CUSTOMERS.COM® RESEARCH FROM THE PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP
Ecommerce
Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 1
A Blank Matrix to Facilitate
Your Evaluation
By Susan E. Aldrich, September 4, 2008
FACILITATING
YOUR EVALUATION PROCESS
Criteria and Capabilities
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.
To simplify the selection of products that can contribute to ecommerce implementation,
we’ve developed our framework1
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
•
Product and Company Viability
We also provide our recommendations on search-related metrics and responsibilities.
We base our criteria on Customer Scenarios and focus on the key differentiators
in our evaluation of current vendor solutions.
Each organization is different, with different skills, requirements, and architectures.
You should evaluate which features are important to your situation and which
may be able to be traded off without harm. To assist you in your evaluation
efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns.
You can use this matrix to track the capabilities of the short list of products
you are currently investigating, or to evaluate the capabilities of your
current purchased or home-grown solution.2
Feel free to delete features which
you don’t require and to highlight those capabilities that are of the
highest priority in your environment. We hope you find this matrix useful.
Ecommerce Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix
© 2008
Patricia Seybold Group
Illustration
1. This diagram presents our evaluation matrix for ecommerce search solutions.
This
report continues...
**Endnotes**
1) See “Ecommerce
Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 1: How to Plan and Select
Search, Navigation, and Discovery
Solutions for Ecommerce Web Sites,” August 28, 2008.
2) * By Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike
2.5 License. You are free to copy, distribute, alter, and build upon this
document as long as attribution is given to the Patricia Seybold Group,
Inc. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform,
or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under
a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must
make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions
can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
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