Ecommerce enables unique marketing and merchandising opportunities for retailers. Technologies can be used like never before to specifically market items to select customers, while improvements in search features allow customers to find what they are looking for almost before they have finished spelling it out.
As the holidays approach, it is more important than ever to make sure that you are doing everything you can to effectively market your brand and your products to your customers. In a recent Practical eCommerce article, writer Armando Roggio points to three easy ways that retailers can improve their online merchandising, titled “3 Tips for Better Online Merchandising” Roggio’s suggestions include ideas such as:
- Merchandise within search results
- Take the opportunity to upsell and cross promote products
- Use categories effectively and intelligently
To some retailers, Roggio’s suggestions may seem like a complete overhaul of their website layout and structure. But never fear retailers, it is all more simple than you think. Merchandising products and upselling to your customers doesn’t have to be difficult or incredibly time consuming. Neither, in fact does cultivating better and more intelligent search results.
The Upshot Commerce Auto Merchandising Extension uses predictive analytics and data mining to select and display custom product suggestions to each of your customers to encourage higher conversion rates. The suggestions can be programmed to appear within search results, below product detail pages or even within shopping carts.
Within search results themselves, the extension really goes to work. Items within search results are sorted and weighted via factors such as number of views, number of buys and how new the product is. All of these factors add up to give each product a weighted score; the higher the score, the higher relevancy it will have and the higher the item will appear within search results. This behavior mimics the merchandising efforts that most retailers would employ, if they had the time to individually sort items. Luckily, with the Auto Merchandising Extension, retailers can let our predictive analytics do the work for them!
For enterprise retailers looking for a more intelligent search solution, Upshot Commerce offers a host of different search options, the two most popular being our Advanced Sphinx Search and Solr Search Integration. The Advanced Search replaces the standard mySQL search and is custom tailored to fit the needs of your website and customers. We employ such useful features as Auto Complete, “Did you mean” spelling suggestions and weighted fields allowing you to assigned highest priority to what is most relevant.
While Advanced Search is an ideal solution for growing enterprise retailers, Solr takes searching to the next level. Employing the popular new method of faceted searching, Solr is a lightning fast search solution, ideally suited for retailers with large and complex catalogs. To learn more, check out the blog we wrote about it earlier this month. If you’re wondering which search is the right solution for you, we are always happy to make recommendations.
We believe that robust search capabilities and auto merchandising are both essential for any retailer looking to increase their sales and conversion rates, especially with the holidays approaching. We believe this so strongly, we want you to let us prove it to you.
Starting November 1st – January 31st, Upshot Commerce retailers will have the opportunity to try out two great extensions that are essential for the holidays at a special reduced price. For three months only we will be offering the Upshot Commerce Advanced Search with our Auto Merchandising Extension for just $50 a month—that is a full 50% discount off our normal list fee!
Getting set up with these two extensions is fast and easy—give a call today and we’ll let you know what we can do to get you up and running in minutes.