Internet Retailer

SearchSpring will be attending this years Internet Retailer conference in Boston June 15th - 18th, 2009. Although we will not have a booth this year, we encourage you to reach out to use to schedule a meetup. We are looking forward to meeting so many different retailers as well as the different vendors. We will be more than willing to sit down, discuss, and demo all the SearchSpring offerings.

Here are some details on the Internet Retailer Conference:

IRCE 2009 is a four-day conference featuring 179 speakers in 94 sessions devoted to the strategies and tools that e-retailers can use to thrive in a recession that pulls the rest of retailing down. Hence the theme: Rising Above—Not Just Surviving—the Economic Storm. The agenda, which has fewer general sessions than last year and many more specific breakout sessions and tracks that are targeted to specific e-retailer needs.

For more information and full agenda:

http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2009/

Found this great information posted by Samantha Gonzales @ Invesp.com

Some of you might think that great navigation is all you need to convert prospects into customers and keep them satisfied with your website’s usability.

Some of you are wrong.

You need internal search. Yes, need.

That’s not it, though. Internal searches have to be modified to reflect your business, its website’s content and your customers’ own needs, desires and habits.

Continue reading…

Visit us at this years Miva Merchant Conference in San Diego California. We will be available for live demos and to answer any questions you may have on site search and its importance. In addition, we will have a se

ssion available for all attendees on Sunday, March 1st. We look forward to seeing all the friendly faces and meeting this years new attendees.

For more details on the 2009 Miva Merchant Conference, please see:

http://www.mivamerchant.com/conference_2009/

Re: Miva Search

SkyeSterling had this to say…

“For us Miva’s built in search was horrible.

We sell sterling silver jewelry. A search for “rings” would not include anything that just said “ring”, without the “s”, but would include products that said “earrings”. So a search for rings only returned earrings.

We tried Power Search which gave a little more control, but we still had the problem of the search including word fragments and we still had to have a custom field for search terms for each product.

We started using Search Spring a few months ago and we LOVE it. You have so much control and it allows for spelling errors, which we’ve had a lot of. The synonyms allow you to tell it once that a search for one word should return results for another, so you dont have to use a search terms custom field for each product, you can just tell search spring once. It also allows customers to narrow their search by custom fields giving you complete control.

I would highly recommend it. For us it was the perfect solution.”

Nina Leon
www.SkyeSterling.com
Silver Jewelry since 1972

Contact Info:
SearchSpring, a product of B7 Interactive
Scott Zielinski, (719) 594-4595
scott at searchspring.net

Colorado Springs, CO, 2008/07/02 — SearchSpring today announced their strategic partnership with Miva Merchant, the makers of the leading E-Commerce solution for small and mid-sized businesses. Designed specifically for E-Commerce, SearchSpring is a hosted site search application that makes it easy for online stores to help their customers find the products they’re looking for. SearchSpring does this by providing shoppers with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that delivers accurate and relevant search results.

Increasingly, online shoppers are becoming accustomed to using search to find products more effectively. This trend is driven by the proliferation of search engines like Google and Yahoo, as well as the rise in popularity of comparison shopping websites such as Shopping.com. Just as shoppers use Google as a gateway to find stores that carry the products they seek, so are they using the site search features on the destination store’s website to hone in on available products and accessories. However, many online stores only offer customers rudimentary search tools that often fail to yield useful results and fall short of providing a positive customer experience. SearchSpring now enables Miva Merchant store owners to address this problem by providing seamless integration between Miva Merchant and SearchSpring. Taking next to no time to implement, the result is the ability to improve customer experience and increase sales quickly and easily.

“Our partnership with Miva Merchant is significant because it echos our commitment to provide a solution that integrates seamlessly with the thousands of stores out there running Miva Merchant.” says Scott Zielinski, co-founder of B7 Interactive, the company behind SearchSpring. Scott, also a long time member of the Miva Merchant developer community, has extensive experience building third-party software for Miva Merchant. Scott goes on to say “We want our merchants to be able to get SearchSpring in front of customers quickly, where it can start delivering immediate value.”

Beyond improving the relevancy of search results, SearchSpring offers many other useful features. One of which is the ability for shoppers to filter and view search results by practical data elements like brand, size, color, style and more. This feature is particularly useful to shoppers because it provides instant feedback into the depth of product options available. Additional features include the ability to fine tune the search behavior, configure misspelling thresholds and report on useful data like which searches are the most popular and those which yield no matches.

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About SearchSpring

SearchSpring is a product of B7 Interactive, a web development firm with extensive experience in delivering tailored solutions to successful online retailers. SearchSpring was born from need to help clients’ provide their customers with a better search experience. SearchSpring integrates seamlessly with Miva Merchant 5.x offering customers enhanced search relevancy, dynamic faceting, reporting, field boosting, and many more powerful features. For more information about SearchSpring, call 719-594-4595 or visit http://www.searchspring.net.

About Miva Merchant

Founded in 1996, Miva Merchant has deployed over 200,000 online storefronts and provides a leading platform for online enterprises. The Miva Merchant Platform consists of software, services, and a partner network assembled for the purpose of helping to create and enhance online business. Miva Merchant partners are at the forefront in servicing the increasing number of enterprises using the Internet to expand their market reach. Partners can easily and quickly integrate the Miva Merchant platform of applications and API’s with their existing services to deliver complete online business solutions. Miva Merchant is a leader in offering the ease of browser-based point and click online business creation, combined with deep customizability and integrated marketing services. For more information about Miva Merchant call 1.858.490.2570 or visit http://www.mivamerchant.com.

“Scott, I just had to take a moment and let you know how happy I am with Searchspring, by B7Interactive. For the first time, I think we are letting users find what they are looking for.

Customers of our site have complained for years that our internal search was ineffective, at best. I hesitated embedding Google’s search; that just seemed a way to let Google get their hooks even deeper into our site. Finally we have an elegant solution to the problem: Searchspring!

And the ability to check out search results on our own admin dashboard is invaluable. By using the failed searches widget we are now taking all the common mispellings of the products and brands on our site and linking them to the correct spelling using Searchspring’s unique “Synonyms” feature. This is such a cool idea; one that I have never seen before.

I’m sure we will find many more benefits as times pases, as we only have been using the product for 10 days.

Thanks again for a needed and useful product. I am anticipating that our store orders will rise and more than cover the cost of Searchspring; customers can finally quickly find what they want to buy!”

-Chris Gripp, SignWarehouse.com

How do I set up Site Search for my Google Analytics profile?

In order to set up Site Search for your profile, you will need to configure your Profile settings. To do so, please follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click ‘Edit’ under Website Profiles for the profile you would like to enable Site Search for.
3. Click ‘Edit’ from the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ section of the Profile Settings page.
4. Select the ‘Do Track Site Search’ radio button in the Site Search section of the Edit Profile Information page.
5. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. The query parameter for Miva Merchant or SearchSpring Basic users is “Search”… everyone else and SearchSpring Pro accounts it is “query”.
6. Select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL. Please note that this will only strip out the parameters you provided, and not any other parameters in the same URL. This has the same functionality as excluding URL Query Parameters in your Main Profile - if you strip the query parameters from your Site Search Profile, you don’t have to exclude them again from your Main Profile.

If you don’t use ‘Categories’ for your Site Search, then hit ‘Save Changes’ to finish. However, if you do use ‘Categories’ - such as the ability to use drop-down menus to refine a search - you can include categories in your search analytics by following the steps below:

1. Select the ‘Yes’ radio button under ‘Do you use categories for site search?’
2. Enter your ‘Category Parameter’ in the field provided. Please enter only the letters that designate an internal query category such as ‘cat, qc,’.
3. Decide if you want to strip out the category parameters that you just provided. This will only strip out the parameters you provided, and not any other parameters in the same URL. This has the same functionality as excluding URL Query Parameters in your Main Profile - if you strip the query parameters from your Site Search Profile, you don’t have to exclude them again from your Main Profile.
4. Click ‘Save Changes’ to finish.

Note: For SearchSpring users, we call this faceting or facets. Example SearchSpring Basic parameters are: filters[0], filters[1], filters[2], etc… And example SearchSpring Pro paramters are: price,category,brand, etc….

You will now find your Site Search reports underneath the ‘Content’ section of your profile.

https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=75817&hl=en_US

We are proud to announce that we now have a seamless integration for SearchSpring E-Commerce Search and Miva Merchant 5. The new module utilizes Miva Merchants proprietary Store Morph template language to give you full control over the look and feel via the administration “Page” system. In addition, the module allows for automatic data feed creation allowing for a hands off experience for the store administrator. For more information, please contact a SearchSpring representative.

“Internal search functionality may not be very sexy to marketers, but it is to consumers. According to MarketingSherpa data, consumers turn to a site’s search box before any other navigation tool, yet 52% of marketers rated their internal search as a ‘D’ or an ‘F.’”

Do your visitors find what they are looking for when they use your internal site search? According to expert Ross Jenkins, “90% of site searches are horrible, horrible.”

“Getting search right is critical to reaching your customers and prospects, but the challenge isn’t limited to commercial search engines. The most important searches are often the ones users perform on your own website. MarketingSherpa data reveals that 43% of visitors who land on a website go immediately to the search function. And customers who use the search box on ecommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers.”

“46% of product marketers say tweaking internal site search is “very effective,” second only to shopping cart design as the most effective site test, according to new data from MarketingSherpa’s 2007 Ecommerce Benchmark Guide.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com