When too much site search tweaking is not enough
Northern Tool and Equipment Co. has been working with Endeca Technologies Inc. since summer to enhance search and navigation for a major site relaunch scheduled for next week. E-commerce manager Nate Miller says that since the site launched in 1998, it has been using the site search function bundled into its WebSphere e-commerce platform. That worked when Northern Tool, No. 93 in Internet Retailer’sTop 300 Guide to online retailers, had fewer than 10,000 SKUs online, which was the case as recently as two years ago. But since then the online offering has climbed to about 14,000 items and now exceeds the number of items offered in Northern Tool’s paper catalogs.
“Our MIS team has been tweaking it since the beginning and pushing it beyond what it was intended to do, with a lot of custom coding that was having the effect of slowing down site search,” says Miller of the original site search feature. He adds that Northern Tool chose Endeca to replace its site search function when it realized that Endeca’s software would also help drive site navigation and merchandising, covering all 21 of the 60 site projects on Northern Tool’s to-do list.
Miller says that among other issues, the expanded online offering had outstripped the original site search feature’s ability to handle it, to the point where a recent review showed that 10% of visitors searching the site had received a “no results found” return when looking for products that Northern Tool actually has. He is aiming to reduce that percentage to “a handful” of searches on NothernTool.com with the new site search and navigation function, with the goal of lifting conversions initially by as much as 10%.
“We were looking for something a little more forgiving,” he said of Northern Tool’s decision to swap out its original site search functionality for something new. “This is going to be a web-based tool that can be used by marketing people, versus an MIS resource.”
Back...
