Are Zero Search Results hampering your customer experience?

A frequent online shopper is often found saying:

I couldn’t find my product!

Still no results!

What should I type to find my product!

And so on…

As an eCommerce merchandiser, it is really not valued if you run a strict rule in the house.

Type as I say, or you get no marks.

In an eCommerce business, almost 30% of the search queries give zero results. 

Imagine, shoppers stumble around your eCommerce website, searching for their desired product. But when they type their search query on the search bar and hit it, they find a cute smiley face asking sorry for there are no search results for them! 

No one likes rejection, right? And displaying a no results page is almost like conveying to the shoppers that your needs are not with us. As per human psychology, they would never return and instead find a site that would cater to their needs. 

So, as an eCommerce merchandiser what should you do to optimize low recall and zero search results? Let’s have a look at some of the use-cases:

• Provide enough synonyms: When you know a product has numerous variations to its name, then provide synonyms for the same. Leaving a site because I received zero results when I typed ‘Flip-flops’ instead of ‘slippers’ is such a no-no! Therefore, 
  – Deliver results for every query whether or not you have it with you.
  
  – Don’t judge shoppers by their geographical location.

  – Create enough vocabulary for your products from the catalog to match them correctly.
  So, the next time when I type ‘rugby ball’, they know I am searching for ‘footballs’.

 

• Did you mean: Shoppers often get zero search results when they don’t spell the product name correctly. This might be out of fast typing or genuinely not knowing the exact spelling of the product. And expecting shoppers to know the exact spelling and name of the product is a little off.
  Therefore, when they misspell a word, throw a ‘Did you mean’ with alternatives close to the product name.
  Make sure, they find their intended query out of the two or three options you suggest. This makes their journey easier rather than the process of searching the exact spelling, copying, pasting, and then marching towards buying the product.

 

• Give the shoppers a way out: Sam, saw a hoarding while driving uptown which caught his attention. It was a men’s face cream, which was paraben-free with charcoal elements. Sam was intrigued and as soon as he reached home, he took out his laptop, opened up a site, and typed the exact words as he saw on the hoarding. But to his amazement, he found no results!
  He was disappointed and left the site without making any purchase. But when he typed the same query on another site, he found related products.
  Though his query generated no results, he found five other links that were closer to his intended product query. And voila! He did find his product just by a different name for online sales. If you give your shoppers such suggestions, they feel included and welcomed.

 

• Graceful fallback: Shoppers come searching for ‘Rolex’ watches on your site. You carry some luxury watches but not ‘Rolex’ brand watches. So, instead of showing them zero results, direct them to some luxury watches that you carry. They would surely not be disappointed.

 

• Filter ‘Out of Stock’ products: Never leave an ‘Out of Stock’ product in your catalog. Keep a track and filter out ‘Out of Stock’ products to avoid displaying zero results to the shoppers for the same. 

Not just these use-cases but you can find a number of use-cases to optimize ‘Zero-Results’. Hiring a data scientist to solve your site problems with NLP is an option but not a feasible one as it might take money (a lot of it!), resources, as well as time. So, with Unbxd you can find all your solutions optimizing your low recalls and zero search results effectively. 

You can read more on the Art and Science of Optimizing for low recall and zero search results in the White Paper, we recently published. You can share your thoughts by writing to us at marketing@unbxd.com

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How AI is changing eCommerce

Defined as commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet, eCommerce has become staunchly embedded in our economy. According to Oberlo, “It’s estimated that there will be 2.05 billion global digital buyers in 2020.” That staggering number is roughly 25 percent of the world’s population. With that number of online transactions, no business, big or small, will be untouched by eCommerce. Oberlo states “The number one reason people shop online is that they’re able to shop at all hours of the day.” With eCommerce comes a level of convenience that’s unavailable in physical stores.

This has become increasingly feasible as artificial intelligence becomes more closely tethered to both businesses and consumers in the eCommerce economy. With personalized marketing, chatbots, and voice-controlled assistants, consumers know what they want sooner, are able to inquire about products easier, and make their purchases faster. One may wonder how businesses can keep up with the efficiencies of AI in the buying experience, but with cloud-based ERP systems and supply chain management software, businesses can manage sales and inventory faster than ever—staying well prepared for online orders day and night.

Personalized Marketing

As consumer data becomes the new crude oil in today’s economy, AI’s ability to digest and analyze that data has made personalized marketing campaigns incredibly sophisticated. By utilizing predictive analytics, businesses are able to deploy effective ad targeting, product recommendations, and even dynamic websites “where web page content changes depending on a visitor’s purchase data.”

Nowadays, consumers are increasingly weary of inauthentic advertising schemes and marketers are faced with the challenge of personalizing customers’ user experience while utilizing the capabilities of artificial intelligence. One way they have dealt with this hurdle is through personalized messaging. By generating email content based on data gathered from consumers, marketers are able to create content for specific customers. This approach feels more authentic to consumers and in turn, they are more likely to remain loyal to a certain brand. The use of AI in marketing is bringing customer’s better information and in turn, moving them through the sales funnel much faster.

Chatbots and Voice Controlled Assistants

As marketing has become more sophisticated, so too have the buying habits of consumers. According to DialogTech, “81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying.” Whether making a purchase in a physical store or online, it’s almost guaranteed that a responsible consumer will complete their due diligence before making a purchase. For businesses, this means you should be providing the absolute best resources for your customers. If a customer is unable to do thorough research about your products on your own website but they can on a competitor’s webpage, your chances of winning out will likely be significantly diminished.

One resource businesses can offer online is the use of chatbots to assist customers by navigating the site, offering product recommendations, providing customer support, and even completing purchases. This will help consumers conduct their research, and give them confidence that assistance will be available when the need arises for customer support.

Another great resource to have connected to your eCommerce platform is the ability to use voice-controlled assistants, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home Mini. If your product has the capability to be controlled by these tools through the Internet of Things, customers are likely to be influenced to purchase your product over others.

The potential use of voice assistants on nearly any eCommerce site is growing quickly, too. This will provide a more personal experience for users and will soon be a customer expectation for any eCommerce site. In anticipation, it would behoove any online retailer to be prepared for this technology to become available.

Businesses Keeping up With AI

While customer interactions continue to evolve as AI creeps into every shopping experience, AI in cloud-based ERP systems is reshaping eCommerce behind the scenes, making business processes faster, more accurate, and more connected than ever before. By centrally locating everything from ledgers, to logistics, businesses are able to utilize AI’s ability to do predictive analysis and make important business decisions based on their findings.

An ERP system connects the stockroom clerk to the CFO and allows a business to act fluidly as new logistic obstacles arise. The system connects coworkers in real-time so that small problems can be solved quickly and not grow into bigger messes. The ability to collect real-time data also helps businesses make decisions based on insights from AI. That means as customers are buying products day and night through eCommerce sites, businesses can stay on top of the constant need to move those products around the world.

One has to wonder how soon AI will be deploying shipments based on predictive analysis of data gathered from past logistics. Will the supply chain be managed in part by artificial intelligence? With AI growing ever-more prevalent in our economy and society, to what extent will AI be involved in eCommerce? With AI already taking stock of the groceries in our refrigerators, how long until it is ordering a refreshment for the groceries it knows you purchase every week so an ERP system can then ship it from the grocery store to your front door? When considering AI’s role in eCommerce, it is hard to imagine how much further it will evolve. The opportunities are infinite, what remains to be seen is the role AI is going to play in reshaping our existing shopping behaviors and hence eCommerce

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Dynamic Ranking: The Key to Increase Conversions

Peter logged in to ‘Amynra’, an eCommerce site. He wanted to grab some stuff for his impromptu bachelor party his friends planned. Peter doesn’t have a great way of online shopping as he rarely did it. For him, it was a maze of a plethora of products where he wanted to find his green, leafy, summery beach shorts! 

Indeed a task.

So, he typed in ‘beach shorts’ and he was flooded with ‘Shorts’ of all types. Peter wasn’t ecstatic about the search results. He had to scroll deep and couldn’t find the ones he was searching for. 

He opts out. 

Now, imagine, how many ‘Peters’ actually do visit your website on a daily basis? And what if all of them kept opting out of your site every time? 

Showing relevant products based on shopper’s intent and history is the most important factor that you should integrate with your site. With so many websites and giants like Amazon and Flipkart in the market, there is no way you could find an escape with an average search engine. 

You need an on-point relevancy platform and an equally well-knit ranking system. 

What is a ‘Relevancy and Ranking’ system?

When shoppers find exactly what they searched for, it proves relevancy settings are on point. 

Unbxd, with its AI-powered system, justifies an efficient search engine with proper relevance and ranking settings to make sure shoppers don’t leave the site half-heartedly. 

Ranking System

Ranking helps you order the most relevant products on the Product Listing Page effectively to increase its conversion rate.

For example, A user typed a query on the search bar as ‘shoes’. Such a generic request! Right? The search panel is flooded with results. Because there are some 10 to the power 5 results for shoes. Now, evidently, you can’t show all the results in a haphazard manner making the shopper scroll and skip pages on pages! 

Instead, based on the shopper’s behavior, you need to index/rank your product pages which displays the most relevant ones on the top page. For example, If the shopper has a quirky sense of fashion and buys most of his products from Nike then the page displays ‘Nike shoes’ as top results. 

This whole process of displaying the most relevant results based on the shoppers’ affinity is called Ranking. Once you have ranked the products properly, you cleverly correspond to your user’s intentions and become a hero of their lives!

Let’s see some of the live use-cases where ranking is needed and how Unbxd can pull you up for that.

Use Case 1: Ranking the ‘Most Relevant’ products higher

I was searching for a book on ‘Ghost Stories’ online on Amazon. The search filter flooded my Product Listing Page with almost 1200 queries which was so much to take in for me as a shopper that I closed all the tabs. Ultimately, I asked my niece for her suggestion and bought the exact book. 

If it keeps the shoppers so much on toes then it is useful to display only the products that matter the most. 

We rank the ‘Most Relevant’ products by identifying the shoppers’ intent and behavior with the help of our AI engine working toward it.

Use Case 2: Rank the products based on their popularity quotient

We know how popular ‘iPhone X’ became overnight on its launch date. People were searching for it, ordering it, and thus the phone model gathered huge sales. But, if you look into the other models from ‘Apple’, not every model is as famous as iPhone X or 11. So, when a user searches for iPhone X, it is not advisable to showcase other iPhone models on the same page which are not that great on the popularity charts. 

Then it makes sense, to display the phones that rank well on the overall popularity charts, that bring more revenue, and are searching for the maximum number of times. 

So, in the above example, suppose, Samsung Galaxy S10 is being searched by most of the shoppers and is thus, ranked as the most popular phone product on the site. So, when shoppers search for iPhone X, then Samsung Galaxy S10 is also displayed on the first page of search results after iPhone X. In this way, if the person is searching for an iPhone, he can get a sneak peek as to what else is making the charts or performing better. 

Therefore, if a particular brand is performing better and is selling like hotcakes, then make sure you boost it enough. 

To boost products, Unbxd helps to navigate to the ‘Merchandising’ section inside the console, where you can boost the products that are performing well and are popular amongst the shoppers. 

Use case 3: When the string match is performed for ‘iPhone X’ and ‘iPhone XR’

Another way, as to how the ranking of products is done, is by string matching of product names. So, if shoppers are searching for iPhone X then the Product Listing Page will also contain iPhone XR and iPhone XS, as it is the closest to iPhone X on string matching. 

This is one of the ways to display products from the search query. 

Example, if the search query was ‘iPhone X’,  search results contain:

iPhone X model

iPhone XR model

Where ‘X’ is the closest to ‘XR’, therefore, we see results for iPhoneXR too. 

 

Use Case 4: Based on Brand Publicity

Sometimes, products are also ranked based on their brand value. 

Suppose, Nike wants to showcase its shoes when someone searches for ‘Sports Shoes’. Nike created a promotional value of its brand and paid your site to rank ‘Nike’ products higher than the others. 

The idea is the shopper will get to see Nike shoes first. In some cases, to a certain set of shoppers, relevant Nike shoes will be shown and in other cases where shopper doesn’t have an affinity for Nike shoes, they will see the most relevant pair of shoes just after Nike shoes (which is a promoted product right now in this case)

With Unbxd, you can ‘Boost’ the brand using our Merchandising section and promote the brand value. 

Use Case 5: When you need to rank ‘New Products’ from your catalog

So, not just the popularity of the products but products are also boosted based on their freshness in the market. If a search query is ‘iPhone’ and Apple recently had launched a new model: iPhone 11 then when shoppers search for iPhone, they will see iPhone 11 as the top searched product on the search results page. It is because iPhone 11 is also ranked higher on the value based on the freshness of the product. It is promoted and therefore displayed along with the other products. Ranking the latest products brings in an element of freshness for both new and repeat shoppers.

Use case 6: Products are ranked based on the region and price of the products

Ranking of the products may vary from their geographical location. Like, if shoppers search for iPhone on Amazon.in where iPhone X is doing better sales, then that model is ranked higher and the search results page will display iPhone X on the top for Indian shoppers. 

While, when shoppers search for iPhone on Amazon.com where iPhone 11 is doing better sales, then the iPhone 11 is ranked higher and the search results page display iPhone 11 on the top for the US region. 

It also varies with the price of the product. 

Use case 7: When the shoppers apply filters for a product query

Suppose a user typed ‘Nike Shoes’ on the search bar and applied price range filter ‘Under $25’. Now, based on the filters the shoppers will see the products that are ranked higher for that range based on their popularity for that range. 

Use Case 8: Rank products based on their ‘Synonyms’

You may always want to provide synonyms to the product queries to avoid getting zero results when a shopper searches with a different product name than the one present in the catalog. So, if shoppers search for sequin dresses, they should receive glitter sequin dresses as well in the search results. 

In what order the search results will be shown is decided by the ranking procedures followed by various eCommerce sites/stores. 

Such queries are marked as synonyms to show search results for the search queries. 

So, when the shoppers type ‘Sequin Dress’, top results show up ‘Glitter sequin dresses’ automatically based on the ranking methods powered by synonyms. 

As we see with so many extensive use cases that relevancy and ranking in itself are the prime parameters to charge up your search engine. While relevance aims to search the right products for your online shoppers from a huge catalog, Ranking ensures that those relevant products are ranked on the top of the stack. 

While Relevance works towards finding the right products, Ranking works towards increasing the likelihood of conversion and shorten the path to purchase. So, it can be said Relevance and Ranking are two pillars of an efficient search system. 

Therefore, build a proper search engine for your site by integrating Unbxd Search Solutions which provides an effective Relevance and Ranking system. 

To integrate or enquire, contact our sales team and try it out for yourself. 

 

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The importance of being Relevant

As a merchandiser, relevancy is a term that you’ll hear often. 

Depending on who you ask, relevancy has many meanings. But everyone will agree that relevancy is centered around tracking and analyzing a shopper’s preferences to show them the products that they are looking for.

Relevancy and Ranking have helped eCommerce stores to anticipate and prioritize a shopper’s needs to provide a seamless retail experience.

Why Unbxd?

When it comes to delivering personalized eCommerce, your store should be equipped to gauge the interest and patterns of a returning shopper. 

As an online shopper, the sheer volume of products deters me from navigating via the product category pages when I’m shopping. I prefer searching for the product either by what I intend to buy, by the name of the brand, or the type of product. 

But site search isn’t always as effective as I would like it to be. A perfect site search solution should be able to:

1. Autocomplete my search query as I’m typing. Maybe even autocorrecting the search query in real-time.
2. Suggest products even as I’m typing in my keyword. Maybe even search by synonyms to provide me with products that match my intent.
3. Display a search page that isn’t cluttered and allows me to sort by price, popularity or newness. 
4. Provide me with filters and facets that can help me zero in on the product I need.
5. Display high-quality images that correctly represent the product
6. Select and compare products and features side-by-side.
7. Allow me to preview and add a product to the cart without taking me to the Product Display Page.
8. Display search results within 2 seconds and have a responsive design.

In other words, your site search solution should score high on relevancy. I should be able to find the product I’m looking for with ease and simplicity. 

Unbxd understands this need of shoppers to be able to find what they are looking for. That’s why we construct and deploy AI and ML models that can fine-tune this relevance to three nines. In this blog, we present to you some of the top use-cases which we have solved for our eCommerce customers across the verticals.  

Fields: Unbxd recommends a list of fields in the catalog that should be marked as ‘searchable’. This helps businesses, no matter what vertical they are in, a running start to getting the search results right. For instance, identifying the ‘Part number’ for an auto parts store correctly would be as important as getting the ‘color’ correct for a beauty store.

Tokenization: Unbxd splits multi-worded search queries into related product categories and product-related attributes. For instance, ‘Outdoor Tent’ will be tokenized into ‘Outdoor’ (Category) and ‘Tent’ (Product). Similarly, ‘Silk Shower Curtains’ are tokenized into ‘Silk’ (Fabric) and ‘Shower Curtains’ (Product).

Stemming: Unbxd recommends you stem common search keywords and phrases to its root or base unit. For instance, queries like ‘Running shoes’ and ‘Runners shoes’ will provide the same set of search results, if ‘Running’ and ‘Runners’ is stemmed to ‘Run’.

Synonyms: With a growing list of synonyms for different verticals, Unbxd allows your store to hit the road running. Our comprehensive list of synonyms helps your shopper find the product they need no matter how they search for it.

Exclude Terms: As a merchandiser, you’d like to exclude products that may have the same keywords searched for, but isn’t what the shopper intended to see. Unbxd allows you to create a library of keywords or phrases that you don’t want to be displayed interchangeably. For instance, queries like ‘Dress Shirt’ may also display ‘Shirt dress’, which is not the same category of product and does not meet the shopper’s intent. Unbxd allows you to insert ‘Shirt Dress’ as an ‘Exclude Term’ so that results for ‘Dress Shirt’ won’t display ‘Shirt Dress’.

Mandatory Terms: Mandatory terms work on a similar principle of Tokenization and Named Entity Recognition, where your search engine recognizes the most important keyword or phrase in a query and displays results from the relevant category. For instance, queries like ‘Jumpsuit Dresses’ will give results that have the keyword ‘Jumpsuit’ either within the product title or its description.

Products by Popularity: Unbxd allows you to promote products that are popular in the category your shoppers are browsing. Clickstream insights reveal the number of times a product has been clicked on, added to cart, and purchased in the last 30 days. These statistics allow merchandisers to create campaigns that boost your product’s findability and enhance search relevance, which we will talk about in detail in a future blog post.

Ranking Fields: Once fields are assigned as ‘searchable’, Unbxd recommends indexing fields by its ‘weight’ or ‘relevancy’. For instance, the ‘Title’ field is ranked ‘HIGH’ since shoppers often search for a keyword or phrase that exists within the title. Similarly, ‘productType’ or ‘catLevel’ will be ranked ‘NORMAL’, while ‘color’ will be ranked ‘LOW’.

User Behavior: Inbuilt User behavior engine allows Unbxd to track, collect, and analyze how shoppers interact within your store. Data from Clickstream and Ranking Insights helps you plan careful campaigns that boost your product’s findability and revenue. 

Apart from this, Unbxd allows you to rank relevant products higher using the Boost/Bury feature within the Unbxd Console.

These are just instances that are most commonly used by the customers who come to us to fix their relevancy. We do much more than just this to ensure that no shopper returns from your website with 0 or irrelevant products found. If your shopper leaves your store because of a poor experience, they’re never coming back. We understand how you want to create a seamless shopping experience for all your shoppers, where searching for the right product doesn’t take moving heaven and earth.

If you’re wondering how you can make your site search system more relevant to your shoppers and profitable to your brand, look no further. Unbxd is your go-to place.

Send us an email and we’d be happy to show you how we can help power your brand’s relevancy engine. 

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Advanced circuit breakers to prevent cascading downstream failures for eCommerce stores

Retailers lose 4% of a day’s sales [1] each hour a website is down, according to Channel Advisor, a software platform for retailers. From H&M to Home Depot and Nordstrom Rack – all of them experienced either downtime or intermittent outages during the Holiday season 2019. And one thing we know for sure is that there is nothing called 100% uptime. But there has to be a way to make our systems resilient and prevent outages for eCommerce sites.

We at Unbxd pay utmost attention to the growth of our customers and ensure that they are up and running for most of the time and do not suffer any business loss. And we do this by making our ecosystem – robust, reliable and resilient.

“Resilience is the ability of the network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation. ” ~Wikipedia

Ever since the term services and recently microservices came into usage, application developers have been converting monolithic APIs into simple and single-function microservices. However, such conversions come with the cost of ensuring consistent response times and resiliency when certain dependencies become unavailable.

For example, a monolithic web application that performs a retry for every call is potentially resilient to some extent, as it can recover when certain dependencies (such as databases or other services) are unavailable. This resilience comes without any additional network or code complexity. 

For a service that orchestrates numerous dependencies, each invocation is costly, and a failure can lead to diminished user experience as well as to higher stress on the underlying system that is attempting to recover from the failure. And that is what we at Unbxd work towards – providing a seamless shopping experience for our customers across verticals.

Let us consider a typical use-case where an e-commerce site that is overloaded with requests on Black Friday, and the vendor providing the payment operations goes offline for a few seconds due to heavy traffic.

The users then begin to see long wait times for their checkouts due to the high concurrency of requests. These conditions also keep all of the application servers clogged with the threads that are waiting to receive a response from the vendor. After a long wait time, the eventual result is a failure.

This leads to either abandoned carts, or users trying to refresh or retry their checkouts, thereby increasing the load on the application servers—which already have long-waiting threads, leading to network congestion. Here is where circuit breaker patterns come helpful!

A circuit breaker is a simple structure that constantly remains vigilant, monitoring for faults. In the above-mentioned scenario, the circuit breaker identifies long waiting times among the calls to the vendor and fails-fast, returning an error response to the user instead of making the threads wait. Thus, the circuit breaker prevents users from having a very suboptimal response time.

And that is what keeps me and my team excited most of the time – to find a better and even more efficient circuit breaker pattern which can create an ecosystem, that can survive outages and downtime, without being impacted or least impact, if at all.

Martin Fowler says, “The basic idea behind the circuit breaker is very simple. You wrap a protected function call in a circuit breaker object, which monitors for failures. Once the failures reach a certain threshold, the circuit breaker trips, and all further calls to the circuit breaker return with an error, without the protected call being made at all. Usually, you’ll also want some kind of monitor alert if the circuit breaker trips.”

Recovery time is crucial for the underlying resource, and having a circuit breaker that fails-fast without overloading the system ensures that the vendor can recover quickly.

A circuit breaker is an always-live system keeping watch over dependency invocations. In case of a high failure rate, the circuit breaker stops the calls from going through for a small amount of time, rather than responding with a standard error.

We at Unbxd are always working towards building the nearest version of an Ideal Circuit Breaker. A harmonious system is one where we have an ideal circuit breaker, real-time monitoring, and a fast recovery variable setup, making the application truly resilient.

And that is what we are creating for our customers. 

Unbxd has many client-facing APIs. They talk to a few of downstream out of which one essential service is Catalog Service. A failure of this service implies a failure for client services as well. Failure need not be an error always as an inability to serve the request in a timely manner is also equivalent to failure for all practical purposes. The problem for client services has been to make them resilient to this service and also not bombard this service if it is already down. We identified a Circuit Breaker to be an ideal solution for the problem our customers were facing.

We zeroed down to Hystrix which is an open-source implementation of Circuit Breaker by Netflix. All the calls to Catalog Service are wrapped in Hystrix functions. Any timeout or error by downstream forces the request to be served by alternate fallback strategy. Our team identified that the problem was to build an alternate service that could get us the catalog. Clearly, a cache was needed to serve the purpose. This can be seen in the sequence of images below:

 

 

We can clearly see that the cache hit rises as the circuit breaker gets initiated and response success is established and once the system is restored, the cache hit starts decreasing and the circuit breaker is back to open state.

LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache was implemented backed by aerospike. LRU was chosen to go by 80-20 rule (80% of the requests are for 20% of the products). Now aerospike does not have out of the box LRU sort of implementation. To create LRU behavior data entry/retrieval in aerospike was made through Lua scripts that run on aerospike nodes.

Now all the successful requests are also being cached in aerospike and when there is a failure (either timeout or error) requests are served from cache. If the failure persists for a few seconds for above a threshold percentage of the requests, the circuit becomes open and now all the requests are served from cache only. The system keeps on actively checking for the stability of downstream after a sleeping window and whenever it is stable, the circuit becomes close and the overall system returns to a normal state.

Using the example of the e-commerce site from above, with a resilient system in place, the circuit breaker keeps an ongoing evaluation of the faults from the payments processor and identifies long wait times or errors from the vendor. On such occurrences, it breaks the circuit, failing fast. As a result, users are notified of the problem and the vendor has enough time to recover.

In the meantime, the circuit breaker also keeps sending one request at regular intervals to evaluate if the vendor system is back again. If so, the circuit breaker closes the circuit immediately, allowing the rest of the calls to go through successfully, thereby effectively removing the problem of network congestion and long wait times.

And this is how we are building a resilient system for our eCommerce customers and preventing the cascading downstream failures from happening. In the future, we aim to improve and further fine-tune our cache admission strategy. We plan to use the recency information of an LRU to implement the same. Right now we are using a single successful execution to close the circuit but we intend to use a configurable number of data points to make a more intelligent decision. Our ideal vision is to prevent a system from any kind of outage or possible downtime with a fully robust and resilient system in place and reducing the occurrence of any such incidents to zero.

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The 7 pillars of an awesome search solution

“The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in determination.”
– Usain Bolt

Like star athletes, successful businesses focus on building systems that are convenient and consistent while creating value for both their customers and merchants.

Today’s global eCommerce retailers can literally sell anything you can possibly need. Consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to products and the sheer convenience of buying a product they want when they want it. However, shoppers are now evolving into discerning connoisseurs of retail convenience. 

They are demanding more value for not just their money but their time and patronage to your brand. When businesses can’t, or worse, don’t want to adapt to the changing ecosystem, they perish. Case in point, Toys R’ Us.

What many businesses seem to forget is that shoppers still make 85% of their purchases via a journey that is connected with an experience they’ve had.

This post talks about the seven integral pillars of your eCommerce search solution.

Infrastructure

Like physical stores, an eCommerce store should have a stable infrastructure, be secure, and remain accessible 24/7. You need a system that cares about your customers just as much as you do.

The key infrastructures that are needed to support eCommerce applications are networks, Web servers, Web server support and software, electronic catalogs, web page design, and Internet access components.

While it is right that you need to stay a step ahead of competitors, it is more important to keep your shoppers safe on your site. If your eCommerce site doesn’t run as quickly and as reliably as shoppers expect, the only things your business will experience are high bounce rates, lower conversions, and more abandoned shopping carts.

Relevancy 

Historically, businesses focused on selling products and sacrificed customer satisfaction in the process. Today’s shoppers look for meaningful retail journeys. They expect online stores to enhance if not augment a brick and mortar store. They also expect that experience to be consistent. 

Tracking your shopper’s preferences and getting them exactly what they want when they want it, is relevancy. 

But that’s not all. 

Because consumers can buy products anywhere, so, to grow, you need to create experiences that are both unique and personalized. Else, you risk losing customers and business faster than you can say  ‘Free Shipping’.

Insights

In a world of ‘Amazon’ and ‘Google’, traditional merchandisers need to track and analyze actionable user events to drive personalized merchandising and marketing campaigns. 

As shoppers spend longer periods online, they generate massive troughs of raw data about what they do and how they behave. Retailers and merchandisers can use business intelligence solutions to turn unstructured customer data into powerful actionable insights. 

By using a data-centric approach, you can understand and analyze shoppers’ purchase patterns to create and consistently deliver tailor-made retail experiences. As a merchandiser, you can understand which products are doing well and which aren’t. This insight allows you to manage your inventory optimally to achieve the maximum Return On Investment (ROI). 

Let’s consider the revenue statistics of two online stores that sell similar brands of fashion clothing.

At first glance, it would appear that Store A is doing better than Store B.

Surely Store A has 3x more transactions than B and has more sales. But if you’d look closer, you’ll realize Store B has better Conversion rates, Average Session times, and a higher Average Order Value than A. 

Asking the right questions can help you get more insight into what you can do to improve conversions.

• How is a shopper’s retail experience while searching, browsing, and completing an order?
• What’s encouraging shoppers at Store B to spend longer? 
• Why are shoppers spending more while shopping in Store B?
• What is Store A doing that is attracting more shoppers to their store? Can Store B replicate this?
• How are the two stores’ site search solution build?

Seeking answers to these questions will help you trap lost opportunities for product placement and get that extra order to your cart. For instance, as someone who is training to compete in a triathlon, I was searching for bodysuits but had to refine my search to find bodysuits capable of withstanding the temperature of open seas. If the site had advertised bodysuits apart from swimming trunks in the ‘Swim wear’ page, I wouldn’t have had to refine my search filters. Thankfully (for the site), I had the patience to search. I’m sure there could be many others who didn’t have the patience to dig deeper and just left the site midway. 

Using user-driven insights can help you position your products correctly, fix issues with product suggestions, optimize merchandising options and predict demand and resolve supply issues before they crop up.

After all, failing to plan is planning to fail.

Optimized for Conversion

Conversion. The one metric most entrepreneurs and merchandisers care the most about. In the previous post, we spoke about how conversion can help you build your business. 

But conversion isn’t going to happen automatically and it surely won’t grow your revenue unless you optimize it.

According to Forrester, 1/3rd of all retail sales in 2018 was done through mobile devices. In other words, If your store does not provide a great mobile experience, you are missing out on a third (or more) of all sales. Period.

For shoppers, optimizing for conversion means they interact with an online store that ‘studies’ their behavior (using AI and ML), ‘understands’ the way they ‘speak’ (using Natural Language Processing), corrects incorrectly spelled queries (using builtin Autocorrect and Spellcheck) and suggests the right products on the fly (using Semantic Search Relevance engines).

For you, optimizing for conversion means shortening the time and effort your shoppers take to search, browse, and buy a product from your store.

To understand how you can optimize your conversion rates, think about what you’d like to experience when you’re shopping.

Would you like to view high-resolution images and different angles of a particular product? Research reveals that having multiple hi-rez images allows a shopper to ‘touch and feel’ a product online and helps increase the conversion by 3x and reduce product returns by half.

Not sure if you’ll return to buy something online? How about if you get limited-time discount coupons that you can use when you return.

Merchandising

Simply put, merchandising is the art and science of displaying the right products and offers at the right place at the right time at the right price on a website with the goal of increasing sales. 

There are a couple of ways successful retailers do this: 

Home Page

You’ve got about 3 seconds to grab your shoppers’ attention. Choose the product images you want your shopper to view, display offers that they can’t refuse, feature personalized products that are based on their shopping and browsing history, and you’ve set up the ideal ‘Home Page’ for your shopper.   

Personally, I love the way Amazon’s home page has evolved over the last 10 years. Today, as I log on to Amazon, it welcomes me with personalized shopping recommendations and promotions tailor-made for me. By the way, this is exactly what Unbxd can do for you as well. 

They even add free shipping to this mix and I’m deliriously happy to stay and shop.
So, adapt such tips and tricks to capture your shopper’s attention and make them stay!

Category Page

Over the past 3 years, shoppers have moved from using Google to search for products to searching for a product within Amazon. Another brilliant example is Lowe. Their category pages aren’t exactly glamorous but like a trusty steed, it does a pretty good job of guiding shoppers through multiple levels to the product they want. 

Or you could just use filters to help shoppers cut through the levels and get to the product. 

Product Display Page

Conventionally, shoppers use the Product Display Page(PDP), to read more about the product before they add it to their shopping cart. As a merchandiser, this is where you’ll have to convince your shopper to buy. 

Choose your CTA options with care, giving shoppers enough information about the product. Adding comprehensive product descriptions, user reviews, and product testimonials help shoppers to make a well-informed decision before they buy the product. Besides ensuring your shoppers know what they’re buying, a detailed product page with high-definition images will also reduce returns.

As for the records, when one store added customer photos to their PDP, conversion rose by 24%!

Cart Page

As the shopper makes the home-run towards order completion, ensure you cut the clutter, make it easy for your shopper to know what comes ahead, and the process is safe. 

Simplify the checkout process. 

Tweak. Test. Repeat.

Identify shoppers who’ve abandoned their cart midway, and encourage them to complete the purchase.

Integration

The internet is chock-a-block with stores and your competitor is just a 2 second Google search away. While shopaholics will trawl the internet for their next retail fix, they will visit and buy from more established brands because of their popularity, accessibility, security, choice of products, and familiarity.  

It is estimated that the bigger marketplaces cater to millions of visitors every day.

Choosing between getting a fully functional site search that is proven to work or building one from the ground up can be a daunting task. 

Just as there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, integrating a well-defined site search engine into your store helps you solve issues unique with your store. You could you be an SME or a multi-billion dollar enterprise, your site search needs are unique. What works for HSN won’t work for a store that’s selling car parts online.

Is your site search learning from queries or are they simply automating tasks?
Is your search solution solving real issues that plague shoppers?
Your site search solution should cater to use-cases specific to your business. Search engines work differently in fashion and stores selling groceries. 

Which is why we at Unbxd work closely with you from the moment you sign on the dotted line until your store is ready to go live.

User Experience

According to Adobe, 38% of shoppers will leave a website if they find it unattractive. 

Corporations worldwide are investing billions to understand how they can create an interface that is clean, easy to navigate, and intuitive. 

eCommerce stores need to go a step forward and ensure their interfaces convert casual shoppers to confirmed buyers. Because there isn’t real-time human interaction with shoppers. As merchandisers, you need feedback, both positive and negative, to drive the overall user experience and ultimately enhance user perception. 

The days when all you needed was an aesthetic template to lure shoppers in are over. Research shows 76 out of 100 visitors end up abandoning their cart mid-checkout. While you know the reasons behind it, these are appalling statistics. 

As in brick and mortar stores, your online store should reflect your brand while also delivering the user experience your shoppers have come to expect. Word of mouth works the same way too. Case in point, Amazon. While they’ve always delivered great value, they have worked on feedback from millions of shoppers to chip away at what was a cluttered interface to make it what it is today. An interface that is personalized, polished, and human-like.

Starting from the home page right up till your shopper has checked out, ensure interactions are both logical and real-world, transitions are simple and natural, feedback is real-time and features add to their convenience.

“The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not to just meet them but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Sir Richard Branson

Unlike physical stores, customers won’t think twice before they switch to a competitor that makes them ‘feel’ better.

Wrapping up, it is safe to say that running an eCommerce store can be easy. But making your brand matter and creating value is science. 

Site search allows your brand to connect with your shoppers, helping them on their journey, on their terms, making the whole experience seamless.

No single pillar of eCommerce search is more important than the other. Bringing it all together to create a successful business takes years of precious blood, sweat, and tears.
Or you can use our Site Search solution. 

Curious to know more? Drop us an email here and let us build your site’s search engine while you focus on your brand.

 

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Don’t let your site down this holiday season

The holiday season is here and we are sure you must have bumped into many Holiday Readiness Guide 2019 already. Fair enough! The holiday season, after all, does have a huge business impact and forms a chunk of our overall revenue. The shopping behavior continues to rise. It is estimated that Holiday eCommerce spending is expected to rise by 13.2% in 2019 from the previous year. The eCommerce spending in the U.S. alone rose by 16.6% to $123.73bn in 2018.

This leaves eCommerce players with no option other than to be “holiday-ready”. There are so many fronts that need to be working just fine to ensure a seamless shopping experience for shoppers. A snapshot of which you can see in the image below:

Challenges of an eCommerce store

While you juggle between fixing all these facets for a smooth online shopping experience, we at Unbxd want to ensure that you are able to scale your business without any hiccups. So that you can focus on things that matter most to your business, we looked into the 2 most ignored aspects of running a healthy site: Site preparedness and Infrastructure redundancy.

“Every year as part of Holiday readiness we assess our architecture for high availability and revisit our Standard Operating Processes based on past holiday traffic and current projections. We also look at recent incidents and remediations for these incidents. We conducted a holistic analysis to understand the impact of the holiday season. We are expecting a 20-30 percent increase in traffic based on customer profile and traffic projections.” says Jayanth, Head of Engineering at Unbxd.

We conducted a heuristic analysis to understand the impact of the holiday season. We saw that there would be almost a 100% jump in QPS (Queries per Second), 80% uptick in the amount of data being indexed and 87% more backend queries being processed. We thought it to be important to communicate the steps we were taking to cater to the business needs of our customers.

We believe actions speak louder than guides (read words), so we conducted this live webinar for all our customers across the globe. In the webinar, the customers were given a walk-through into the following:

We showed our customers how our infrastructure currently operates and how it will behave and act as the peak traffic goes on to increase during the holiday season. We also showed them how increased caching capacity will solve for downstream services and middleware timeouts.

We understand that unplanned downtimes can happen anytime and we ensure that we are always prepared for that.  To ensure that the system is able to handle the increased traffic and search queries during the holiday season, how we have increased the capacity at the Proxy, search orchestration, and edge layers.  (as seen in the image)

The Layered Architecture for Site Search

We also built an Unbxd Status page that gives our customers visibility into ongoing and the previous incidents. Nothing can be more satiating for the customers than letting them know that we are working to fix their issue.

Amidst all the holiday craziness, we want the site search and site performance to be the least of the concerns for any eCommerce player. And we have worked hard in the last few months to ensure we have the infrastructure and a system in place that can cater to these exponential business needs and give our customers a feeling that they are in safe hands.

“We wanted to lay trust in our customers about our preparedness for the coming holiday season and we wanted to demo this to them live. And I must say, when we demonstrated the platform stability with test use-cases, showcasing our in-depth infrastructure architecture, the auto-healing capability of our systems – our customers were nothing less than delighted”, says Nishant Agrawal, Product Lead for Site Search at Unbxd.

The Site search plays a pivotal role in shaping the online shopping experience for shoppers. The shoppers bounce off the website in 3 seconds if they are not able to find what they came looking for. We cannot empathize any less with the eCommerce customers who work day in and day out to provide the best product/services to their shoppers but are not able to showcase the right products at the right time when they finally come knocking on the door. A poor search experience or a delay in loading the webpage can mean a loss of business to the eCommerce stores. That is what we have worked to fix for our customers and we used the webinar as a means to establish that confidence in our customers as well.

We also realize the importance of human point of contact during the times of emergency, if need be. We concluded the webinar by giving our customers a direct point of contact in case of any urgent issue or concern during the holiday period.

We at Unbxd are always working towards making an eCommerce ecosystem that is robust, reliable and resilient. This was just one of many attempts to promise the same to our customers for the upcoming holiday season and times to come.

If you have suffered the pain of a poor site search or inadequate infrastructure handling your eCommerce site during holiday season hitting your revenue or any time of the year, it is time you switch to a solution that really cares for its customers. You can reach out to us here.

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Broken Site Search? Quick ways to fix it!

Did you know that 8 out of 10 Americans shop online?

About 79% of U.S. shoppers find what they want and order them via the Internet.

And still, 42% of companies completely ignore the on-site search.

Looking at the stats, we realize how deeply we are engaged with online shopping and how some companies still don’t prioritize fixing a broken search system. 

Let’s consider the upcoming holiday season. 

This is the time of the year when merchandisers, both online and offline, ready their holiday catalogs for shoppers to splurge. But what will happen if your site search is broken and shoppers leave your site to fulfill their product needs elsewhere? How will your shoppers know you have what they want? 

You wouldn’t want to yield your business to the competition. Right? 

So, making sure that the shoppers find exactly what they are looking for has to be your #1 priority. A broken site search would mean your shoppers will not be able to ‘discover’ their favorite product or even buy it. Who would like that?

I wouldn’t.

I’d probably strike off that site from my future references and look out for the same brand/product elsewhere. And that is why you would want your search engine to work just fine for the shoppers who come to your site fulfilling their lengthy shopping list for the holiday or else brace yourself for: 

 
Broken Site Search = Lost Customers = Plunging Sales = Lost Revenues.

Image: ‘When no one likes to wait’

 

What are some of the major problems?

A good search engine must be able to relate and understand shoppers’ needs just as humans (who listen) would do!

Imagine, Rick is searching for a ‘red Santa hat’ which is defined as ‘red floppy hat’ within your product catalog. Just because Rick searches for the product by a different name, it shows him ZERO RESULTS. Should that even happen? No, right?

So, if your site’s search engine overcomes these trivial problems and becomes capable of identifying synonyms, searching for similar words, and auto-correct queries for product names, then customers like Rick will never face the ‘Zero Results’ page. Your revenues will go higher, shoppers wouldn’t leave, your ROI value will increase, and your customers will appreciate your efforts of providing a seamless search experience. 

 

Why Should You Fix It?

An eCommerce site falls into trouble when it doesn’t offer the shoppers what they have been looking for or maybe something more. Like shoppers search for a product and their queries don’t fetch product suggestions, aren’t corrected for typos, and results aren’t filtered for relevance. A scenario that maximum eCommerce websites face!

Do we ever realize why merchandisers, like you, prefer selling their products on Amazon than any other site? It is because you know shoppers will be able to search for and find your product easily if marketed well on Amazon. This is made possible only because of Amazon’s robust search engine. When shoppers search for a product, powerful algorithms work behind the scenes to display the most relevant results.

This makes it easier for merchants and merchandisers, large and small, to reach customers beyond geography. 

So, it is necessary to overcome the hazard of a bad search system and work to fix it.

 

How to solve it?

Typical eCommerce metrics such as “Abandonment Rate”, “Conversion Rate”, “Click-Through Rates”, “Zero Queries”, defined in the previous blog post have a lasting effect on the site’s performance. It is the job of a Search Quality Analyst to bridge this gap. Unbxd takes that role perfectly and builds your site search effectively. 

“You can’t look at the competition and say you’re going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you’re going to do it differently.” – Steve Jobs

So, acquire different approaches to fix your site search.

We have curated six ways for you to fix it by yourself when nothing else works:

• List it right: An appropriately structured Product Listing Page(PLP) helps shoppers navigate through product categories without getting lost in a maze of choices.
  Perform a rigorous card sorting exercise to ensure products are categorized well and sorted nicely. A lot of times shoppers exit a site in frustration when they can’t find the right products within a category.
  Similarly, ensure your Product Listing Page (PLP) lists products by relevance to fit your shopper’s needs perfectly. Your shoppers should be able to spot the product they want in a visually appealing results page.

 

• All that glitters is gold: We are all visual beings. Shoppers like to see high-resolution images of the products they want to buy. Pictures are the only way a shopper feels as if shopping at the store itself. Apart from amazing pictures, a description is extremely important that delivers the specifications, features, and pros/cons effectively to the shoppers.  When stores have the right mix of content, both textual and visual, it thrills the shoppers to stay back and return for more.

 

• ‘Remember this device’: Studies show 40% of online shoppers use their mobile phones to shop online. You must always know your audience and show them the list of products in a visually enhancing manner to let the shoppers connect with the products as if they were shopping offline. The design of your website and app plays a vital role to make the shoppers believe in online shopping! So, always remember their device!

 

• Declutter your Catalog: Chances are that your catalog has millions of products. This means you need to structure your catalog and index the products in the right format when you’re uploading them to your store’s database. The right format means indexing the product feed, removing products that aren’t part of your business vertical, temporarily out of stock, or simply not sold anymore.

 

• Detangle Checkout: Once the shoppers spot the product they were looking for, they want to buy it without much hassle. This is easier said than done.
  Shoppers appreciate when the checkout process doesn’t have multiple complex steps to complete the payment. The need is to complete the payment and wait for its delivery. If the end process itself takes time, they are surely going to run out on you and take their business elsewhere.

 

• Pay as you like it: Shoppers like the luxury of choosing the most convenient mode of payment. Allow them to choose between Credit or Debit cards, mobile wallets, net banking options, various payment gateways, and more. This not only diversifies your payment options but also enhances your shoppers’ user experience. 

 

Let’s revisit Ken, who was shopping for the perfect wedding ring. He could have just gotten the ring he was looking for, but if your Product Display Page wasn’t categorized the right way, he would have simply ‘bounced’ out of there before even saying ‘I Do’. 

Thankfully, creating an intuitive search engine is easy peasy with Unbxd’s proprietary search system. Once you’ve integrated our search engine, shoppers like Ken find exactly what they are looking for, and more. How?

Give your shoppers options, give them filters, recommendations, power their search with versatile auto-suggest options, filter out the noise, display search results by relevance and voila! Your shoppers become your biggest advocates. 

And also, fix these six things about your site with us and you’ll see your site’s performance improving, your shoppers ‘sticking’ by your brand, and revenues increasing. So, make sure this holiday season you don’t lose out on shoppers but double the conversion rate! 

The verdict is clear: Leave search broken as it is, and you’ll have disappointed shoppers leave by the scores. Drop a mail to us at sales@unbxd.com and we’ll show you how we can get you a 10% uplift in your revenue. 

 

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