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EasyAsk for Commerce B2C

EasyAsk® for Commerce B2C delivers the retail industry’s most complete semantic product search, refinement navigation technology and merchandising platform. Each function plays a vital role in delivering the integrated, interactive shopping experience that is unmatched in the industry today. To offer a truly distinctive shopping experience—one that drives conversion rates and average basket sizes and keeps shoppers coming back—retailers need to offer a balance between these functions. A balance that changes based upon product set and target audience but is consistent across all customer-interaction channels. Delivering just that is the intent behind EasyAsk for Commerce B2C.

EasyAsk provides IT staff and marketers with powerful tools, such as the Merchandising Administrative Dashboard, for controlling when, where and how results, search refinement options and product promotions are displayed to customers or internal users. This creates a personalized experience for each shopper. The Dashboard is an intuitive, Web-based interface that streamlines defining, monitoring and refining presentation, product and business rules and display options. Site administrators and merchandisers can easily optimize product and information placement based on defined criteria. Retail marketers can quickly fine-tune business rules to promote, cross-sell and up-sell products. In fact, retailers will find EasyAsk is just as useful to employees and administrators as it is to the online consumer.

Linguistics-driven Natural-language Query

With EasyAsk for Commerce B2C, online shoppers get the most accurate results from their natural-language queries. Why is natural language so critical for online shopping? Because shoppers don’t use full sentences—most use only two or three words in a search. Search terms could be “dress shoes,” “laptop batteries” or “12 HP mowers.” Each of which is “word soup” to any other search technology, as the words themselves represent different products or units of measure that describe a product. Imagine if the result set from “dress shoes” reflected dresses and sneakers as well as an assortment of dress shoes. How would the retailer guide the shopper?

EasyAsk’s linguistic technology understands these questions the way the shopper intended—which is why the results are so accurate and precise. And accurate results are only just the beginning. EasyAsk can quickly offer the user detailed refinement criteria, such as product features, sizes or colors. Not many shoppers know all the features and combinations available to them. Prompting the shopper is helpful and adds to the richness of the experience. Whether up-selling, cross-selling, featuring selected products or sorting the result set by popularity or product margin, precision technology is necessary to drive online retail businesses. 

As customers use the site more often, they won’t have to choose the right keyword. EasyAsk makes it easy to browse the hierarchy of a product catalog or simply type a synonym, an abbreviation or an everyday language phrase such as “blue wool sweaters size large” and get only the most relevant results. This empowers shoppers to quickly find the exact products they are searching for and provides retailers with an environment to promote other merchandise based upon those products or customer preferences.

Capabilities and Features

EasyAsk for Commerce B2C empowers retailers with functionality unmatched in the industry today, and allows them to differentiate themselves by providing:

EasyAsk offers B2C marketers the following additional capabilities and features:

Learn more about Progress EasyAsk and "BusinessEdge for Retail", a Progress retail initiative.