Search plays an important role in the positioning of products to customers. Whether helping customers find the specific products they are looking for or to simply browse a product catalogue, search is pivotal in converting customers from browsers to buyers. It has been these obvious benefits of using search for commerce which has driven specializations in search technology aimed at influencing customer buying behavior.
Enterprise search engines such as Endeca have maintained a strong presence in retail and commerce due to their ability to rapidly access vast repositories of data and provide robust architectures that can scale easily to cope with the demands of high volume transactional websites. The ambitions of enterprise search for ubiquitous information access and the empowerment of information discovery has seen the arrival of more intuitive methods for exploring information that are particular valuable in retail. Endeca has been the driving force behind faceted navigation a method which enables multiple navigational paths to any one item of information. The use of facets to support the exploration of large product catalogues was a key differentiator in retail in the past; however, faceted navigation is now considered a de facto standard within most search applications.
Following the commoditization of faceted search vendors switched their focus to merchandising and product placement. Enterprise vendors have been reinforcing their position in commerce through the refinement of merchandising functionality which is often consolidated into modules specifically targeted at supporting retailers. These modules give the ability for retailers to populate areas of a page with products based on rule based queries and are fully integrated into the base platform and can be added relatively easily. The Fast search engine uses merchandising modules for creating the usual merchandising zones while Endeca have taken things a step further by extending their merchandising workbench to allow business users to take complete control over a pages dynamic content and layout using their page builder extension. This also gives the ability for websites to create dynamic landing pages based on any search term to providing specific merchandising landing pages for brands, categories and click through from paid for search.
There have been number of retail specific search engines such as Mercardo and Fred Hopper which have concentrated solely on commerce and retailers. The relative advantage of these retail specific search engines is the depth of knowledge and expertise that comes from specializing in a specific sector. This is made apparent in the maturity of their business tools and interfaces which are both intuitive and highly relevant for retail business users. Mercado for instance embeds merchandising into the very core of its platform. Allowing business users to have complete control of where and when products are placed, whether in search results, facets or in targeted ads.
The question is what is the future for search vendors in retail and commerce?
I believe the answer does not lie in iteratively adding more bits of functionality to a search platform but in how a search engine plays an important part in the whole solution for commerce. Search engines are no longer needed as point solutions to address specific problems such as navigating complex catalogues and simple product targeting. Instead, retailers are craving higher level solutions for commerce strategies to drive and manage their businesses.
It is in delivering these larger commerce strategies where retail search engines should start to focus their efforts, However this requires them to integrate more closely with of an increasingly complex ecosystem of ecommerce technologies ranging from analytics, eCRM, ecommerce platforms, search, personalization and multi variant testing tools not to mention the wider role of backend technologies ERP, fulfillment, finance and buying systems in supporting these strategies. Typical examples of commerce strategies where retail search can play a crucial role include closed loop and personalised merchandising in which the targeting of products is constantly refined and influenced by customer behavior.
For these strategies to be effective retail search engines needs to incorporate new sources of data in their indexes and interact in new ways with other systems in order to provide enhanced customer experiences and sophisticated tooling that businesses need.
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