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DollarDays Delivers a Solid Back-to-School Season with EasyAsk Semantic Search

Move from Open Source Solr, to EasyAsk Improved Search, Navigation and Merchandising – Driving Business Forward

EasyAsk, the leading provider of natural language semantic technologies, and DollarDays International, the largest by-the-case online store for small businesses shared details of DollarDays recent Back-to-School season success.

In 11 short years, Dollar Days is celebrating several milestones, including doubling the number of SKUs it offers to more than 225,000 and the number of suppliers to more than 500. Traffic on the DollarDays.com site has increased significantly, as have the number of memberships. All of this translates into revenue growth for DollarDays, even in a business environment where competitors are shrinking or going out of business.

DollarDays CEO Marc Joseph attributes DollarDays’ continued success to many key variables, including a growing number of price-sensitive shoppers, dominant marketing as seen in the company’s back-to-school programs and an overall exceptional customer experience, led by strong site search, merchandising and analytic capabilities.

“As the volume of traffic and the total number of items increases, the more important it is to present the right items to the visitor as quickly as possible,” says Joseph.

DollarDays originally used the open source search product, Solr as part of its open source e-commerce software stack. Solr is an open source search platform from the Apache Lucene project.

Business Reasons DollarDays Upgraded to EasyAsk from Solr
• Highly descriptive search – Because of their explosive product catalogue growth, DollarDays needed to give shoppers more search functionality, and the ability to enter more detailed descriptions in the search box.
• Faceted navigation – most navigation systems define static categories. EasyAsk natural language automatically generates additional layers of product definitions that greatly improve faceted navigation.
• Agile merchandising – Merchandisers can leverage EasyAsk eCommerce to create banner ads, promotions and rapidly identify and adapt as shopper trends develop.
• Manageability – the scope of managing search terms over a product catalogue of 225,000 SKUs can be overwhelming. EasyAsk offers intuitive graphical tools and analytics to make the job easier.

“EasyAsk search dramatically reduced the time for customers to find products and get to that all important checkout stage,” said Joseph. “As our number of items and seasonal merchandising needs grew, EasyAsk’s superior faceted search enabled our shoppers to more explicitly explore items across multiple dimensions. We offer a number of niche products, and once the visitors get to our site, we need to make it easy to find the exact product they want. EasyAsk helps us do that.”

Kevin Ryan, VP of merchandising at DollarDays said, “wholesale sites are generally behind consumer sites when it comes to usability. Many sites only offer basic search and simple navigation by category. Imagine scrolling through 5000 different products in the same category, such as toys to find the one you’re looking for. People eventually get frustrated and leave. That is what sets us apart – we are way ahead of the competition.”

DollarDays recently redesigned its homepage (www.dollardays.com), leveraging EasyAsk’s analytics, natural language merchandising and faceted navigation to better guide visitors and present high priority items for the season in much less space. DollarDays also uses EasyAsk analytics to discover and actively promote the top items its customers are looking for at any given time. An example can be found in its “School Charity Drive” page (https://dollardays.com/easysearch.aspx?pg=1&q=bts2012) where EasyAsk Analytics identifies the 500 most popular items from last year, and promotes these in a blackboard-style category grid.

Joseph is an active contributor to the Huffington Post on economic and business issues. According to Joseph, “Despite the fact that many US consumers believe we are still in a recession, DollarDays is well into our best back-to-school season yet, which is the biggest season for our company. EasyAsk is a big part of our success.”

About EasyAsk
EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through the company’s ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software and its customers include Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, Hartford Hospital, Ceridian, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools. For more information, go to www.easyask.com.

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Webinar: Using Analytics to Optimize the Shopping Experience

Orginal Air Date: Thursday, October 11, 2012
Length: 60 minutes

Learn how to apply search analytics to increase online sales.

Search, navigation and merchandising are a living, breathing part of your e-commerce site and overall customer shopping experience. You need to quickly adapt these critical aspects of your site for new products, market trends and customer needs.

Your search analytics provide you with timely, actionable information for continuously optimizing your shopping experience. Using search analytics, you can identify opportunities to streamline the path to customer purchases, and highly specific actions to deliver these optimizations.

In this webinar, the EasyAsk “Man in the Green Hat” will teach you:

  • What information is contained in search analytics and what it can teach you,
  • The customer experience problems search analytics can help you identify and how to take action, including the elimination no results searches and fine tuning the results of searches,
  • How search analytics can help identify new categories and attributes that can better guide customers to the right products,
  • The new merchandising opportunities which search analytics can identify to increase sales through promotions, SEO, and new product offerings.

The webinar will be hosted by Ben Rudnick, EasyAsk Director of Field Technical Services. Ben is also affectionately known as the “Man in the Green Hat” for his unique expert sessions at leading industry events.

Attend this session from EasyAsk to learn how to apply analytics to drive conversion and shopper satisfaction. To register for this webinar, click the button below.

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Top helpful devices for the kitchen

Every day in our kitchen we need to use different appliances and devices. It’s about electric devices that we normally use to prepare a toasted bread or to bake cakes and other kinds of food.

Often times we find it very normal to use all these electric devices and in most technology stores we can see even more of all kind.

It’s a matter of fact that modern cooking requires a little bit of technology. It helps us to prepare our foods in a quicker time or without to put too much effort.

List of top helpful appliances

We can even think to mention the most used and helpful appliances for the kitchen ever existed.

1. First off, appliances for toasting and grilling: these are very often used to toast bread and to grill meat or fish. Grills are also used to bake small cupcakes or handmade biscuits.

2. Blending and mixing: these are two of the most common methods to prepare recipes that are based on fruits and vegetables. In particular, mixed fruits and blended vegetables are important when having babies at home who are approaching new foods.

Blenders have a big role in the kitchen when it comes to prepare bread and big cakes. There are blenders of all sizes and all prices.

3. Have you ever thought what’s the first appliance you normally use every day in your kitchen? Well, of course it’s the coffee and tea maker! It’s a classic of all breakfasts in the world, just to start the day.

Where to learn to bake and cook?

If you are now thinking that it would be nice to use all these appliances, well you don’t have to think that baking a cake or making a bread is impossible. Actually, you can easily learn the basic techniques to prepare the most common and the most refined food if you visit the video culinary website.

Here you can see images and watch tutorial videos what show how easy and funny preparing food is. You can also discover foods and typical dishes from other places of the world, such as the tasty Italian macaroni, the Italian pizza in all its versions (from Naples, from Florence, from Genoa and from Rome) or the French fois-gras or even recipes from Kazakhstan or Sri Lanka.  

Taking on the table a new dish is the best way to find your personal hidden skills.

 

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Gartner E-Commerce Search Best Practices Part 2

In my last blog post, I discussed the recent Gartner report “Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce.” One of the most important e-commerce search best practices that analysts Whit Andrews and Gene Alvarez emphasize is the ability to “Offer effective definition-matching and handling of ambiguity in Query terms.” Let’s take a closer look at what this means, and how it applies to your search environment.

Effective Definition Matching

The Gartner reports talks about how a truly effective e-commerce search environment must understand the “language variations that are specific to what’s being sold and the audience to whom it’s being sold.” This really boils down to two items a search engine must be able to do:

  1. For each term in a search string, understand what that value represents – an attribute, product name, product category, etc. – and allow each column to have different relevancies.
  2. The ability to process search strings of different complexities as entire entities and understand how the individual terms relate in order to return the most accurate results.

This is the essence of natural language.  A natural language engine will process a complete search phrase, break it down linguistically and understand the full meaning of the request – NOT just what individual terms mean.  In this way, a natural language engine such as EasyAsk can fully support the specific “language of the site” and allow visitors to “speak” to the site in that language via the search engine.

With natural language processing, you can be assured that not only will simple searches – “blue shirts” – be processed effective, but so will complex ones – “women’s blue short sleeve shirts under $50.”  You can fulfill this e-commerce search best practice with the most effective definition matching possible.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity can come in many different forms.  It can come from mistakes or typos.  It can come from simple language variations such as different tenses.  Or it can come from a visitor’s lack of knowledge of the products – asking for “purple blouses” when none are available on the site.  To help you fulfill this aspect of the Gartner best practices, your search engine needs to give you the following:

  • Spell correction – your search engine needs to provide automatic spell correction.  Anticipating and pre-coding every potential misspelling of each term on your Website is a time consuming task. Who wants to do that?
  • Stemming – Your search engine needs to automatically support the different tenses, plurals and other variances of terms.  Once again, why should you need to have the time consuming task of entering every potential variance of each term?
  • Relaxation – this concept allows the search engine to drop part of a search term if no specific products exist in order to make sure some products are returned.  Seeing some products is always better than seeing NO products.  With relaxation, a search for “black levi jeans” will still return Levi jeans, even if there are none in black.  You search engine needs to have automatic support for this capability.

All of these characteristics will help you virtually eliminate the dreaded “no results” page and dramatically enhance the customer experience by always returning products to the visitor, even when there is some degree of ambiguity.

Further Flexibility

What if your “site language” is more complex than standard terms?  What if your site has a number of acronyms and industry terms?  What if you have cryptic model numbers that customers need to use to find parts or products?

To fulfill this last requirement, your search engine needs to make it easy to add synonyms, custom search terms and rules.  Once again this is where natural language engines help you implement best practices.

With natural language, you easily specify additional search terms and rules in – well, natural language.  You simply type in terms of any level of complexity and associate those with the existing terms or products in your catalog by simply pointing and clicking.

Learn More

To read more on these capabilities, please download our white paper, “The ABCs of E-Commerce Search: A Guide to Essential E-Commerce Search Features.”  In Part 3 of our blog post series, we’ll look at best practices in Search Analytics and Merchandising.

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ECommerce Shopping Experience Download

Thank you for registering with us. We hope our premium content is useful in your efforts to deliver richer shopping experiences for your customers and increasing your e-commerce revenue.

 

Free chapter of Greg Nundelman’s Book, “Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success”

 

EasyAsk Best Practices White Paper, “The ABCs of E-Commerce Search.”

 

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Gartner Best Practices in E-Commerce Search – Part 1

July is “Best Practices” month here at EasyAsk – where we describe good search, navigation and merchandising techniques that can help you convert more customers.  As you and your teams ramp up for busy back-to-school and holiday seasons, we want to help you convert more visitors into sales.  Over the course of this month, our team will show different best practices in search, navigation and merchandising and how they can impact customer experience.

While EasyAsk has many lessons to share, we always like to recognize best practices from independent firms, especially when they align with our vision. Gartner, a preeminent research firm, recently released a report called “Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce“, written by Whit Andrews and Gene Alvarez – two of the brightest minds in e-commerce and search.

Among the findings in this report, the Gartner analysts clearly stated the value of search, navigation and merchandising to an e-commerce environment:

  • Search is the means by which shoppers most nakedly reveal their needs and wants (as they themselves perceive them) to sellers.
  • Search is, therefore, a particularly powerful way to promote, relate and reveal products in a shopping experience.

The analysts went on from there to lay out two very important best practices in e-commerce search:

  1. Offer Effective Definition-Matching and Handling of Ambiguity in Query Terms
  2. Use Search and Content Analytics to Fulfill Shoppers’ Desires Through Merchandise, Related and Suggested Offers, and Advertising

These two best practices highlight the unique advantages natural language technology delivers in an e-commerce search environment.  Since natural language understands both the intent of the search and the content being searched, visitor searches are more accurately matched and the search engine seamlessly deals with ambiguity – misspellings, tenses, stemming and when to relax terms.  Natural language also understands the relationship between terms in a search to derive contextual meaning and further eliminates ambiguity.

In addition, the actionable analytics and natural language business rules in EasyAsk make it easy for your business people to better merchandise your site with context-driven offers, promotions and ads.

In the next two blog posts of this series, I will drill down into each of the two Gartner best practices we discussed above.  I will examine the best practices, detail how natural language fulfills the promise of these best practices and show customer sites where these practices are applied.

The most valuable best practices typically come from experts that have visibility into the widest spectrum of implementations – learning how smart people across the industry approach problems differently.  We’re always happy to confirm when EasyAsk best practices match those of top-tier research firms, such as Gartner.

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Internet Retailer: Tool retailer lets mobile shoppers speak their searches

Travers Tools Company implements a voice search feature into its mobile site.

Consumers visiting the mobile site for Travers Tools Company Inc. searching for a specific drill bit now need only ask for it.

The retailer recently launched an updated m-commerce site that enables consumers to speak their site searches. The service, from site search provider EasyAsk, lets shoppers touch a microphone icon then say what they want into their smartphone to see a list of results.

“The industrial supply business is very competitive and what sets us apart is our industry knowledge and our ability to provide the right tools and parts for our customers,” says Bruce Zolot, president, Travers Tools. “EasyAsk search helps us ensure that our customers find what they are looking for quickly on our site and now just as easily on our mobile site. Shoppers can speak what they want into the search box and see what they want immediately.”

Shoppers can use their Apple Inc. iPhone 4S or a smartphone using Google Inc.’s Android operating system to speak their search queries. Consumers see a microphone icon next to the search box that prompts them to speak into their device.

“A consumer might be in a hardware store and see a tool they want,” an EasyAsk spokesman says. “Maybe they think it costs too much, or they want to see if they can get a better deal online. They pull out their Android or iPhone and go to Travers Tools and touch the search box microphone icon. They say ’Jet bandsaw‘ or ’Jet bandsaw over $1500.’ They can speak their search as they would describe it to a salesperson– the more info, the tighter the search results. The list is short and accurate, which is critical on smartphones with little screen space.”

EasyAsk uses what it calls natural language search—software and algorithms provided by EasyAsk that seek to understand what the consumer wants to buy and returns appropriate search results, the company says.

This natural language search engine can better understand the intent behind shopper requests than other search engines, EasyAsk says. “Try ’not stripe dress shirts under $80‘ for example,” the spokesman says. “Keyword-based search engines would return stripe shirts for $80 and possibly underwear and dresses. People can get around poor search on a desktop, but won’t on a mobile device.”

Travers Tool, No. 826 in Internet Retailer’s Second 500 Guide, already uses EasyAsk for its e-commerce site. The site search tool on the retailer’s desktop e-commerce site supports multiple search methods, such as the ability to view results within a category and narrow the results to specific items using a single results page, and also recognizes synonyms for search terms common to the metalworking industry. The results also reflect the current pricing and inventory amounts.

Travers began using the EasyAsk site search technology after consumers began telling the retailer they couldn’t find items on its e-commerce site as easily as they could in its print catalog. Given that the site offered a search box, those complaints represented a clear sign that that the search tool, which was supplied with its information management software, wasn’t working.

The EasyAsk system connects to Travers Tool’s back-office system that manages the flow of inventory and tracks product costs for the retailer’s more than 100,000 SKUs. This ensures that shoppers get up-to-date inventory and pricing information.

“Keyword-search back-ends won’t cut it,” says Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Even Google understands this. They’re in the process of evolving closer to natural language with semantic search. If your search box can’t understand the intent behind shoppers’ requests now, you’ll be irrelevant when that request comes from a mobile device. Mobile users can’t navigate as easily and will quickly abandon the site if it requires multiple searches. They either see it and get it, or move on.”

This article originally appeared in Internet Retailer: https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/06/14/tool-retailer-lets-mobile-shoppers-speak-their-searches

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EasyAsk Products – Excerpt from Sync-Up Interview on the Pulse Network

Sync-Up host Tyler Pyburn asks CEO Craig Bassin about EasyAsk’s products – EasyAsk eCommerce, Business Edition and Quiri.

 

 

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EasyAsk Quiri – Interview Excerpt on Pulse Network Sync-Up">Voice Recognition & EasyAsk Quiri – Interview Excerpt on Pulse Network Sync-Up

EasyAsk CEO Craig Bassin talks about the differences between “voice-recognition” and “natural language search” – without understanding intent, you can’t accurately answer questions. Craig also notes that even Google is evolving from traditional keyword search.

 

 

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Google joining IBM, Apple and EasyAsk? Pigs fly! News at 11…

 

(Message from the CEO of EasyAsk, Craig Bassin)

Looks like this is the beginning of the end for keyword search.  You’ve probably seen a number of articles discussing Google’s shift to ‘semantic search’.  Anyone understand what that REALLY means?  First, the definition of ‘semantic search’ is an understanding of the ‘intent’, or meaning, of the search, rather than just matching the keywords.

Now why would the undisputed 800-pound gorilla of keyword search, change course at this late date?  Conventional wisdom says they were forced to take a hard look after Apple launched Siri.  The timing sure seems to reinforce the fact that they’ve been playing with semantic search for some time, but needed to make a marketing splash now.

So, why change?  Well, obviously it’s a BETTER way to search and they had to, or they wouldn’t have!  I mean, really, Google acknowledging the limitations of keyword search?

Quoting from Paul Demery’s recent article (to read it, click here) about Google’s adoption of semantic search in Internet Retailer, ‘“Semantic search should allow Google as well as other search engines to better understand the true user intent of a search query,” says Kevin Lee, CEO of search marketing firm Didit.

Also, quoting from the same article: “Every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible,” Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search technology, said in a blog post. “In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for ‘the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,’ and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.”

Now, understanding ‘intent’ AND ‘content’ is something that is at the very core of who EasyAsk is and how EasyAsk searches.  It’s the idea that, in an e-commerce setting, you can search for ‘men’s dress shirts under $30’ or ‘ladies red pumps size 6’ and get EXACTLY what you’re looking for.  Natural language understands the semantics involved in the search.  We understand the ‘intent’ of the question, we understand the ‘content’ of the data.  In adopting a new ‘semantic’ architecture Google will start to understand the ‘intent’ piece as well.

Now, who else searches this way?  How about Microsoft’s Bing, IBM’s Watson, obviously Apple’s Siri.

Now which of these companies can help you improve your e-commerce site?

None of them.

OK, but what about the other e-commerce search providers.  You probably know a few of them.  Endeca, SLI, Adobe, SOLR.

No, no, no and no.  Strictly keyword search.  Old news. Yesterday’s tech.

So we want to be the first to welcome Google.  We like them, use them all the time for internet search, along with Bing.  But when it comes to e-commerce search, folks, EasyAsk is leading the way.  Let us show you how.

It’s what we do.

Ready to see how EasyAsk's eCommerce solution can help you? Request a demo!
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