We know your mind is still on camping trips and barbeques, but now is the time to act in order to maximize revenue this Holiday Season. Creating an optimized shopping experience for your customers will be a gift to your business accounts as well as your customers. This blog post is the first in a series of posts that will lay out best practices and tips as you prepare your eCommerce site for the biggest commercial period of the year.
Chatbots are big business right now. They are appearing on sites and apps across the world, from ordering take out to organizing your life. There’s even a Chatbot Annual Conference.
Users interact with a Chatbot via a chat or messaging interface, imitating a conversation. After a series of questions and responses, users should arrive at an answer or product. Chatbots have moved on from their beginnings as a text-based response tree to now include elements of Artificial Intelligence such as Natural Language Processing. The most common use for Chatbots is for customer service. The Chatbot can answer the simpler customer queries, leaving the complex answers to the ‘living’ employees. Read More
There is no denying Amazon’s domination in the eCommerce industry. Selling nearly anything you could imagine, Amazon’s sales account for 43% of all online sales. Amazon’s Prime Day official sale results marked the biggest-selling event in its history.
Being the force of nature that is Amazon has its advantages, but there are ways in which eRetail businesses smaller than Amazon can have the upper hand in the mobile arena.
Sixty-five percent of consumers say Amazon makes it easier to find what they are looking for. Good UX for mobile shopping is being able to say what you’re looking for and see exactly that. But does Amazon really do that? Is it really that difficult to compete with Amazon? Can smaller eRetailers make it even easier for customers to find what they’re looking for?
“We’re sorry, your search returned no results”
It’s the page many Search and Merchandizing teams hope will never appear to their customers. And of course, good search should avoid the “No Results” page showing unnecessarily – for example, if a spelling mistake has been made. However, customers may be searching for products that are simply not available in the product catalog and therefore “No Results” pages are sometimes inevitable. But they don’t have to be a dead-end for potential customers; they can be an opportunity to engage with your users. Read More
Do your search marketers have a plan for voice search optimization? According to research from BrightEdge, 31 percent of marketers see voice search as the next big thing. However, approximately 62 percent have no plans to prepare for voice search.
Jim Yu’s article sets out the ‘three Cs’ of optimizing for voice search: Conversation, Content, and Context. Read More
Outstanding pizza and fireworks at Navy Pier are reason enough to visit Chicago, but the industry’s largest eCommerce event, the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE), didn’t fail to equip and inspire as it held its 14th annual event in the city last month.
The EasyAsk team had a great time attending discussions, presentations, and networking sessions, as well as running a booth in the exhibit hall. We were able to impress visitors with solutions to the challenge that emerged over the 4 days: how to maximize mobile shoppers. Read More
Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash
Typeahead… autocomplete… incremental search: many attempts have been made in recent years to speed up shopper’s searches. At EasyAsk, we offer ‘Search As You Type’, or SAYT (pronounced Say-it), because it means a whole lot more than just a list of suggested searches. It means many possibilities for getting the right products in front of your customers.
SAYT progressively searches for and filters through text. As a user types a query, suggestions, products, categories, and attributes are found and presented with each keystroke. This allows a user to stop short of typing the entire word or phrase and find what they were looking for quicker. Read More
Q: A Search box is a search box . . . right? How much difference can it make?
A: All the difference.
This might just be the single most important component in a successful eCommerce strategy and the key to driving significantly more revenue.
It is essential to get the usability of the search box within eCommerce sites right. Up to 30% of visitors will use the site search tool and these will be highly motivated shoppers who know exactly what they’re looking for. Shoppers who use the search box will buy more:
Personalization is a valuable and effective part of the shopping experience. But personalization must always be just that – a part of the shopping experience, not the shopping experience. There are occasions when a shopper asks for certain products and the search results are affected by personalization. Being able to find relevant products through good search is imperative to higher conversion rates.
The scope and advantages of personalization for eCommerce are ever-growing. Personalization systems tailor the information a customer sees on the screen based on something known about them. For example, if a shopper in Atlanta searches for jackets in the spring, a personalization system might use the knowledge of location and time of year to display lighter-weight jackets than it would to another shopper living in Boston during the winter. Or maybe a shopper has been browsing the women’s department of a site, then searches for a shirt. The personalization system might choose to show women’s shirts to the shopper first.
The world we know continues to change, and we as a people, are forced to change with it. Sometimes it’s in small ways, like swapping Bell Bottoms for White-Washed jeans, then swapping those for Skinny Jeans. Sometimes it’s in larger ways, like going from hailing a cab on the sidewalk, to ordering an Uber from your bedroom/office/etc. with a touch of a button. Some of us prefer the former, while others have adapted, or were even raised with the latter. It is those inbred traits from our particular generation that make us who we are. The beauty of today’s age is that our technology can handle whichever you prefer. Can your site-search say the same?
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