Search That Means Business
EasyAsk eCommerce helps her find it. And fast.
With EasyAsk eCommerce Search, shoppers search as if they were interacting with a real person. When shoppers find what they want, they buy what they want. Request a demo »
…natural language search allows our customers to find the exact product in a single click…- Marc Joseph, CEO, DollarDays International
The fact that dozens of brand-name online retailers have deployed EasyAsk was a huge selling point.- Mike Fabrico, Vice President of Information Technology, Broder Bros.
EasyAsk’s emphasis on improving customers’ shopping experiences reinforced our own philosophy…- Karen Reed, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Coldwater Creek
Natural language search is fast and easy
Ease of use and relevance. That’s what users want from search technology. They really don’t care how. But to deliver those objectives, a lot has to happen behind the scenes. And that’s what puts EasyAsk natural language in a class by itself. Natural language search is not just a single activity. It’s a set of activities that happen simultaneously, such as term stemming, semantic processing, and attribute awareness. EasyAsk excels at all of them.
- Term stemming makes the search box more tolerant of the shopper’s input and of the word choices merchandisers make in describing a product. Term stemming includes variations on words such as plurals, tenses, genders, hyphenated forms, and more. For example, fishing, fished, fisher, fisherman, and fishermen are all related to the root word, fish.
- Semantic processing relates various word forms and synonyms to their core concepts—bridging the gap between text and meaning. EasyAsk optimizes results at the concept level. Doing this enables a more consistent shopping experience while significantly reducing the effort needed to manage and tune the search engine.
- Attribute awareness comes into play when shoppers use attributes as search terms to narrow their product search. EasyAsk is aware of attributes—like size or color—and how to relate them. For example, in a search for “red shoes size 7″, EasyAsk recognizes “red” as a product attribute, rather than simply look for the word, regardless of context. The search on “size 7″ is recognized as an attribute name and value pair so EasyAsk can return the available shoes with ‘color=red and size=7.’ All the shopper needs to do is click the search button. It’s all done in one step.
Create the shopping path of least resistance
In ecommerce terms, creating the path of least resistance means putting the right products on the first search results page. This is critical to increasing shopper satisfaction, which in turn translates into high conversion rates and larger average order value.
EasyAsk makes search easier for your customers and more effective for your business. It takes product popularity and business rules into consideration along with sales, stock levels, and other available data. No other search tool does all this.
EasyAsk gives you a better understanding of where in the product data to match a search. For some sites, matching the product name is most valuable. For others, matching the category delivers more relevant search results. With EasyAsk, there’s no guesswork. You can test and tune search results to fit your products and buyer behavior. It’s a simple, transparent process that will improve performance across all searches. Four EasyAsk features enable you to create the path of least resistance from the search box to the products your buyers want.
Autocomplete guides shoppers to products by displaying popular search suggestions as they type. For them, it saves time and reduces frustration. For administrators, it means fewer spelling errors or mistakes in part numbers. AutoComplete increases conversion and satisfaction across all searches.
Spelling Correction is a necessary part of site search. Most search engines use a thesaurus and dictionary to do spelling correction, which is inherently limited. Many spelling mistakes involve brand names, industry terms, or part numbers that would not be in a simple dictionary. EasyAsk uses all the words in your product data as a reference for valid spelling. When it’s unable to get an exact match, a powerful algorithm identifies the closest logical alternative. For example, if a buyer mistypes the word “denim” as “denin,” EasyAsk will automatically return results for “denim.”
Word Relaxation helps eliminate the dreaded “No Results” page. Many sites choke on searches of three words or longer, delivering a “no results” page. But not sites powered by EasyAsk. While word stemming and spelling correction go a long way toward eliminating the No Results page, relaxation is another important tool in the EasyAsk bag of tricks. As a natural language engine, EasyAsk recognizes the relationship between terms their underlying concepts. When searching for an exact match would return no results, EasyAsk identifies the most fundamental parts of the search query and drops a term to deliver results. Other engines simply fail. Picture a search for “plaid fleece jackets” and assume the site in question has no perfect matches. EasyAsk recognizes the value of “fleece” as a material and “jacket” as a category. Category matches are very valuable, and the material is somewhat more valuable than “plaid,” which could be an unknown word or an attribute of jackets of particular color. Analytics available through the EasyAsk Commerce Studio will show you where and when relaxation is used and enable you to preview the behavior as a shopper would experience it. Concepts such as category, material, color, can be prioritized and tuned with only a click—eliminating the no results page forever.
Variation Awareness is critical if your products come in sizes, colors, or other variations. With EasyAsk, a site can conserve screen real estate by collecting variations into a product group, while allowing the product results to more closely reflect the shopper’s intent. If a shopper searches for a “red sweater”, it’s inefficient to return every product that’s available in red—and very frustrating for shoppers. You’re wasting their time. With EasyAsk, you have the option to make that search return only sweaters that come in red.
Powerful merchandising drives larger sales
EasyAsk provides easy-to-use tools that enable merchandisers to deliver compelling, timely offers and promotions that increase the number and dollar value of sales.
With EasyAsk Commerce Studio merchandisers can quickly and easily:
- Optimize product searches based on parameters such as popularity and relevance
- Up-sell and cross-sell related products and accessories
- Trigger graphical rollover displays
- Test promotional strategies
Gather actionable intelligence with powerful analytics
EasyAsk search analytics deliver actionable intelligence about your customers and their purchase behaviors. In reports, each term or relationship you investigate is linked to a preview of the product listing and the area where you can guide customer behavior.
Just as your customers use natural language search to find products, you can pose questions in plain English such as, “What are the most frequent searches that contain the word ‘shoe’?” to explore search and navigation logs in minute detail. Our analytics also take you beyond optimizing site search to refining search engine marketing, and improving data quality in addition to:
- Tracking search activity and understanding the impact of search on conversions
- Identifying problematic searches, adding words, terms or attributes to the dictionary, and associating them with specific products
- Recognizing search patterns and buying trends
- Monitoring transaction volume
Enjoy flexible deployment & seamless integration
Choose the implementation thats right for your site. Whether you opt for EasyAsk’s Cloud-hosted solution or decide to host the technology on-site, EasyAsk comes highly-tuned straight out of the box & provides value in days, not months
On Premise
While most on-premise search solutions take months to configure and tune, EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is easy to deploy and manage, delivering rapid value in only days. Right out of the box, EasyAsk provides unmatched search quality with minimal tuning. The software installs in minutes and generates initial search dictionaries from product catalogues in hours. From there, our easy-to-use analytic and search management tools enable marketing staff to continuously refine search capabilities for optimal performance.
Cloud
EasyAsk in the cloud provides the same ease of use as our on-premise solution, but with no IT resources needed from your side. Plus, unlike other SaaS e-commerce search and merchandising solutions, EasyAsk provides Internet accessible tools that business people can use to manage search and merchandising.
Each night, EasyAsk automatically builds a rich search application from your product catalog. Easy-to-use reports identify searches that require tuning and allow you to take action with a single click. Merchandising tools quickly create merchandising promotions using English language business rules and visual previews.