Merchandising is a cornerstone for many ecommerce sites and empowers online retailers to provide better customer experiences, improve product discovery, increase conversion rates and enhance order values.
Broadly speaking, merchandising an ecommerce website involves creating, implementing and measuring strategies that get the right products in front of the shopper with as little friction as possible. Merchandising strategies can be informed by data including analytics, shopper behavior or contextual signals (e.g. Geo-location, traffic from a pay-per-click campaign, click-stream), and can also be driven by marketing and sales goals (e.g. new product releases, email campaigns, closeout items).
Based on many years of experience and dozens of ecommerce search and merchandising solution implementations for retailers large and small, we deliver an ecommerce merchandising application called FindTuner.
FindTuner is designed to give merchandisers the ability to create strategies that provide high-quality, relevant search results, enhance and personalize the online shopping experience and optimize revenue and profitability. The application has a straightforward web interface that makes it easy for business users to define rules that will influence search results, populate content in merchandising zones and streamline product discovery all without the need to engage IT resources. Key features include creating rules for guided navigation, landing pages, banners redirects and autocomplete.
Most of our clients have systems and data sources that track performance of things such as product sales, conversion rate, user activity on the website, inventory, customer ratings, etc. Another great feature we offer is the ability to utilize these metrics (you can use one metric, two or combination of all) to tune relevancy according to business goals. Our UI immediately and visually allows the user to compare organic results to the influenced results to see the impact of the strategy, all while using real product data.
FindTuner works with Apache Solr, the rock-solid, ultra-reliable search technology under the Apache Software Foundation that has been adopted by some of the most prominent names in retailing as well as ecommerce platform providers including hybris, IBM and Magento.
If you are looking to take your Solr-powered ecommerce website to the next level by utilizing merchandising techniques, please reach out to us for a demonstration of our Solr merchandising solution.
In future articles, I’ll highlight the many features in more detail so stay tuned.
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