Coldwater Creek gets ready to roll out new search function

Coldwater Creek, the catalog and online retailer of women’s clothing and accessories, will activate EasyAsk Inc.’s search function on its site March 1. Coldwater Creek customers today must drill down through the site’s navigation structure to find what they are looking for. “The online shopper’s patience is very, very finite,” says a spokesman for Coldwater Creek. The new system “will expedite the whole process and we’re expecting it will close a lot more sales.” EasyAsk’s search system searches an entire database—not just the product descriptions—and uses synonyms for products so a shopper doesn’t have to type in the exact phrase that the database contains. Coldwater Creek has been testing the system internally for several months.