When a customer performs a search or navigates to a category, the most important thing is to get the right products to the top of the page. But what defines the right products? They could be the combination of products that most accurately match the search and products you want to promote at this time which fall within the search parameters.
“Relevancy” is the most important feature in a search engine for accuracy. EasyAsk’s natural language engine delivers far more accurate relevancy scoring through features such as phrase matching, column weighting/ranking and value-based relevancy to expand control over results and deliver better hit rates. Read more on our earlier blog post on relevancy.
Your merchandisers also need the ability to adjust where products are displayed on an e-commerce site just like they would promote on the floor of a brick and mortar store. You may want to promote specific products based on:
- Inventory – promote products with low stock for clearance, or products with high stock in order to jump start sales,
- Margin – promote your higher margin products to improve profitability,
- Brand – suppliers may give you incentives to promote specific brands, or you may find certain brands to be better sellers,
- Product Age –promote older products to clear out the remaining inventory or promote newer products that might be more in season.
The results and category pages need to be driven by promotion rules that can take into account these different factors.
This is where natural language rules come into play. It allows the merchandisers to specify the priority of the products in the display in their own language. These rules also allow merchandisers to create “derived attributes” that create customer friendly ways to display and categorize products without the time and cost to re-design the attributes in your product catalog.
EasyAsk customer Andertons Music took advantage of natural language rules to better promote products on their e-commerce site (read the press release).
Promoting the most effective products is the third customer behavior use case in our new white paper: Increasing Customer Conversion through Better Product Findability. You can download this free paper and find ways to better tune your site to customer behavior.