Sophelle Focus Report - Product Findability 2016-11

© Copyright 2016, Sophelle. All rights reserved.

[email protected]

November 2016

945 Concord StreetFramingham, MA 01701508.875.5700

FOCUS REPORTPRODUCT FINDABILITY:

CONNECTING PEOPLE AND PRODUCTS

A WORD FROM SOPHELLE

DOUGLAS WEICH

CEO

For over 20 years Sophelle has been helping retailers navigate

the continuous change in the way people shop. Throughout

this time, one underlying theme has remained constant: how

can retailers connect the right people with the right products at

the right time? If that can be accomplished, retail success will

follow.

In this report we will look across the retail enterprise at how

you can most effectively connect your customers with the

products they are looking for, and share key insights on how

you can be more successful with product findability. And we

will present several of the more innovative vendor solutions

and their perspectives.

I hope that you find the report helpful.

© Copyright 2016, Sophelle. All rights reserved. PAGE - 2

ABOUT SOPHELLE FOCUS REPORTS

Sophelle Focus Reports are intended to provide readers with

information and insight into specific areas of retail technology

and operations. The information attributed to Sophelle in this

report is based on the combined experience of its associates

working with hundreds of leading retailers on strategy and

implementation projects.

Sophelle Focus Reports are not intended to provide all of the

information needed for retailers to make a decision on

selecting a specific solution. We recommend that each retailer

conduct a thorough solution selection project, identifying its

particular requirements, and reviewing each vendor’s solution

in detail. Sophelle has conducted hundreds of selection

projects and we invite you to find out more by visiting our

website at www.sophelle.com.

Readers are encouraged to contact Sophelle and all of the

participating vendors. Contact information is provided at the

end of the report.

Sophelle Focus Reports are published regularly. For the most

recent versions, please visit www.Sophelle.com/Focus.


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Introduction

Benefits to Retailers in Getting Product Findability Right

Customers Expect More

Customer Experience Drives Retail Success

Mobile Product Findability

Enhanced Product Data

The Data Factor

Finding the Right Solution

Vendor Offerings

Vendor Directory

About the Author

Get in Touch

Product findability is more than on-site search.

INTRODUCTION

Doing product findability right connects the right person with the right product at the right time. Consumers don’t recognize channels, technologies, warehouse locations, or drop-ship relationships. They are expecting a seamless, frictionless experience, and retailers that provide it are succeeding in the marketplace.

Connecting people and products effectively significantly improves the customer experience and leads directly to downstream benefits such as:

Customers want retailers to meet them with relevancy wherever they choose to shop. Seamless customer experiences across all touchpoints requires coordinated operations, integrated systems, and shared data throughout the enterprise. Retailers must find the right mix of solutions for their products and customers.

Higher sales and marginsIncreased profitabilityGreater loyalty

Operational Considerations:

Data Considerations:

Technology Considerations:

On-site searchNavigationPersonalizationRecommendations

MobileIn-store applicationsCustomer databasePIM

Well-thought-out policies for each channel

Coordinated processes between channels

that keep the customer experience in mind

Shared single views of the customer, product, inventory, and order data


When people find what they are looking for, they buy more.

Bringing customers closer to the products they are looking to buy, faster and across all customer touch points, enhances the customer experience and drives measurable increases to retailers’ bottom line.

Relevant site experiences result in higher conversion rates, units per order, and average order value.

Relevancy drives customer loyalty, and loyalty reduces attrition.

Purchase information from product relevancy initiatives can be leveraged to improve operational processes such as inventory forecasting, assortment planning, and supply chain optimization.

Improving product findability online has a positive impact on in-store sales and supports clienteling efforts.

Retailers can drive customers toward higher value, higher margin items and improve profitability by leveraging personalization and product data.

Applying product findability to marketing efforts can garner higher ROI and increase marketing budget efficiency.

Key Trend: Empowering Business Users

Sophelle Tip:

Key Insight:

An ongoing shift in digital technology is toward untangling business users from heavy reliance on IT with business user-friendly tools, allowing them to execute and react to market and business changes more quickly.

Revisit your digital commerce platform’s capabilities in connecting people and products. Are you taking full advantage of all out-of-the-box product findability-related features and functionality?

A personalized website experience can increase sales by up to 19% as well as increase average order value, the average revenue per customer, and increase customer retention rates.

- Monetate

BENEFITS TO RETAILERS INGETTING PRODUCT FINDABILITY RIGHT


When customers provide their personal and behavioral data, they expect something in return.

Customers know retailers are collecting data on their

behavior, and they want it to be used to deliver more

personalized and relevant experiences. Customers’ research

patterns, browsing activity, and purchase history provide

retailers with the information needed to connect people and

products effectively. Retailers need to have the right

strategies, tools, and resources to execute this successfully.

Customers expect to be recognized across all channels -

online, in-stores, and on their mobile devices. This

expectation starts with a personal greeting online, in email

messages, or in-store, and extends through content,

products, marketing messaging, and even customer service

contacts. All of these touchpoints have a role in creating

opportunities to connect people with the right products. By

making small, incremental changes in each of these areas,

retailers can have a positive effect on the customer

experience.

CUSTOMERS EXPECT MORE Key Trend: Personalized Omnichannel Experiences

Key Insight:

Sophelle Tip:

As retailers look toward coordinating operations,

integrating technologies, and centralizing data to

deliver truly personalized and seamless

omnichannel experiences for customers, they are

smartly approaching it in phases. Tackling

low-hanging fruit first is a surefire way to prove

success and gain support for bigger, more complex

initiatives.

One of the simplest things to implement is greeting

the customer by name in an email, on a website, or

during a customer service contact session. Retailers

can also utilize social log-in functionality to further

enhance customer profiles with interest and activity

data, which can be applied to personalization and

marketing communications to improve relevancy.

Over 50% of consumers will share their private data

if it will expedite or improve their shopping

experience.

- Monetate and Accenture Interactive



CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DRIVES RETAIL SUCCESS

Key Trend: The Mash-up of Site Search, Navigation, Merchandising, and In-store

Applications

Key Insight:

Sophelle Tip:

Digital commerce point solutions are evolving well beyond their original capabilities in an effort to support seamless customer experiences. Before investing in new technologies, retailers should audit their existing toolset to avoid redundancy and ensure current capabilities are maximized.

Product findability solutions vary greatly in capability, complexity, and price. Functions such as advanced filtering, comparison features, and guided selling help customers make better purchase decisions. Customer journey analysis and mapping helps retailers better understand their customer experience opportunities and should be a key consideration in selecting a solution.

Only 32% of retailers can see a consumer online and match them to their mobile device or tablet.Just 22% have a complete profile of customers across all channels.

- Retail TouchPoints

Successful retailers are solving for complex customer journeys.

The customer journey continues to become increasingly complex as customers research, browse, and purchase via multiple devices and channels over extended periods of time. However, personalization efforts are often siloed within multi-channel organizations, preventing the delivery of a truly personalized experience.

Successful retailers coordinate operations, integrate systems, and share centralized data across all customer touch points. By focusing on improving, enhancing, and orchestrating the connection of people and products across the enterprise, retailers can better satisfy customers’ needs, meet their expectations, and mitigate the risk of losing sales to competitors.

Achieving the holy grail of seamless customer experiences is not done overnight, but is a process over time which requires discovery, planning, and enterprise alignment. The approach taken toward achieving that goal will be dependent on many factors including retail and digital system architecture, the number and complexity of data sources, and the state of the company’s data hygiene.

If they can’t find it, they can’t buy it.

Digital traffic to retailer sites from mobile devices can be as high as 50% and is growing. With conversion rates approximately half that of desktop, mobile represents a significant opportunity in improving product findability and monetizing traffic.

Poor navigation and search on mobile shopping sites may not align with the way customers prefer to shop. Reduced screen sizes limit options, but creative solutions are evolving rapidly. Retailers need to focus on how to design the optimal mobile user interface for their specific product catalog and customers.

Nested fly-out navigation menus make good use of limited space and are an effective way to move shoppers through the product findability journey. For most retailers, guided navigational elements such as dynamic facets and filters on mobile are a must-have, particularly for large and varied product assortments.

Equally important for retailers is ensuring the search feature is easily located on the mobile UI, and provides the user with smart search functionality such as auto-complete, suggested searches, auto-correct, and multi-word key phrase recognition.

MOBILE PRODUCT FINDABILITY Key Trend: Natural Language Search

Key Insight:

Sophelle Tip:

Technologies that support natural language search and built-in mobile phone capabilities, such as voice-to-text, are leading the way in solving the challenges of product findability on small screens.

To improve mobile product findability, ensure that the most relevant search results are presented first. Design navigational interfaces to support accurate clickability and the most efficient path to relevant products.

In a study of 50 major U.S. mobile sites:

34% do not offer “thematic” product browsing, e.g. “casual men’s shoes”

38% have a category hierarchy that is either too deep or too shallow

88% present shoppers with “no results” without providing contextually relevant help to maintain engagement, leaving the user at a dead-end

- Baymard Institute


Let customers search for and find products the way they want to.

In direct-to-consumer selling, there’s a risk that company-speak does not align with customer-speak. If so, it can greatly affect product findability success. In order to develop an effective product data strategy, retailers need to understand how customers actually think about, search for, and find a retailer’s particular products. Insights from content consumed, site search query data, paid search, SEO activities, and even customer service contacts are some of the ways retailers can discover customer-friendly product attributes to enhance product-level data.

Tools which enhance product data beyond what is native to most digital commerce solutions allow for the inclusion of natural language descriptors, product features, multi-word phrases, and problem/solution-oriented terminology – all of which should be accounted for in a comprehensive product data set. A fully attributed product catalog enables better search results, more relevant facets, filters, and drill-downs, and powers more comprehensive data feeds.

The benefits in aligning queryable product attributes with customer-speak include higher average order value, higher conversion, and greater customer loyalty. The risk in not doing it is that relevant products will not be shown to shoppers, leading them to believe you don’t have what they are looking for.

ENHANCED PRODUCT DATAKey Trend: The Internet of Things

Key Insight:

Sophelle Tip:

Advances in digital technologies are making it easier for retailers to deliver personalized experiences in stores. Beacons, RFID, and augmented reality applications are enhancing the connection of people and products.

You don’t need to tackle the entire assortment with enhanced product data all at one time. Starting with a category, sub-category, or even product type to test, learn, refine, and build upon success is a more manageable approach.

According to Edgecase, to power navigation aligned with how shoppers actually think and speak, most retailers would need to increase their product attributes by an average of 689%.


Well-planned, managed, structured, and accessible customer and product data fuels product findability. Implementing and running product findability solutions in silos results in performance ceilings, stifles innovation, and blocks cross-channel orchestration. Before retailers can effectively employ advanced solutions to support product findability, they must take stock of their data environment.

Optimal product findability is driven by the intersection of real-time product and customer data, including behavioral, demographic, geographic, and historical purchase data. How all of this data is managed, and its accessibility, factors greatly into the degree to which product findability can be maximized.

Breaking down data silos and creating a single source of truth also offer benefits in improving strategic decision making, gaining operational efficiencies, and enabling advanced functionality, such as predictive analytics and preparation for the Internet of Things.

THE DATA FACTOR Key Trend: Hosting Data in the Cloud

Hosting data in the cloud allows retailers to benefit from operational cost-efficiencies, increased scalability, and streamlined real-time accessibility by disparate systems. While cloud hosting is a good option for many retailers, it’s important to ensure that it solves for connecting data from all relevant sources.

Sophelle Tip:

Solving data silo challenges takes time and proper planning. Consider creating a cross-functional Data Task Force to oversee the effort from internal discovery, through planning, and ultimately to remediation.

Retailers’ top two challenges in achieving a centralized view of the customer:

Key Insight:

34% state poor data quality40% state an inability to link different technologies

- CMO.com by Adobe


There is a vast and growing landscape of product findability solutions.

With so many product findability solutions available, many with overlapping

functionality, retailers are challenged to find the right solutions to maximize their

opportunities and minimize risk. Sophelle has helped hundreds of retailers make

thousands of smart technology decisions with a proven process for success based

on four fundamental pillars:

A disciplined approach to achieving product findability success is critical. Here are

some tips to get your company started on the path to the best solution:

We can help! Contact Sophelle today for a free 30-minute consultation on

solving your product findability challenges.

1. Holistic view: to consider impact across the enterprise;

2. Deep domain expertise: to foresee long-term needs and impact;

3. Vast experience: to have previously witnessed solutions’ performance; and

4. Objective assessment: to ensure the optimal solution is selected,

not the best sold solution.

Develop product findability goals – what are your customers expecting from you?

Assess current state – how well are you meeting your customers’ expectations?

Determine gaps in People, Processes, and Tools – what are the specific areas

of opportunity and risk?

Define business and technical requirements – what is needed to bridge

the gap between current state and achieving your product findability goals?

FINDING THE RIGHT SOLUTION


VENDOR OFFERINGS

Product findability is enabled with the right tools.

Sophelle asked several of the leading software vendors with solutions in the product findability space to present their views on best practices, trends, and their particular approaches. The information provided under each vendor represents their respective view. Sophelle has not verified their claims nor endorses their solutions. The information is presented to allow readers to learn and make their own decisions.


Leading brands in apparel, home and sporting goods rely on the BaynoteONE smart data platform to drive highly relevant and personalized experiences on their website and in email campaigns. BaynoteONE integrates with existing ecommerce, onsite search, email and CMS systems to drive a seamless personalized experience for consumers that increases conversion, average order value and brand loyalty.

BaynoteONE provides key infrastructure elements that are missing from most commerce operations that drive relevance and item findability including:

Online Customer Data Hub

The BaynoteONE CXP is a smart, online customer data hub to collect, connect and enhance data about individual customers. The data hub can be used to connect data from online and offline sources into a single profile for each customer. The system uses machine learning techniques to enhance the data by pulling out actionable insights like each customer’s preferred categories, styles or price points.

Self-service Merchandising Console

To drive the needs of modern commerce, applications must be self-service and allow business users to make changes without extensive training. BaynoteONE VUE was designed with 30 of Baynote’s industry leading retail clients to be used by retail marketers and merchandisers. BaynoteONE VUE includes advanced features like built-in A/B testing, outfitting and boost and bury.

Real-time Performance Engine

The BaynoteONE RTX modelling engine enables machine learning on complex datasets that combine online and offline data with derived presences. Using Hadoop as a data refinery and for scalable computation, the BaynoteONE modelling engine uses unique, patented machine learning algorithms and a new composite approach to find patterns that are impossible with prior or off-the-shelf or king-of-the-hill techniques.


BaynoteONE powers smart data solutions that integrate with existing systems to increase relevance, personalization and product findability including:

Homepage – Trending items and categories by segment and location and recently viewed items.

Category Pages – Personalized category sort to bring the most relevant items to the top of the category results

Onsite Search – Deliver more relevant search results based on consumer behavior and trends

PDP and Cart – Personalized product, accessory and category recommendations

Transactional and Campaign Emails – Personalized recommended products and content

Call Center / Store Sales Agents – Real-time customer data, recently viewed items across channels and recommended items based on preferences and recent intent

Mobile Applications – Deliver recommended items, trending items and more within existing mobile applications

Smart Data Solutions for Relevance and Findability

1:1 Personalization vs. Persona TargetingMany “personalization” solutions are little more than persona-based targeting engines using rules to target users based on well-defined large groups and limited content. BaynoteOne uses individual customer data to understand each customer’s preferences and current interests and then directs them to the best items to meet their current needs.Cross-Device Profiles and InteractionsExisting solutions are typically isolated to a particular channel of interaction and cannot utilize data from other touchpoints or interact across touchpoints. BaynoteONE is designed to collect and connect data and make that data available online to applications and touchpoints with very low latency.

Full AutomationMany “old school” recommenders and targeting systems must be completely setup ahead of time and do not change as new data is introduced. BaynoteONE automatically processes real-time data and algorithms to quickly adapt to changing customer behavior without additional configuration.

Self-service MerchandisingTo drive the needs of modern commerce, applications must be self-service and allow business users to make changes without extensive training. BaynoteONE VUE was designed with 30 of Baynote’s industry leading clients to be used by retail marketers and merchandisers.

Delivering relevant, dynamic and impactful customer experiences has never been easier. With the BaynoteONE retailers can have smart and actionable big data and a proven partner to accelerate business results today.

Smart, Actionable Big Data, Today

The BaynoteONE Difference


VISUALSEARCH

Analyze every keystroke within search to uncover shopper intent and predict relevant text suggestions and product discovery

up to 28% conversion

increase

up to 70% Click-through

increase when product

sought is on 1st page

up to 7%conversion increase

up to 120% AOV increase

up to 70%higher conversion

than product page

Deliver personalized product discovery aligned to category and sub-category search and

driven by real-time interaction with your navigation menu

Uncover shopper traits and in-the-moment interests with a fun, interactive quiz. Combine answers with predictive modeling to deliver products that will best resonate with each unique shopper

Predict the most

relevant order of

products on category

and sub-category

pages based on

in-session activity,

interaction with

faceted elements and

shopper history

Leverage Certona best

practices and flexible

merchandising rules for

home, product detail,

cart and other site

pages to deliver the

most relevant

recommendations to

each individual shopper

VISUAL

NAVIGATIONPRODUCT FINDER

& GIFT FINDER

AUTO

DISCOVERY

PRODUCT

RECOMMENDATIONS

Consumers have spoken—in surveys, in reports, in jumping ship to buy from the

competition—not only do they want personalization, they expect it! The question for

retailers today is not “to personalize or not to personalize,” but rather:

How do I find the right personalization technology to connect shoppers with relevant products that match

their individual preferences and in-the-moment interests?

How do I make it easy for shoppers to find what they are looking for across digital and in-store channels?

How do I help shoppers uncover products they didn’t even know they wanted?

EMARKETER REPORTS

Maximize Product Findability

The number one ask by consumers: “Make it easy for me to find and buy what I’m looking for.” It seems

like a simple request, but the level of technology required to make it happen is not. A sophisticated blend

of data collection unified across channels, predictive analytics and contextualization for actionable

insights and real-time experience delivery is the only way to meet expectations for that one-to-one,

individually relevant experience shoppers demand. With the most data-driven technology on the market,

backed by patents for search and discovery, and predicting human behavior, Certona makes it simple to

deliver on the retail experience elements that are most important. Below are some of the best practices

driving increases in AOV, conversion and overall revenue for top retailers.

1. Optimize the Path to Conversion

Combining a collection of simple yet essential discovery tactics with more advanced innovations, Certona’s

Smart Discovery solutions create an optimal path to conversion by immediately uncovering shopper intent to

engage them early in the shopping experience, then guiding them each step of the way to purchase:

“SHOPPERS WANT PERSONALIZATION”Consumers rate most important

retail experience elements

Can find what I’m looking for and buy how I want to buy

Consistent across digital and in-store channels

Relevant to my current interest

Consistent across devices

Relevant to my personal

taste, style, age group or

location

52%

54%

56%

59%

81%


2. Connect the dots across digital and in-store channels: Consumers research, browse and purchase across devices and in-store. They expect each interaction to be personal and consistent. Certona can ingest data from in-store point of sale systems, CRM and third parties to enrich our deep customer profiles built from every click and interaction across channels. The result: a tailored customer experience within each channel seamlessly informed by the others.

up to 2X Liftin digital engagement

up to 11%Digital engagement

increasewhen point of sale data is ingested with personalized content &

offers

3. Deliver the complete experience

Personalization need not be limited to products. Like recommendations, hero shots, articles, videos, offers and just about any digital asset can be personalized based on customer profile, location, style, taste, preferences, context and segmentation models.

It’s all about the individualOptimized paths engage customers at every turn—on any device and within every channel—for maximum findability. See below for an example of possible initial site search points and ways a personal experience could flow.


Connecting with Shoppers

Retailers exist to connect shoppers with product. Great retailers do this in a way that inspires shoppers and attracts new customers. To execute on this core principle of retailing, merchants have traditionally turned to a number of tried and true techniques such as ensuring that categories are sorted appropriately, identifying collections and making good use of product bundling. More recently, though, the intersection of content and data has accelerated the importance of two particular digital commerce merchandising strategies: guided selling and personalization.

Guided selling is a process that accelerates the connection between shoppers and products by matching interests or needs with product attributes. A 2014 survey of digital marketers conducted by Forrester Consulting found that 51 percent plan to increase spending in guided selling. 1

CONSIDER GUIDED SELLING FOR:

CASE STUDY – DIGITAL BEAUTY COUNTER

A leading beauty brand uses guided selling to recommend products like a trusted beauty counter associate. Successful engagement and interactivity show you can create a confident buyer – in any channel. Traffic to the guided selling application outperforms the rest of the brand’s website.

TECHNICAL PURCHASES - Customers may need education to understand the benefits of complex items and feature-rich products, especially when price is a consideration.

BEAUTY PURCHASES - In the U.S., 79% of beauty brands now offer some form of guided selling tool on their sites. 2

SEASONAL PURCHASES – Retailers often leverage guided selling for early-funnel shoppers, using attributes like gender and age to drive product discovery. Prom or wedding dress finders are often used in the spring and summer, while holiday gift finders are an effective way to guide consumers in making an appropriate purchase decision for Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.

“Refresh Your Approach to 1:1 Marketing: How Real-Time Automation Elevates Personalization,” Forrester Consulting, August 2014, p. 4.

(“Intelligence Report: Content & Commerce,” L2 Inc. and Demandware, October 23, 2014, p. 38.)

1.

2.


1970s:Ad-hoc segmentation

1990-2010s:‘Big Data’ TODAY

The Next Generation of Personalization Born from recent advancements in data science, retailers can now model shopper activity and affinities to predict the most relevant products for each individual shopper. This machine learning approach to personalization moves past the days where segmentation reigned. Gone are the days when ‘You May Also Like’ is an innovative merchandising tactic. Soon, shoppers will expect personalized sorts and pages that surface products that will make their way into the cart. These merchandising tactics require intelligence to be woven into the shopping experience, far deeper than a simple integration.

The Personalization Evolution

As content and commerce blend, retailers must provide a true shopping experience that engages and connects the brand to the shopper. Guided selling and personalization provide opportunity for innovative retailers to attract and retain shoppers.

“We comb through what we know about each shopper, facets like color, style, fit and even price sensitivity, to infer what she likes, what she doesn’t, and automatically find insights that create relevant experiences.”

-- Rama Ramakrishnan, SVP Data Science, Salesforce Commerce Cloud


EasyAsk is the industry-leading provider of Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising functionality for eCommerce. Some of the largest, most successful retailers have integrated EasyAsk’s site search technology into their eCommerce platform, resulting in much higher revenue per search, better conversion and AOV. Providing the best search and merchandising and generating the products your shoppers need, EasyAsk delivers an outstanding customer experience that earns customer loyalty.

Why “Good Enough” Search isn’t Good Enough

Corporate priorities have accepted mediocre search for too long. As priorities jockey for top-of-mind position in a retail organization’s C-suite, search gets pushed lower down the list. That’s a mistake. Search is the lynch pin to a successful eCommerce business. The search box is the jumping off point for most shoppers and therefore is the one spot on your website that you must get right to deliver what your customers want.

Search and the Mobile Revolution

The technology behind the search box determines the products that are delivered to your customer as well as complementary merchandising decisions. Serving up the products that fit your customer’s request along with relevant cross-sell and up-sell options will increase your average sale and boost revenue.

Understanding the intent of a shopper’s request is the key to more accurate search. In order for a search engine to understand the intent, the technology must do more than just match keywords. Customers can use their own words and not be hamstrung by words thrown together for the benefit of the search engine. The search engine needs to speak the same language as the shopper – not the other way around.

When it comes to mobile, search is even more important. Mobile commerce now accounts for 30% of all eCommerce in the U.S., with numbers expecting to grow to 50% by 20181. Natural language search and built-in smartphone voice-to-text technology work hand-in-hand to provide shoppers the experience they expect while searching for products. Regardless of the device your customer uses, they will get the most relevant results first. Because of the smaller screen, this is even more significant for mobile. If a customer needs to scroll past the first screen, they are more likely to abandon your site and move on to a competitor.

Example: exact search on two sports apparel mobile sites.EasyAsk on the left


1 According to Internet Retailer https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/03/10/mobile-commerce-will-be-nearly-half-e-commerce-2018

Empower your Merchandisers through Search Seamless Integration

Features and Benefits

EasyAsk Commerce Studio provides the tools your merchandisers need to create and configure new shopping experiences:

EasyAsk provides a search and merchandising tool that seamlessly integrates and works with your existing eCommerce infrastructure. Once implemented, analytics provide intelligence for merchandisers that empower them to make updates and create business rules to meet the demands of a changing market.

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is available as a SaaS offering as well as an On-Premise Enterprise License. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is a complete product offering Search, Navigation, Merchandising and Analytics to help eTailers get the most from their eCommerce sites. Join over 350 customers worldwide to deploy the best-in-breed search and merchandising software. Visit www.easyask.com

Best-in-class search using natural language technology

Direct control of shopping sites by business users making it easy to react to changes

In-depth analytics provide a detailed view of shopper’s behavior

Integration with eCommerce platforms, such as Websphere, Magento, Infor, and Netsuite

Mobile-readyAn easy-to-use interface where merchandisers can quickly set up promotions that automatically adjust to the selling environment

Optimized product display in searches, category pages and landing pages based on dynamic parameters like popularity, sales, inventory and relevance

Up-sell and cross-sell offers for products based on natural language rules that dynamically adjust according to the current selling environment

Quick creation of new promotional strategies with the ability to test these, on-the-fly, to determine their value and responsiveness


Enriched Product Data: The Key to Great Shopping Experiences

Connecting shoppers with the products they actually

want remains an incredible challenge for retailers today.

Today’s consumer is forced to express their wants and

needs in retailer-speak rather than using their own

language and preferences. Meanwhile the poor state of

underlying product data limits the retailer’s ability to

connect shopper preferences with accurate and

compelling product options.

The result is often a generic shopping experience that

feels like the retailer just “does not have anything for

me.”

On the surface it appears to be an experience problem,

but the real culprit for the majority of retailers is

incomplete and inaccurate product data that is

overwhelming to create and manage.

Edgecase is the leading provider of product data enrichment technology to fuel e-commerce. By identifying and creating enriched product attributes

that align with how consumers think and communicate,

we empower retailers to speak the language of their

shoppers.

Edgecase technology creates expanded product vocabulary to

power discovery experiences that connect shoppers with the

products they’ll love, resulting in higher engagement,

conversion, and revenue.


Real Solutions to Complex Product Attribution Problems

Without great product data, even the most sophisticated product selection and user experience won’t help shoppers find what they are looking for.

The average retailer has only 15–25% of their catalog thoroughly and accurately attributed, while also missing the vast majority of attributes that would align with actual shopper vocabulary and preferences. With this data powering shopping touchpoints like search and navigation, products become “hidden” from shoppers, limiting conversion rates and product sell-through across all channels.

So, you’re experiencing the product data pain and

wondering what’s the next step – or from Edgecase’s

perspective, the next four steps:


Retailers and Brand Manufacturers are implementing various technologies in their pursuit of omni-channel capabilities. They face the daunting task of enriching product details with digital and visual content, while simultaneously expanding online assortments to drive top-line growth. Retailers and brands must centralize information from disparate applications, spreadsheets and databases into a ’command and control’ hub for master data and product content.

The requirement: Automate manual processes to coordinate and synchronize people, processes and data within and across enterprises.

The goal: Provide a single view of content across channels.

Master Data Management (MDM) / Product Information Management (PIM) platforms enable orchestration of complex content, business relationships and work flows to achieve differentiated customer experience, findability and brand consistency (as detailed below).


EnterWorks’ MDM/PIM Enables Findability

EnterWorks’ MDM/PIM Enables Findability

AssortmentExpansion

Search &Syndication

Site Search &

Browse

Localize &

Globalize

Digital

Assets

Digital

AssetsProduct

Associations

ProductAssociations

An expanded product assortment provides

enhanced customer experiences and

competitive advantages. The time and effort

required to setup products in manually

intensive and inefficient. EnterWorks PIM

accelerates item setup to enhance findablity,

drive top line growth, and improve customer

experiences as they interact with your brand.

Steve Jobs said people don’t know what they

want until you show it to them. EnterWorks PIM

drives product association creation and

management including up-sell, cross-sell and

substitutes. This information is typically fed

into recommendation engines to drive

enhanced performance. EnterWorks provides a

feedback loop to learn from the results and

drive merchandising improvements.

Keywords, images, attributes and other

metadata feed search engines to drive your

product findability. PIM solutions centralize

and manage these data elements into a

single operating model. Syndicating data to

your partners at the right time, and with

accurate information using a PIM, enables

you to expand reach and findability across

the marketplace.

The brain processes images 60,000 times faster

than text, and EnterWorks PIM provides a

Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution for

organizations to utilize images, videos,

installation guides, MSDS sheets and other

digital content to enhance customer

experiences and drive findability.

An organized hierarchy, structured taxonomy, and relevant search facets (e.g. product attributes) drives findability and personalization. Ensuring marketing content is aligned with customer expectations also drives findability. EnterWorks PIM controls, manages and federates this information into various customer touchpoints including digital catalogs, eCommerce, CMS and site search systems.

Customers want to find products, and experience your brand, in their local context. As companies expand operations globally, translated and localized content becomes increasingly important to differentiate and compete in each market. EnterWorks PIM orchestrates language translation and becomes the ‘single version of truth’ for global and localized product content.


Optimizing the e-commerce experience is one of the most important challenges facing e-commerce professionals today. Because site search is so important, businesses evaluate the pros and cons of selecting a third-party site search solution. Businesses need to also look beyond features and ensure that the solution is implemented with long-term goals in mind.

Site search feature could arguably be the most important feature of a website. As more shoppers head online and mobile, online retailers cannot ignore:

SITE SEARCH IMPLEMENTATION GAPSTHE IMPORTANCE OF SITE SEARCH


Site search accounts for over 30% of the activity on an e-commerce site.

Site search is a part of the shopping experience in over 40% of online purchases.

80% of visitors will abandon a site as a result of a poor site search experience.

94% of searchers never go past the first page of search results.

The Hawk Search platform upgrades basic site search functionality with a full e-merchandising suite. Built to be agnostic and flexible, plug Hawk Search into any existing e-commerce system and modernize the customer experience.

Over 25% conversion increases are achieved with next generation

Intelligent Search, Smart Autocomplete, and over 300 e-merchandising features.

A flexible dashboard configured to fit all reporting needs. Save time and have the key metrics emailed on a

regular basis.

From predictive recommendations to content management,

merchandisers now have full access to tailor the experience

that fit the shopper.

INFLUENCE THE EXPERIENCEBE ENGAGED DRIVE A KILLER EXPERIENCE

GO BEYOND SITE SEARCH


Tealium is the leader in real-time customer data solutions and enterprise tag management. Leveraging Tealium’s customer

data platform, retailers can build a unified view of the customer in real time and power more relevant, engaging

omnichannel customer experiences. Tealium is the neutral data foundation that marries customer behavior across every channel and digital marketing technology, allowing marketers to define and segment once, yet take action everywhere.

Today’s consumers are engaging with retailers across devices and

across channels, and expect to be engaged with the right message,

in the right channel, at the right time. The ability to deliver that

message, in the right place and at the right time, is dependent on

having a clear, comprehensive view of the consumer and their

preferences, interests, and behaviors. This comprehensive is also

critical when aiming to foster product findabililty, increase cart size,

and build customer loyalty and retention.

Omnichannel marketing is the realization of the long-held marketing

goal of delivering the right message to the right customer at the

right time. Omnichannel marketing requires assembling a single

view of the customer across channels and devices, and then sharing

that customer data with all of your systems so they can work in

concert to improve the customer experience. This important

capability requires the right approach and very specific technology

components, including a real-time data infrastructure.

Tealium enables ATMOSPHERIC MARKETING = Segment Once, Take Action Everywhere

To fuel growth and achieve best-in-class results,

companies must engage customers at every point.

Collect visitor interaction data across every

channel and device

Be able to act on that data in real-time to

improve engagement and conversion rates

Powers 25% of Top 100 Internet Retailers

Has a turnkey integration marketplace with 800+ vendors

Served up 3.4 billion tags on Cyber Monday 2015

The company:



Tealium’s customer data platform includes:

As the leading enterprise tag management system and the foundation of Tealium’s real-time customer data platform, Tealium iQ empowers marketing organizations to unify disparate sources customer data and drive better, more meaningful visitor interactions. The Tealium iQ tag management solution builds a unifying data layer that allows your marketing applications to share a consistent, centralized source of data, resulting in more consistent customer experiences across channels. Then, equipped with an ecosystem of 800+ turnkey vendor integrations, you can easily deploy and manage vendor tags, test new technologies, and take control of your marketing technology stack. These integrations include leading e-commerce providers such as Magento, Demandware, Certona, Optimizely, and others.

Fueled by first-hand knowledge of your customer, AudienceStream enables marketers to build comprehensive visitor profiles, enrich these profiles with powerful additive data, and take relevant action in real time. AudienceStream allows you to correlate data from across every digital touch point, and then synthesize it with offline audience data, such as call center or point of sale information. In addition, the solution identifies visitors across devices by collecting any known identifier and matching that identifier across sessions on any mobile, tablet, or desktop device.

AudienceStream also enables you to easily discover and target a diverse mix of audience segments, and speak to them with the right message, at the right time, in the right way. The AudienceStream ecosystem is made up of deep, native integrations with leading email, marketing automation, online advertising, social, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. These live, two way connectors share your rich visitor data with these technologies you already use to power real-time engagement and action.

Tealium DataAccess is a suite of rich data services built from the ground up to break down the barriers between the marketing data set and data available across an entire organization. DataAccess offers the richest source of clean omnichannel, event, and audience data collected across web and mobile touch points, and makes that data available for real-time action.

An enterprise tag management solution, Tealium iQ TM

An omnichannel segmentation and action engine, Tealium AudienceStream TM

A suite of rich data services, Tealium DataAccess TM

In order to maximize the reach of product catalogs and to increase overall visibility within organic search engines,

retailers need to embrace four primary tenets within the eCommerce businesses. By executing these aspects

effectively and to technical best practices, retail brands will enhance their overall penetration and rankings for

their “long tail” terms, the phrases that associate to their product listings and ultimately convert at the highest

percentages.

What It is: Responsive mobile design is a method of coding that resizes websites to fit screen sizes across mobile devices. This method of mobile website creation ensures a seamless viewing and interaction experience across device types.

Why it is Vital: Google, and other search engines, have mobile-only search results where ‘mobile friendliness’ is a ranking factor. In addition, with the number of search queries on mobile devices now eclipsing desktop as of 2015, the potential for long-term revenue generation for ecommerce sites may very well depend on their ability to deliver a quality mobile experience that can drive conversions.

Tenants of Mobile Friendly Design:

What It Is: With the announcement of Rank Brain, Google is integrating machine learning as a core function of its algorithm to understand relations between topics to increase relevance of search results for user queries. The search wants to do more than serve results. They want to understand meaning, relationships between topics (topic modeling) and context.

Why it is Vital: As the third-highest ranking signal, Rank Brain becomes a signal that websites must address through robust content that answers searcher questions, convinces them to engage through increased time spent on site, and lengthens the time it takes searchers to return to the results pages after their initial click-through.

How Brands Make an Impact:

What it is: Semantic or structured markup, managed through a partnership with Schema.org, is the technical practice of adding additional code snippets (RDFa, MicroData or JSON-LD) to your product pages in order to visually impact search listings through rich snippet display and give a known boost to click-through rate.

Why is it vital: Semantic markup enables brands to integrate additional content into search listings in a programmatic way to search engines, helping them understand their content and products better while also improving click-through rates.

Context that can be included in markup:

What it is: The elements within your webpage and underlining code that serve as key directives for Google and other search engines to understand and initially classify your pages.

Why is it vital: Google uses these on-page elements to shape your visibility and listings within their search engine results pages. Each can have varying influence on ranking within SERP and click-through rate, which search engines use with increasing frequency to gauge searcher satisfaction for queries. These elements also help reduce duplication, which helps improve ranking potential across the domain.

On-Page Ranking Factors:

Size tap targets appropriately to help searchers click on the products and info they want with ease

Keep an appropriate font size so text is simple to read across screen sizes

Make navigation simple so searchers can find their products and content without confusion. This also helps them down the sales/marketing funnel.

Optimize load times –mobile loads at different speeds than desktop site versions. Streamline files, including css, image pixels and Java, to account for varying connections and device types.

Craft content for humans with info drawn from authoritative sources

Answer questions in a robust manner that encourages the incorporation of additional resources (images, video, interactives)

Understand the importance of searcher behavior over keyword search volume.

Construct content to target transactional queries that’s different from content geared to capture searchers on informational queries

Do not rely on manufacturer generated descriptions for products. Always create unique content aimed at helping searchers make purchase decisions easier.

Product price

Aggregate reviews (star ratings)

Product Availability

Address for physical locations

Phone numbers

Awards won (for product)

Manufacturer

Model

Weight

Depth

Page TitlesHeader Tags (H1, H2)Image Alt TagsSolving Duplication: Canonical tags Prev/Next tagsImproving Click-Through Rate: Meta Descriptions Page Titles

Core On-Page Elements Semantic Markup Topic Modeling & Relevance Responsive Design for Mobile



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32 North Front StPhiladelphia, PA 19106trinityinsight.comCraig [email protected](610) 638-1047

VENDOR DIRECTORY

[email protected]

6040 Center Oak Plaza Suite 115Sterling, Virginia 20166enterworks.com Susan Worth

4

Julie Barile has over 17 years of ecommerce and digital

marketing experience in both the mass and luxury markets.

Having led digital marketing at several top global companies,

including Avon, Lancôme, and Toys”R”Us, Julie’s experience

spans several product categories, business models and

corporate functions. Focusing on business strategy and

technology selection, Julie has helped top online and

multi-channel retailers gain operational efficiencies, grow

their businesses, select best-fit technology solutions, and

solve for their unique business challenges.

Please feel free to reach out: [email protected]

JULIE BARILE, Director Digital Commerce Practice

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


GET IN TOUCHSophelle, an experienced provider of management and technology consulting services to the retail and fashion industry since 1995, helps both emerging and Fortune 500 clients achieve IT and business objectives by delivering sound, flexible strategies and reliable, efficient solutions.

Sophelle is privately held with offices in Boston and New York City and comprised of a team of industry experts and more than 50 retail technology professionals.

TRADEMARKS Sophelle Focus Reports are trademarked by Sophelle. Vendor and solution names and trademarks are the property of the respective vendors. All rights reserved. No portion of this report may be reproduced without authorization by Sophelle.

Sophelle

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Framingham, MA 01701

www.sophelle.com

[email protected]

508.875.5700


Sophelle Focus Report - Product Findability 2016-11

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