To help you make the most of this holiday season, we have teamed up with GoDataFeed to offer you an actionable retail checklist, chock full of useful tips and industry insider tactics you can use to prepare for 2009’s biggest shopping days.

This guide also features new merchant offers by the industry’s leading shopping channels and affiliate networks.

Download the Tips & Tactics Holiday Edition Guide Today to learn more:

* Get Ready for the Big Shopping Days- Calendar Items
* Product Feed Optimization, with New Shopping Channel Merchant Offers
* Search Engine Marketing
* Search Engine Optimization
* Site Search Optimization
* Email Marketing

http://godatafeed.blogspot.com/2009/10/optimize-your-ecommerce-holiday.html

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/

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.

Try these stats on for size:

• At least 50% of shoppers prefer to use an online business’s internal search function to find products
• Prospects convert at least 4x more than those who don’t use search functions
• The average value of orders increases as more searches are performed

Given this, it’s practically unconscionable for business owners to overlook optimizing an internal site search on their website.

Like any other optimization measure, improving your search function’s performance can result in higher conversions. After all, fine-tuning an internal site search requires that better results show so that more prospects find and buy what they need.

Before that happens though, you have to understand prospect behavior.

Prospects are likely to use an internal search function because:

• They’re used to searching for what they want on search engines and getting it
• They don’t want to waste time manually searching if they don’t have to

You can imagine their surprise when they’re confronted with an internal site search that doesn’t act as expected. Google has spoiled them and us. We’re used to getting what we need fast and on the first try. If we don’t get it then, we use suggestions that will.

But, all too often, internal site searches don’t perform. And they cost business owners money because of it.

To optimize, you’ll have to make changes. Here are six tips that’ll help you along your way.

1. Study habits

Finding out what your prospects are looking for is the obvious first step.

Investigate your logs and consult Google Analytics’ Site Search. Are there common misspellings or grammatical errors that keep prospects from finding and buying your products? Consult dictionaries or thesauri developed for your industry. Fix your search engine to yield relevant results based on their (correct or incorrect) queries and watch your conversion rates rise.

Look at what your prospects typed into a search engine to arrive at your website. They will likely enter the same terms into your site’s search function, so prepare for that.

Try “dynamic merchandising.” Find out what keywords are entered most and feed links to corresponding products to search engines so that they’ll be indexed gates to sales.

2. Offer help

Prospects may be familiar with Googling, but that doesn’t mean that they’re familiar with your internal search. Make its use easier for them by offering auto-complete, radio buttons, an option to narrow results and pull-down menus. Showing last query results or suggestions for future searches can also help push prospects along the conversion path.

Linda Bustos suggests investing in spell checkers, phonetic tools, stemming tools, controlled vocabularies and natural language processing to prepare for anything a prospect may throw at your internal search.

3. Refine your catalog

You don’t have to add or subtract anything from your actual stock. Instead, as Corey Leibow says, you should “extract, normalize and categorize.” Pick each item’s attributes out, decide upon standard descriptors across all products and use them to organically group.

Have your search handle numbers and phrases as well as keywords. SEO involves more than just single words and product numbers are often utilized to find corresponding units.

4.  Include more than just inventory

Prospects search for more than just products. New customers may be interested in shipping, privacy, return policies or other consumer-related information. If they can’t find it, they might decide against buying from you. Including other types of “miscellaneous” but useful files as results won’t hurt if you’re maximizing your marketing effort and using them as advertising tools.

5. Show descriptive results

How you serve up your results can actually be just as important as the results themselves, since they can determine how your prospects access them.

You’ll have to decide on presentation. Like…

Result numbers

How many results are there per page? Limitless pages packed with dozens of results on each tend to turn prospects off. Prospects can end up looking at the endless results and question why they even used the search function…if the entire site was going to be returned to them as classified as “relevant.”

Relevancy

Do you have a ranking system to help consumers identify which results are most accurate? Do search results reflect search frequency and conversion rates? Consider restructuring your result rankings as customer behavior informs them.

Are there filters in place to help customers find what they’re looking for? Relevancy, price, alphabetical position and popularity sorting options are commonly used by businesses. Consider your specific business and anticipate your customers’ searching habits to determine suitable filters. For example, if you sell clothes, you might want to add size, color and price. Auto parts sellers may filter results by make, model and year.

Visual presentation

Text-only results aren’t very imaginative. Nor are they attention-keeping. Think about making your results enticing by including thumbnail product images alongside descriptions. Your customers will also appreciate the time-saving aspect of seeing a price near the product and may even reward you by pressing the “Buy Now” button.

6. Bank on “no results”…literally

No matter how well you’ve optimized your search to handle misspellings and alternate phrases for products, you always have to keep in mind that your prospects seeing “No Results” is a very real possibility. That doesn’t mean that they have to log off empty-handed. Keep making money by dressing your “No Results” page with suggested categories, best sellers and other offers.

Investing in a better site search function can do more than just increase your sales. It may even contribute to your SEO campaign and improve your search engine ranking, making your presence something that can’t be ignored. That’s just another reason to make optimizing your internal search function your next top priority. You’ll no doubt start seeing the conversions pile up.

Source:

http://www.invesp.com/blog/conversion-optimization/six-tips-to-optimize-your-websites-internal-search-function.html

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/

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

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.

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