SLI Systems Blog, Guest Post

Contributed by: Ed Kennedy, Business Development, Guidance

Recently, I was listening to APM’s Marketplace Tech Report which highlighted how Google and Bing are now including social content such as Twitter and Facebook postings in natural search results.  The report left me wondering how retailers can leverage social search to drive traffic to their sites.

So … I decided to contact eCommerce search partner, SLI Systems, to learn more about how this new trend has impacted their site search and navigation solution.  During our conversation, we talked about ways retailers can combine social and search to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.  Here are some of them:

• Index social media content in search results: If you have blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall posts, videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, all of this content should appear in your site search results – possibly in a separate tab, as Yarn.com handles it.




• Place Facebook “like” buttons on product pages: This will encourage site visitors to share your products with their connections. In addition, Facebook “likes” can improve the page’s ranking on search engines, like Bing. You can also import the number of likes that each product has into your site search index and allow your site visitors to reorder site search results so the products with the most “likes” are ranked highest.
• Add search to your Facebook page: You can add a search box to your company Facebook page, and results will appear within Facebook. This is a good way to build stronger relationships with shoppers who like to combine shopping with social networking. Here is Chaparral Motorsports’ facebook search.




• Implement Facebook Sign-In for your store: A more advanced integration between Facebook and your commerce site is allowing visitors to use their Facebook profile as their account on your store. This reduces the amount of information visitors need to provide to create an account with your site. This functionality can also trigger personalized content for the user based on their friend’s activity on the site. TripAdvisor does a good job of encouraging Facebook Sign-In and using friends’ activity to promote certain destinations or trips.




• Encourage user generated content and tie to social networks: When Guidance designed TOMS Shoes, our User Experience and Design team looked for ways to combine the customer’s passion for the brand’s canvas shoe and the popularity of social networks. They came up with How We Wear Them, a section on TOMS’ site that allows users to upload a photo of themselves wearing their favorite pair of TOMS. The user associates the shoe in the photo to a SKU in the catalog, linking directly to that product detail page (PDP) and is then prompted to share the photo on Facebook. These images are then represented as thumbnails on the PDP, adding a social touch to the buying experience.

Got any tips of your own?  Share them with me via Twitter, @EdwardPKennedy, or via @guidance.

I have just returned  from the Internet Retailer Conference in San Diego. This is the biggest show that we attend and the one where we have the largest presence. Because the show is fairly close to our office we had a lot of people there – I counted 22. It was fantastic fun seeing current and future customers, and partners and learning about some of the new stuff.

For me this is the third show that I’ve been to in the last 4 weeks, The other two were Ecommerce Expo in Manchester and Online Retailer Road show in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, Australia. A gruelling travel schedule but apart from seeing very little of my family for the last four weeks it has been very rewarding. One overriding theme that I have been getting from the customers I met during my travels is that they are very happy with the service they get from us. I heard from several that we are one of the best vendors that they deal with. It was great to hear this because we put a lot of effort into making our customer service the best it can be and it’s nice to see the evidence that this is working.

With over 500 vendors, multiple streams and workshops I feel like I missed out on a lot of good information at the show. However there were plenty of interesting bits and pieces I did pick up. Here are some of them…

A novel approach to getting answers

George Eberstadt, the founder and president of TurnTo Networks showed me their question and answer service for retailers. The novel thing they do is when someone asks a question about a product an email is sent to people who recently bought the product. They get a great response from this which means people get good answers to their questions in a timely manner. He had some good stats about the uplift they saw for their customers. I can see why this works. I would be likely to answer a question about a product I had just bought in this situation. Sending the question to people who have just bought the product is a great idea. Like most great ideas, it seems pretty obvious once you hear it. but I hadn’t heard it before.

Having the same URL for mobile and the web

Igor Faletski, the founder and CEO of Mobify was telling me about their approach to producing mobile websites. Like others they translate existing pages into mobile optimized pages. Unlike others they use client side JavaScript to do this which means the URL is the same whether you’re on a mobile page or the normal page. This means people aren’t sharing mobile URLs and has a number of other advantages. I thought it was an interesting approach.

Paying people to like you

While I was sitting on the floor eating lunch I was chatting to a couple of reps from a San Diego company whose name I forget (sorry). The interesting thing they told me they are doing for their customers is offering people a discount on some purchases if they “like” the product. I thought this was interesting from a couple of perspectives. The discount may help close the sale in the first place and secondly, by sharing it on facebook they are telling their friends about it. I expect the retailers will be able to maximize the benefit by paying to promote likes on facebook. But what this will force them to do is to try and quantify the value of a like. Something else I hadn’t seen before.

2B searches/quarter on eBay

Chris Payne, VP and Head of eBay North America talked about their strategy to provide infrastructure to retailers of all size, the standard eBay for Mom and Pop retailers, and their new acquisitions Magento and GSI for  medium and large retailers. He shared that in the last quarter there were over 2 billion searches on eBay. That got me thinking – how many searches did we serve across our customers in the last quarter. One of my team looked it up – just over 700 million. We’re working to catch up with them.

Robots

Finally Kiva had a great display showing their robots at work. Who doesn’t like robots?

Next week we’ll be exhibiting at the annual Retail World conference in Sydney, taking place June 27-29. If you’re attending the event, be sure to see us at stand #51, where we’ll be demonstrating our recently announced Conversion Optimizer A/B testing tool for site search, as well as the power our Learning Search site search, navigation and merchandising solutions deliver to online retailers. You can also enter our draw to win an iPad 2.

Be sure to also pick up your conference passport, which allows you to get stamps from participating exhibitors (like us) and be entered to win prizes once your passport is complete. And on June 29 we’ll be exhibiting in the eRetailing and Multi-Channel Retail Day in stand #2 – so you can also catch us there.

We hope to see you there!

Minor changes to search and navigation, such as the way search results or images are displayed, can improve conversions and increase orders, while helping streamline the customer experience. However, if you’re not testing the various options before you put them into place, it’s hard to know what impact they’ll have – and testing can take a lot of time if you don’t have help.

Today we unveiled Conversion Optimizer, our new tool for conducting multivariate and A/B testing. We announced the beta version of this tool several months ago, and we’ve been working closely with customers to make sure it delivers all the right functionality and performs smoothly. Like all our products, Conversion Optimizer is backed by our team of search and merchandising experts who will help you figure out which options to test and manage all the tests for you, then help you determine next steps after you see the results.

Click here to read more about Conversion Optimizer, or ask your Customer Success Manager for a demo.

Like most of you, we’ve been gearing up for IRCE for months. Well, it’s almost here, and it’s sure to be a great event. We love the opportunity to see familiar faces and meet new people as well – and offer a first-hand view of our Learning Search solutions in action. If you’re attending, please be sure to drop by our booth #405 where you’ll see a demo of our full-service site search, navigation and merchandising product offerings, as well as a new tool we’re unveiling next week (more to come on that soon).

We’re also giving away 3 iPads over the course of the event, so you can enter to be one of the lucky winners. And, as IRCE’s tote bag sponsor, you’ll find inside your bag a special key which opens our treasure chest of prizes – located at our booth – giving you another opportunity to score something nice for yourself.

Have safe travels to sunny San Diego, and we hope to see you next week!