Design firm Fry Inc. will offer site search technology from Endeca Technologies Inc. on a hosted basis, meaning retailers who use the service will not have to make an upfront investment in the technology. Fry customers Brookstone Inc., Graco Children’s Products Inc., and Fisheries Supply Inc. have implemented Endeca’s InFront site search technology through Fry’s ASP, Fry says.
Endeca’s InFront product is a guided-search-and-navigation product that presents results in answer to a customer’s search query but that also presents search results sorted by other criteria. It also allows retailers to incorporate business rules for product merchandising into the results.
The service will be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis, depending on sales and number of SKUs at a site, Fry says. While he won’t reveal exact pricing, president David Fry says experience has shown a three-month payback in the form of conversion rates that the Endeca service can push 50% higher than previously. Retailers will pay a set-up fee to integrate their data into the technology.
Customers will find the service attractive, Fry believes, as a way to avoid the upfront investment that integrating the search function into a web site can cost. Forrester Research Inc. reports that the average Endeca installation costs $350,000 in licensing fees and installation.
With costs at that level, hosted solutions make sense, says Harley Manning, principal analyst at Forrester, especially since there appears to be market demand for this kind of service. “Endeca was increasingly being asked by its customers to offer a hosted solution, but they’d rather not be in that business,” he says. “This makes sense because they get the sale and they get the hosting monkey off their backs.”
Fry will host the service at its network operations center in Chicago.
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