Exorbyte Commerce Unveils New Merchandising Features

The Exorbyte Commerce site search add-on for online stores was launched in 2010. Recent releases of Exorbyte Commerce include new merchandising features which empower online retailers to continuously improve revenues and customer satisfaction.
 
Oct. 10, 2011 - PRLog -- Exorbyte Commerce  - http://commerce.exorbyte.com - has initially focused on providing best-in-class site search for online retail. Years of serving some of the biggest names in online retail in both Europe and the USA (Yahoo!, Vodafone, Billiger, and more) have led Exorbyte to develop a unique expertise at the crossroads between search engine software and online retail merchandising software. Exorbyte Commerce was founded on Exorbyte's award-winning proprietary structured data search engine: MatchMaker. Since Exorbyte Commerce customers started flocking to the online service in 2010, many have requested various merchandising features to integrate their merchandising strategies into the search experience of their stores' visitors. Exorbyte has responded with a series of powerful merchandising features that prefigure an online retail industry where the principal moment of truth in converting a visitor into a buyer is at "the point of search" (as opposed to the "point of sale").

Search-Centric Merchandising Features
Actionable Search Reporting
Knowing how many visitors, transactions and page views occurred doesn't provide online retailers with much visibility of the conversion process (how visitors become buyers). In a physical store, salespeople, clerks, and cashiers hear first-hand from visitors why they are buying, what they are looking for and what they did not find. Online retailers need the same information and Exorbyte provides such reports as "Search Terms", "Zero Hit Queries", "Query Frequencies", "Gainers" and "Loosers" which allow retailers to act and raise conversions instantly. Search is the point of a vistor's experience when a well informed retailer can ease access to their products and remove other obstacles to the purchase using other tools below or simply stocking highly sought for products.



Detailed search reporting is the foundation of good online retail merchandising


Faceted Search Refinements
The first thing that a retailer does to allow easy access to products is to classify them in relevant categories, and to add various attributes by which a store visitor can locate the ideal product (color, brand, size, make, model, material, origin, etc.). Online store users have become accustomed to faceted search which allows them to refine a first search results page into a much more precise set of results. For instance, a search query of "red shoe" might still need to be refined by size, gender, and material to locate a relevant set of shoes to consider for purchase. Exorbyte Commerce allows any numbers of facets based on the data available in a retailer's catalog. No need to painstakingly add the data by hand. Load the catalog and facets are available right away.



Dynamic search refinements and facets controllable through Exorbyte Commerce


Ranking Rules
When a brick-and-mortar retailer decides to favor a supplier's products or seasonal offerings to his visitors, he lays those products in a special display or in a store window. Exorbyte offers even better for online stores. With Ranking Rules, retailers can now choose what products, brands, or category of products should be favored or hidden in search results and suggestions throughout the site. Ranking Rules also allow merchandisers to enhnace the ranking rules with a "boost" or a "penalty" factor to allow for precise results.



Controlling the ranking of products based on merchandising criteria is easy with Exorbyte Commerce


Aliases and Synonyms
When retailers find out what search terms are used by visitors to locate products, they are faced with the daunting task of enriching their product descriptions with all the possible terms used to define a product or its category. Couches, are often called sofas, futons, divan, love seat, lunges, etc. Televisions can be called TV, screens, LCD, monitors, tuners, etc. Going through all product descriptions to enrich them with the variations of product names for each product is not necessary anymore, nor effective. Description terms are often not weighed high compared to product names and the alternative terms used in descriptions will therefore not lead to much better search results for terms like "TV" or "couch". The real way of handling this dilemma is to implement an alias dictionary (dictionary of synonyms) at the search engine level. In the case of Exorbyte, retailers are also able to add site specific aliases and configure them in details to accommodate their particular store's brands and search terms. This is one of the primary methods of capturing new sales for Exorbyte Commerce retailers. Their "Zero Hit Queries" report tells them what search queries often return zero hits and therefore may need to be added as an alias of a known product, category, or brand.



Ensuring products are always found no matter how they are named or described requires alias rules


Target Pages, Cross-Selling and Store Promos
Streamlining the experience of visitors when searching for products and guiding them to high value opportunities is just the start of online retail merchandising. Merchandisers want to run programs like store promotions, sales, cross-selling, and more. For such purposes, the "point of search" is again the right time to present these choices to visitors and repeat customers. Target Pages allow retailers to create special features like promotions, cross-selling product descriptions, or seasonal sales and guide their store's visitors to these destinations at "the point of search".



Target Pages allow merchandisers to send visitors to promos, sales, special features and more straight from search based on their queries.


Intelligent Error-Tolerance and Fuzzy Matching
The unrivaled error-tolerance and fuzzy matching capability of Exorbyte Commerce remains the number one advantage of its use for merchandisers. While many ecommerce platforms have made progress over the past decade in online retail growth with content management features, basic product search features, and other such features, advanced search was a rare feature. During the same period Internet users were educated by Google, eBay, Amazon and others to change their behavior of "surfing" from link to link into one of "searching". The same behavioral changes happened in online retail. Surveys say users systematically gravitate towards the search box of online stores and do not "browse" through categories until they find the product of their choice.
There is nothing mysterious about site search or online merchandising. Exorbyte Commerce always improves conversion rates because its proprietary search platform is far better at decreasing the number of fruitless searches and at ranking relevant search results than any other search engine in the market. Search is the "moment" of an online visitor's experience when he is expressing what comes closest to a question to the store about a product it may carry, a category of products he is interested in, a brand, a color, etc. Exorbyte Commerce makes the most of this with a clear understanding that the search demand curve generates vast amounts of misspelled, unique, rare queries and that only a powerful search engine addressing the questions of spelling, typos, similarity, phonetics, synonyms, and more can cover most cases. Furthermore, the extensive reporting package included with Exorbyte Commerce allows retailers to verify the above and constantly improve their results with actionable reports and merchandising features to enhance their store continuously.

High conversions are a direct result of the wide search query coverage of Exorbyte's proprietary search technology


Exorbyte Commerce will continue to offer 30-day free trials and month-to-month contracts to prove its absolute confidence in its unbeatable benefits. See more at http://commerce.exorbyte.com

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Exorbyte publishes high-performance search software for databases and structured data formats. Exorbyte software offers a large array of phonetic and algorithmic fuzzy search methods while returning results under 10 ms across many millions of records.

Exorbyte is a trademark of Exorbyte GmbH. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
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