Outdoor Megastore See Higher Conversion Rate with Full-service Site Search and Navigation from SLI Systems
Outdoor Gear and Clothing Retailer Now Offers Relevant, Flexible Search Results, Creating Customer Experience with Greater Value
LONDON, UK– May 9, 2011 – SLI Systems provider of full-service on-demand, site search and navigation solutions, announced today that Outdoor Megastore are seeing a higher conversion rate, along with improved customer retention and reduced site abandonment with SLI’s Learning Search solution.
Outdoor Megastore sell outdoor clothing and camping gear to online shoppers in the United Kingdom and Europe via an ecommerce site as well as their brick and mortar store in Liverpool. The site initially relied on the search functionality built into its ecommerce platform, but discovered that customers often left the site after using search because they couldn’t find what they needed. Outdoor Megastore chose Learning Search, SLI Systems’ full-service site search solution, to allow fine-turning of search results and improve the online shopping experience for its customers.
“Immediately after implementing Learning Search, we could see that our customers were receiving search results that were much more closely tailored to their queries,” said Paul Roberson, general manager for Outdoor Megastore. “Now they are staying on the site longer and viewing more pages instead of departing immediately after conducting a search. That’s an important benefit given the large volume of items in our product catalogue, and the complexity of finding specific camping supplies and clothing sizes.”
In addition to the poor results Outdoor Megastore’s previous site search delivered, the feature offered only “quick search” functionality, and did not suggest alternative products or allow shoppers to refine searches. Because of these limitations the online retail site’s bounce rate was higher than desired, and Outdoor Megastore were losing sales. On top of all this, customers who responded to Outdoor Megastore’s Shopzilla surveys complained about the site’s search function, saying it didn’t deliver good results and provided a poor shopping experience.
With Learning Search, Outdoor Megastore customers can now sort search results by popularity and price, and can also click on search suggestions related to their keyword terms. They can also choose to view results in grid or list formats.
Shoppers who use Learning Search on the Outdoor Megastore site convert at a rate 43% higher than visitors who don’t search. In addition, Outdoor Megastore shoppers who use Learning Search remain on the site 45% longer and view more pages than shoppers who don’t use site search, and the abandonment rate for Learning Search users is about half the abandonment rate for non-site search users.
“Not only is working with SLI giving our business a significant boost, we’ve also seen shopper complaints about the site search feature completely drop off,” said Roberson.
“Satisfied customers stay on ecommerce sites longer and buy more – and their satisfaction level with the online retailer goes up when they quickly and easily find the products they need,” said Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems. “Outdoor Megastore visitors are indicating that the site’s search feature is making their shopping experience much more pleasurable, and the retailer is seeing benefits to its bottom line as a result.”
SLI’s Learning Search is a hosted full-service site search solution that continually “learns” from ongoing site search activity, improving relevance of search results and reducing the time it takes users to find what they need. By tracking every query and click-through, Learning Search ranks results based on what’s most popular and delivers results people are looking for on the first page 95% of the time.
SLI Systems is the only company that provides site search, navigation and merchandising as customised full-service solutions, backed by a dedicated team of experts, to set up and continuously improve the user experience and the effectiveness of the web site. SLI’s solutions have shown to improve overall customer satisfaction and generate increases in conversions, number of page views and average order size, among other key performance indicators.
About SLI Systems
SLI Systems provides full-service, customized, on-demand solutions for site-search, navigation, merchandising, and user-generated SEO. SLI Systems’ solutions empower businesses to enhance customer satisfaction while increasing sales, reducing costs and increasing site conversions. Unlike traditional search and merchandising software, SLI Systems’ patented technology continuously “learns” from the behavior of visitors over time to deliver more relevant results. SLI Systems is a privately held company with offices in San Jose, California; London; New Zealand and Australia. For more information, visit www.sli-systems.com , or read the company’s blog at http://blog.sli-systems.com, watch the SLI YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/SLISiteSearch, follow SLI on Twitter at http://twitter.com/slisystems or listen to SLI hosted ecommerce podcasts at http://www.EcommercePodcast.com/.
