Shopping Made Easy

Retailers look to tech tools to help on-line navigation

Finally, people of all ages seem comfortable navigating and purchasing on the Web. It's become so easy that in September, a 3-year-old boy managed to buy a pink convertible car on eBay for $17,000. How? He simply exercised the "buy it now" option after his mother left her password on the auction site.

While this is an extreme case, it proves that the more user-friendly a site is, the more likely it is that someone will make an on-line purchase. To reach this goal, retailers are revamping site navigation. At the top of retailer lists are improvements to their search services.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Footwear etc. struggled with this very task. The site accrues about 40,000 visitors per month and 300,000 page views are conducted during this time frame. Yet, the company was using "a very basic search engine that came with our shopping-cart program," said Mike Baranov, e-commerce operations director for Footwear etc., which also operates six stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"If you typed in a word or description about shoes, many results would surface in alphabetical order," he said. "It didn't allow us to customize the search in a compelling way. Customers wanted more."
Tired of these limited search capabilities, the company "wanted to make the site much more powerful for our customers," said Baranov. "We wanted to help narrow product options by allowing visitors to search by shoe size, type and brand, without having any trouble."

The company also wanted to provide shoppers with an easy navigational experience that saves them time.

In July, Footwear etc. launched the Learning Search tool from SLI Systems, Cupertino, CaHf. Learning Search is a hosted solution that continually tracks visitors' aggregate search terms and the corresponding items they click on. Then the software analyzes these results and delivers products based on popularity.
By September, Footwear etc. became the first retailer to implement SLI Systems' newest service, called Learning Navigation. An extension to SLI Systems' Learning Search suite, the software allows retailers to group products by category.

"It's a way to narrow down your initial search without typing in a search term," said SLI Systems' CEO Shaun Ryan.

Using a visual point-and-click system, on-line merchants can create product groups, or "facets." These facets can be shown on a retailer's home page, and grouped together with products that have similar qualities.

This is particularly useful for shoppers who want to view inventory in a certain category, but may be unsure of what they're looking for. Facets can also be used on a search results page to further narrow the results from a keyword search.

While Baranov believes this is a strong new feature, he is unsure how it is affecting sales. "Based on [user] feedback however, the site has become significantly more user-friendly," he said. "We have also noticed a big increase in multiple pair orders. We're very pleased" Moscow, Idaho-based NRS (Northwest River Supplies), which manufactures and distributes gear for adventure and water sports, has also experienced the effects of these tools. Since adding SLI Systems' Learning Search to its own site, conversion rates have risen by 2%.

And more NRS visitors are taking advantage of the service. Previously, fewer than 20% of visitors used the site's search tool. Today, 75% use search. Approximately 3.4% of visitors then proceed to make a purchase. Before adding the software, fewer than 1% of visitors made a purchase based on search results.

NRS has also seen a surge in traffic from Web search engines with the help of SLI's Site Champion product Integrated with Learning Search, Site Champion tracks visitors' search terms and automatically creates related search links for each page of a retailer's site. These links are also more easily crawled by search-engine spiders.

NRS added the solution before the 2004 holiday season and it continues to improve visibility in search results.

Footwear etc. also plans to explore the solution in hopes of "getting better search results from sites like Google. This is something we've been building over time," Baranov said. "But we're getting there."