EasyAsk's Search and Merchandising Boosts Bottom Line

Every e-commerce company is looking for ways to increase conversion rates. If they're not, chances are they won't be in business for long. But with so many affordable tools on the market designed to help online retailers drive more traffic to their sites and provide visitors a better user experience, how does an e-tailer choose? For Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, a more than 50-year-old mail order business that has been on the Web since 1996, the choice was easy — or rather, EasyAsk.

Rockler, a family-owned business with over 500 employees that caters to all types of woodworkers, from the seasoned pro to the DIYer to hobbyists, has always had a loyal following but it is constantly working to improve the customer experience, especially on its e-tail site, www.rockler.com. That's why in the fall of 2006 the company's senior Web developer, Dave Werden, began shopping around for a new search, navigation and merchandising platform.

Directing Traffic Without Extra Servers or Staff
"We want to get customers where they want to go as quickly as possible," explained Werden. "And we felt the search engine tool we used before [wasn't] optimized as well as it should be for our product line and for the results." It was also very difficult to manage and didn't have any built-in merchandising tools.

Werden wanted a single solution that would give customers the information they needed faster, getting them to the page or product they needed with a minimum number of clicks and that would deliver a better quality of search results, so visitors found what they were searching for quickly. He also wanted a platform that could be easily customized so Werden and his team could tweak results and products and pages as needed, without a lot of hassle.

After checking out several of the bigger players in the site search and navigation space, Werden settled on EasyAsk, from Progress Software. Unlike other products, EasyAsk is a commerce-specific product search engine, as opposed to a site search engine, offering online businesses a combination of product search, navigation and merchandising capabilities in one easy-to-deploy package.

But what really sold Werden on the product was its track record. "They had the best track record for conversion rates," he said. "And also the infrastructure requirements were substantially less than what was required for some of the other products [we looked at]. So we wouldn't have to invest as much in servers and equipment to support EasyAsk."

Rockler purchased EasyAsk in late November 2006 and started implementation in December, going live with it mid-February 2007.

According to Werden, the software was fairly easy to implement. Due to the holidays and the need for some help with XML and customization, which Werden says EasyAsk's support team provided right away, the deployment took a bit longer than the usual three weeks EasyAsk's Vice President and General Manager Larry Harris said it typically takes e-tailers to implement the software, though he quickly added that implementation time will vary depending on the size of the retailer's online catalog and the level of customization required.

Carving Out Increased Sales
Within just a couple of weeks, Werden saw improvements on the Web site. "We noticed immediately that we had increased the amount per purchase by about 6 to 7 percent, which is fairly significant," he said. Then in April, with the help of a Web author/woodworker, Werden and his team used EasyAsk to tweak how items came up in searches and were displayed on pages. Right after, Rockler saw its conversion rates climb, to about a 30 percent increase over the same period the year before.

What really surprised Werden, however, was how quickly EasyAsk worked, displaying search results and getting users to where they needed to go faster. "We achieved a substantial speed increase over our previous product," said Werden. "That was surprising to me, because I'm a programmer, and I know it's got a lot of work to do in the background."

Another pleasant surprise: "We didn't have to buy extra servers and so on to handle it," said Werden. That meant additional savings for the company.

Some other key ways EasyAsk is improving the Rockler site include:

Highlighting of sale and overstock items on "Rockler Outlet" pages.
Promotion and categorization of "Rockler Exclusive" products now centrally located on one landing page.
Better access to information, such as blog entries and related articles, that showcases Rockler's expertise in the woodworking industry. For example, when shoppers search for "dust," they will find dozens of dust-control products, as well as industry articles and blog entries that offer valuable insight on the topic.

"Once we deployed EasyAsk, adding the blogs and articles to the index was a very easy process, and their indexing is automatically updated on the same daily schedule as our product index," said Werden. "We can better position Rockler as an expert in the field of woodworking and hardware over and above being simply a seller of products."

And Werden has more plans for EasyAsk. "We want to do much more with landing pages using the power of the tool, to save us time and especially to save us on maintenance."

As for other Web developers considering the product, Werden said: "Out of the box it delivered very good results. But, as with any tool, the more you invest in it, the more you get back from it. You can't expect the thing to just sit out there and do its job totally unnoticed by you," though it will. Your results just won't be as optimized as much as they could — or should — be. So you definitely need to be involved.

"As we add new products, we have to make sure they are showing up the way we think they should be and that we're really looking at what our customers are experiencing and making sure that we give them what they expect," said Werden.

Some of the key features of EasyAsk are as follows:

Merchandising Administrative Dashboard — A Web-based interface that makes it easy to optimize product and information placement based on defined user-activity criteria.
Search within Context — Automatically determines whether a search is better interpreted as a search within a previous context or a new search. This delivers a more intelligent, usable search experience.
Smart Site Search — Automatically interprets site search requests, such as "size chart" as site searches rather than product searches.
Intelligent Category Search — Intelligently searches category names. This is a critical component of site search functionality because a search for "sweaters" should also include "cardigans" that may not contain the word "sweater" in the description. Conversely, it is important not to get hits for all products in the "Shoes & Belts" category if the search is only for "shoes," as this will also include belts in the result set.
Search-Based Color Display — EasyAsk provides a means of displaying products in the result set in the same color for which they were searched. For example, search for "red sweaters" at J. Jill and only red images will appear.
Most Problematic Words —Data-mines search logs to provide a ranked list of words causing the most problems with search on the site. This function provides a "to-do" list of steps to most effectively improve search functionality on the site.
Built-in Hot Score Feature — Provides a built-in hot score capability. This allows the display order of products to be related to a "hot" index, based on actual sales data, analytic metrics or number of clicks. Hot Score provides a proven increase in conversion rate based on A/B Testing, according to the company.
e-Mail Notifications — Supports e-mail notifications to shoppers. Shoppers are automatically notified when specific products become available, or become available at a specific price.
Search to Landing Page — EasyAsk directs users to landing pages for certain searches. For example, a search for "dinnerware" can re-direct to a dinnerware landing page, rather than a search results page. This provides a more tailored shopping experience for the user.
Built-in A/B Testing Analytics — EasyAsk provides integrated A/B Testing analytics. This allows EasyAsk to provide uplift comparisons to the current site experience to a test experience.
MyStore — EasyAsk supports the MyStore concept that allows Web shop owners to identify and save customer and partner preferences according to product attributes and transaction history, making future visits more efficient. Customers can easily find specific parts or products without the SKU or record number.
Relevancy tuning and management — Provides e-tailers with additional tuning options such as phrase matches, column weighting/ranking and value-based relevancy to expand control over search results and deliver a better hit rate. In addition, EasyAsk leverages internal or third-party analytics data sets that reflect product popularity, purchase propensities or frequencies to the relevancy model, in order to 'intelligently' drive results presentation.
Industry-specific support — Simplifies matching of search requests with relevant merchandise in all supported languages using pre-defined vertical-market dictionaries, thesauruses and extended attributes (i.e., apparel, consumer and household goods, education and manufacturing suppliers, outdoors and technology) tied to a particular vertical market.

Bottom Line: Research Backs up Claims
But can other e-tailers expect the same kind of results that Rockler Woodworking and Hardware got? Absolutely, stated Larry Harris, the vice president and general manager of the EasyAsk division of Progress Software. "We have evidence, backed up by Nielson, that shows that switching to EasyAsk does raise conversion rates."

Indeed, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, e-tailers using EasyAsk achieve the highest average online conversion rates among all users (they tested) of commercially available e-commerce search and navigation technologies. And in 2006, EasyAsk customers had on average at least a 33 percent better conversion rate than competitors.

EasyAsk does not quote prices because it is dependent on site size and the number of SKUs. For more information about EasyAsk and to see a demo, visit www.easyask.com.

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to Ecommerce-Guide.com.

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