How about sharing your thoughts on what 2012 will bring?

I’ll start – While 2011 could be called the year eRetailers got interested in mobile and social media, 2012 will likely be the year of the tablet, and … more social media.

As retailers begin to understand how people search, shop, and consume content on mobile devices, the soaring popularity of the iPad (one of the must-have items on people’s holiday wish lists this year), presents new challenges for retailers, as well as for those of us who provide products and services to them, in delivering a compelling shopping experience on the new “fourth screen.”

For tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire, the requirements for creating user-friendly search and navigation experiences are different than those for the mobile screen. We have more screen real estate to work with when it comes to tablets, which means a better display of product images and an easier-to-use touchscreen. On the other hand, “t-commerce” or “couch-commerce” will require a different experience than what is displayed on a personal computer or mobile screen. Site owners (and companies like ours) need to brainstorm ways to take advantage of the benefits of tablets (like brilliant displays of photos and videos), while keeping navigation streamlined.

For instance, tapping the screen is the standard method of navigation for tablets. However, small text menus – for instance, which you might find in lists of refinements – are hard to tap on without hitting another menu item by mistake. The same goes for buttons that are too close together, or pagination numbers: easy to click on with a mouse, tough to click on with a finger. In addition, as GetElastic reports, tablets are making it possible for website visitors to interact with content in new ways: people can “touch” content, swiping and zooming to choose how they view text and images. This tactile interaction may cause us to discover new ways to present information, new ways to display navigation, and new possibilities for innovative merchandising and SEO.

Users spend lots of time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and now Pinterest. We can expect that the merging of e-commerce and social media will gain even more prominence in the months ahead. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, site owners have realized that if people are spending more and more time with their friends on social networks, the website search and shopping experience needs to come to the social setting – instead of trying to lure people away from their social networks.

Now, your turn. What are your predictions for 2012?

I see that the Google Store is provided as an example of their commerce search in action so I thought I would check it out. I found a few issues and thought I would share a few friendly tips with the folks at Google on how they can improve their offering.

Tip #1: Add Synonyms for commonly mistyped terms

My first search term was “tshirt“. You can see that they had no results because I typed this as one word. This is very common on apparel sites. If someone was looking at their site search analytics they would have noticed this and added a synonym so you would see results for “t-shirts” without having to click on the spelling suggestion. You can see an example of this if you search for tshirts on hottopic.

Google commerce search - tshirts

Tip # 2: Don’t show refinement options on no results

One of the new features that Google offers is the ability to filter results. This is a standard feature on ecommerce sites and it’s not surprising to see that Google is offering this.  I found it strange that there are filtering options on the page above when there are no results. For example you can see that under Shop by Category there is the option to filter by Eco (14). The (14) normally means that there are 14 results in the current result set which fall into the Eco category. Something strange is happening here – when you click on that option you still get no results.

Tip #3: Refinement numbers should be accurate

I also noticed that when you search for “google” the “Shop By Price” facet shows that there are 35 products in the $0-10 range. When you click on “Show All” you don’t see any more price ranges but that number changes to 34. When you click on the price range it returns 61 products. I’m sure there is an explanation for this but something seems broken with their filtering.

Tip #4: Put the most relevant results first

Let’s try another search. Here are the results for bag:

There are bags here – but the top result is for a bean bag. It looks like Google’s legendry relevance algorithms for web search don’t necessarily translate to relevant results for site search. Our approach here is to watch what people click on for each keyword and promote the results that are clicked on most. This would bring the most popular bags to the top of the results.

In their datasheet Google claims that if you use the Google Commerce Search it “removes the need to plan for variable capacity around increases in traffic”.  That probably needs to be adjusted a little because Google is only providing the search feature. Retailers are still hosting the rest of their site (product and navigation pages, shopping carts etc) and they will need to plan for variable capacity. That said, having your search hosted by someone else can help significantly with your capacity planning. We saw this with one of our early ecommerce customers, Etronics, in Christmas 2002.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Birkenstock USA is an early user, reporting speedier searches, more relevant result and better customer satisfaction. However I can’t see a search box anywhere on their site. Hmmmm….

My feeling is that Google may have announced this product a little prematurely. It doesn’t quite look ready for prime time. However, I’m sure they’ll improve it and in doing so will keep us on our toes. We will continue to innovate in site search.

We are confident that we have many features that Google doesn’t offer, however the one thing that I hear from our customers repeatedly that they love about us most is the level of service they receive from SLI. This is one of the factors that made Armando Roggio at Practical Ecommerce state “I believe that SLI’s search solution constitutes one of the best products I’ve ever reviewed” in his recent review of SLI’s site search. I’ll be interested to see whether Google can change their traditional, hands off approach to customer service with the Google Commerce Search.

Welcome to the ecommerce site search market Google. It is great to have Google validate what we have been saying for some time, which is that site search is important and it deserves focus from owners of high value sites, including online retailers.

Well known venture capital firm Sequoia Capital made a now famous presentation to their portfolio companies titled “RIP: The Good Times”,  warning these companies about the seriousness of the economic crisis and the need for them to become cash flow positive before they need more capital.

This has been widely circulated and cited and now potential customers of venture backed companies are being warned to ask about their financial stability. This has prompted me to write this blog post assuring our existing and potential customers and partners that SLI is in a fantastic position at the moment.

We are cash flow positive and don’t need any more capital to survive or to grow further. SLI has a pure software as a service (SaaS) business model. This is good for our customers because it means that they don’t have to pay a huge sum up front and we do almost all the work. It is also great for us because it means we get recurring revenue across all of our customers (which now number in the hundreds). Being cash flow positive, this revenue gives us a very solid base from which to operate the company.

Interestingly the SaaS model means that we have a very strong incentive to focus on customer satisfaction. In order to keep our solid base of recurring revenue we need to keep our existing customers happy. This is why we have an internal policy ensuring requests from exiting customers should always take precedence over those from prospective customers. This is also one of the motivations behind our aim to continuously improve our service. In a survey we did earlier this year 100% of the customers we surveyed said they would recommend us to other website owners looking for a search.

Even in these difficult financial times we are growing strongly. Last quarter was the best quarter we’ve ever had in terms of new customers and the first month of this quarter was the best month we’ve had in over a year. We expect that most of our customers’ business will continue to grow and we are still hiring staff and investing in improving our service. Our situation has been helped by the demise of one of our competitors, Mercado and by the extremely poor attention to customer service of some of our other competitors. There is speculation that other search companies are struggling.

SLI Systems has been around since 2001. We have built the company on very little capital (we received more revenue from our customers last quarter than we have received from our investors in total). If you are considering using our services then you can be assured that we will be here for many years to come.

A few weeks ago I was quoted in an interesting blog entry on Information World Review (http://blog.iwr.co.uk/2008/08/google-stakes-i.html) talking about enterprise search and, particularly how Google is, once again, putting pressure on the industry. I think it’s worth expanding on a couple of things, particularly what I mean by enterprise search going beyond “what’s behind the firewall”.

As Phil Muncaster quite rightly points out, for many, searching documents behind the firewall is exactly what enterprise search means, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. In our experience, larger organizations need to store, retrieve and track digital information that exists in many different containers such as e-mail servers, desktops, intranet sites but also, crucially, on their Web sites and e-commerce sites which fall outside the corporate firewall.

For most organizations, Enterprise Search Software as most people know it today can’t provide access to all the information it needs within a single search – that’s because the content exists in numerous locations and formats. When this is coupled with factors such as technical limitations, cost and bureaucracy, it prevents all these various enterprise silos being unified under one index. Certain ideas such as ‘federated search’ are being explored in parts of the industry but, in my view, you are better off having a few different products that each perform a function well, rather than trying to manage everything under one cumbersome, expensive project.

When using an enterprise search function behind the firewall, employees will expect complexity and even accept that they may need training in order to use it.  When people are using a public search function however, even to search for information connected to the organization they work for, they expect it to be simple to use like Google.