the page – this wouldn’t make sense on a site search because most of the page is the same – but instead have been doing mouse over popups, which show a larger image and potentially some more information. Note this can be done when you mouse over an image, or can be initiated by clicking on a link.

The nice thing about this feature is it makes it easy to see the product detail of several different products. Without this feature you would need to click on the product, look at the detail, return to the search results page, then click on the next product.

Here are some examples of it in action (with links to the pages):

On BedbathStore a larger image pops up when you mouse is over an image

BikeSomewhere show a larger image, a description and an Add to Cart button

On Efaucets when you mouse over you see a button to click to see a larger image that contains additional info and a Buy Now button.

Lessons for web search?

So is there anything Google and the other search engines can learn from the things we’re doing with our site search customers? One thing they should try is making the preview appear when you simply mouse over a result. They almost do this. You have to click on the magnifying glass image to turn on the previews – then you only need to hover over a result to see the preview. They should experiment with getting rid of that first step. I think that would improve the usability.

Secondly I think they should look at pulling out and highlighting more of the critical information on the web page. To be fair they are already doing some of this. But for example if they know it’s a product page and they have the product information – say from a feed that the retailer has submitted to them then they could show the detail of the product in the preview.

One of the best things about site search is that almost everyone is familiar with the concept of being online and starting their journey with a keyword search. The search results page is one of the most frequented pages of a website and yet all too often is the case that you’ll perform a simple search only to be shown ‘product not found’ ‘article doesn’t exist’ or be served a page of totally irrelevant results. Today’s internet user has very little patience when it comes to this kind of user experience and will usually be off to a competitor’s site within seconds.

In the current economic climate it is crucial that you invest in areas of your online business that can deliver and deliver quickly. Furthermore, anything that assists the innovation of your site whilst engaging existing customers and attracting new ones gives your brand the opportunity to rise above the competition and improve the performance of your online business. Of course there are a number of technology areas worth considering but I’d strongly advocate that you consider investing in a dedicated site search solution for two simple but very important reasons: the effects are tangible and immediate.

There is no doubt that site search is one of the most important ways to understand the shopping behaviours of your visitors. Users who type a search phrase are more likely to convert versus a user who browses (typically using navigation) the site. Site search users are ‘objective focused’ – that is to say they are looking for something specific and are telling you in their own language what they want. If you show them what they are expecting to see (relevant results) they are much more inclined to add the item to their shopping basket.

This is proven through another important area of site search – the data. To be sure your investment is working for you the ability to measure the impact via site search analytics and online analytics is vital and will provide genuine insight into how your site performance is improving as measured against your KPI’s (key performance indicators).

Site search needn’t be difficult to implement either (SLI Systems use a product data feed) so you shouldn’t have to employ a development team or change your ecommerce platform to accommodate it. On the contrary, the site search solution should easily bolt into your existing ecommerce infrastructure and run seamlessly with the site you already have. If you opt for a SaaS (software as a service) model there are no hardware implications either so why not test your own site search to see if the results are what you were expecting to see. If the results are not relevant then you are very likely losing out on the opportunity to improve your conversion rates and other vital metrics.

For more information on how to improve your site search please contact SLI Systems on 0800 032 4783 in the UK and (866) 240-2812 in the US. Alternatively please click here for a free Site Search Critique. The SLI Systems Christmas Guide (UK version), the SLI Systems Holiday Guide (US version) and Big Book of Site Search tips can also be downloaded free of charge.

In our latest Ecommerce Podcast, Dave Baird, vice president of marketing and co-owner of MagnetStreet, spoke with our fearless leader, Shaun Ryan, about how site search data helped MagnetStreet identify an opportunity for a new line of business, which has become a huge success. As Dave explains in the podcast, most of the custom magnet company’s customers were in the real estate industry (real estate agents like to send custom magnets to their clients as a useful self-promotional tool). When the economy took a nosedive, magnet orders from real estate agents dropped.

As you’ll hear Dave discuss in the podcast, about a year before the economic crisis, MagnetStreet had launched a search engine optimization project and began looking at popular search terms on their site to see if they’d find new keywords for paid search campaigns. They discovered that searches for “save the date magnet” started turning up, and Baird and his colleagues realized that they could develop a new line of products appealing to brides who needed to create a clever date reminder for wedding guests.

Dave says that the “save the date” magnets were a huge success and helped make up for the decline in orders of real estate agents.

Check out the MagnetStreet podcast to hear more about this growing company’s strategies for enhancing the online customer experience, such as personalized recommendations and an integration with Facebook that will tell users when other friends are shopping on the site.

Lately, we’ve been beating the mobile drum pretty loudly. A few weeks ago, we announced our new SLI Mobile solution to help retailers quickly create a mobile version of their websites. And just last week, we announced that one of our customers – Century Novelty – worked with us to create its mobile site in a matter of days, in order to capture the growing numbers of mobile shoppers the company was already seeing.

Some in the industry think it’s just too early for companies to be worrying about mobile. That’s not our take, based on the experience many of our customers have had in seeing a steady growth in numbers of visitors to their sites from mobile devices. As Ian MacDonald of Century Novelty explained to us, over the past year they noticed a small percentage of sales actually coming from mobile devices. The amount wasn’t significant, but it was enough that they couldn’t ignore it.

Last week, the results of a recent NRF survey on mobile shopping were published by Evan Schuman in StorefrontBacktalk, showing that our thinking is correct – as many American consumers say they expect to shop by mobile device this holiday season. According to StorefrontBacktalk, exact numbers are hard to pin down due to the possibility that respondents may not have answered the questions in the same way (e.g. some may have treated social networking recommendations or texting friends as “conducting research” while others may not have), or because some people may not think today that they’ll shop via mobile device but come December they might. Still, the data is compelling. Of 8,767 consumers surveyed, 26.8% said they would use their smartphones to either research or make a purchase during the holidays this year; and of those in the 18 to 24 age range, 45% said they would.

Evan also mentions that his site conducted a survey with Forrester Research that showed an “alarmingly high percentage of retailers (21.3%) who said they have no plans for any M-Commerce programs in the next 18 months. And almost half of those surveyed choose ‘none of these’ when asked if they allow customers through a mobile site or a dedicated application.” In our own M-commerce survey from earlier this year, we found that 80% of retailers surveyed say they have no mobile commerce strategy in place, while at the same time, 83% of those surveyed said that between 1-10% of site visitors come from mobile devices.

While the numbers vary from survey to survey, one thing is clear: there is an audience today on the mobile platform, and that audience will only continue to grow in the months ahead. Retailers who choose to sit on the sidelines until this market is more mature may miss out on an opportunity to garner more sales, and possibly lose customers along the way.

For retailers who are eager to get started but are reticent to spend a lot of time and resources on a mobile site, a solution like SLI Mobile is ideal – it can help you create a site in a week or less, with minimal involvement from your team. And the expense is nominal. If you’re hesitating, don’t. We’re ready to help you today. Contact us now.