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Featured Research
Ecommerce
Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 1
How to Plan and Select Search,
Navigation, and Discovery Solutions for Ecommerce Web Sites
By Susan E. Aldrich, August 28, 2008
NETTING
IT OUT
We define ecommerce
search as the technologies companies deploy to connect customers with products
and answers. This includes search, navigation, and discovery; plus merchandising,
searchandising, and tools to manage the customer experience.
Great search
and navigation have the potential to deliver huge benefits. We have spoken
with companies that increased cart size by 270 percent and eliminated 60
percent of customer support calls by implementing effective ecommerce search.
Whether or not your results reach these heights (or exceed them) depends
on how poor your seeker experience is today, the quality of your content,
and how effective your organization is at managing the seeker experience
once you’ve got the right technologies in place.
Search is far
from being just a technology solution, because information and seekers’ needs
are constantly evolving. You must assign responsibility for the quality
of the seeker experience, monitor the quality, and take actions to improve
it. You must also assign responsibility for the quality of your information
collections, monitor the quality, and take actions to improve information
quality.
To simplify
the selection of products that can contribute to ecommerce implementation,
we’ve developed our framework for evaluating ecommerce search products
and architectures. This framework describes evaluation criteria in the
areas of seeker interfaces, seeker experience management, marketing management,
information collection management, architecture, and product and company
viability. We also provide our recommendations on search-related metrics
and responsibilities.
Since 2003,
we have been using our earlier evaluation frameworks to assess vendors’ offerings
for search and navigation, for ecommerce, enterprise, and customer service
applications. To date, we’ve assessed offerings from ATG, Autonomy, Celebros,
Endeca, FAST, Fredhopper, Google, InQuira, IBM, Mercado, Microsoft, Northern
Light, Oracle, SLI Systems, and Thunderstone, as well as solutions from
EasyAsk (acquired by Progress Software), iPhrase (acquired by IBM), Knova
(acquired by Consona), Verity (acquired by Autonomy), and WebSideStory
(acquired by Omniture).
This framework
also provides our assessment of goals and metrics for key stakeholders
in successful search and navigation. As with our earlier frameworks, we
plan to evaluate leading solutions against our criteria and then prepare
a side-by-side comparison and a ranking of the solutions.
Ecommerce
Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix
© 2008
Patricia Seybold Group
Illustration
1. This diagram presents our evaluation matrix for ecommerce search solutions.
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