Overstock.com Selects EasyAsk to Power E-Commerce Search, Navigation, Merchandising and Analytics
LITTLETON, MASS. – August 19, 2003 – EasyAsk, a market leader in information access software, and the only provider of Synchronized Search and Navigation™, today announced that its advanced search, navigation, merchandising and analytics platform has been selected by Overstock.com, Inc., a leading Internet retailer. Overstock.com® will embed EasyAsk into two of its retail sites: www.overstock.com, a consumer-focused Internet liquidation site, and www.worldstock.com, a socially responsible store promoting the work of artisans worldwide.
Overstock.com offers one of the largest and most dynamic product assortments in e-commerce, with approximately 400,000 items available online. Each month, an average of seven million shoppers visit the site, making Overstock.com one of the most popular retail destinations on the Web. With such wide selection of products and high-traffic volume, Overstock.com realized that its existing search did not provide the accuracy and scalability necessary to support its rapidly growing business.
After a thorough evaluation of all major search vendors, Overstock.com selected EasyAsk’s proven, scalable platform to enhance its search and navigation. By leveraging EasyAsk’s linguistic capabilities, Overstock.com will open its diverse product selection to an even greater number of shoppers, who will now be able to search quickly using keywords, complex phrases or natural-language queries. EasyAsk’s dynamic navigation categorizes search results according to product attributes, allowing shoppers to drill down on search results to find exactly what they’re looking with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
For Overstock.com’s site administrators and merchandising managers, EasyAsk will help to improve the management and promotion of inventory. Using EasyAsk’s intuitive Merchandising Manager dashboard, Overstock.com will be able to easily modify product descriptions and adjust individual merchandising promotions to respond to any number of searches, shopping patterns and other consumer behaviors. Insight into shopping trends and consumer behaviors can be crystallized using EasyAsk’s advanced analytics module, which provides extensive standard reports, as well as support for ad-hoc queries and reports.
EasyAsk will also enable Overstock.com to offer loyal customers the option of creating their own customized MyStore™ page views. The EasyAsk MyStore service cultivates customer loyalty by allowing repeat shoppers to identify and save preferences according to certain product attributes, such as size, brand or color. Once MyStore preferences are saved, shoppers can view personalized, dynamically-generated pages that display items matching their criteria each time they log on to Overstock.com.
“Overstock.com features a tremendously diverse assortment of merchandise – from apparel and housewares to electronics and media,” said Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com. “As a result of this diversity and the sheer number of items that we offer, we required an advanced, sophisticated, easy-to-use search and navigation platform that could understand the context of our customers’ searches. After evaluating several technologies, we found that EasyAsk offered far more than other vendors’ solutions. EasyAsk’s platform encompasses a comprehensive, synchronized suite of search-, navigation- and merchandising-related functionality that creates a superior shopping and buying experience, while at the same time driving sales and streamlining back-end administration and management.”
“Not only does Overstock.com have hundreds of thousands of items of inventory, but due to the nature of the close-out business, its inventory is in a state of constant flux, changing daily, sometimes hourly,” stated Bob Alperin, president and CEO of EasyAsk. “With EasyAsk’s scalable platform, unsurpassed expertise in e-commerce search and navigation, and strength in natural-language processing, we will help Overstock.com to continue providing an exceptional shopping experience regardless of how fast its inventory grows or how diverse its merchandise assortment becomes.”
ABOUT EASYASK
EasyAsk is a leading provider of intuitive and precise information access solutions that empower enterprise users to quickly find and retrieve critical business information. Powered by a unique linguistic capability, EasyAsk’s Synchronized Search and Navigation platform accesses both structured and unstructured data, intelligently interpreting users’ queries to find accurate and complete results with unprecedented efficiency. Leading retail, financial services and business-to-business companies such as Lands’ End, Siemens Medical Systems (SMS) and GlaxoSmithKline use EasyAsk’s technology. Over 100 companies have acquired EasyAsk’s core technology. EasyAsk partners include IBM and SAIC. Leading investors include Sigma Partners and Flagship Ventures. EasyAsk is headquartered outside of Boston with sales and support offices throughout the U.S., and internationally in England and Belgium. For more information, please visit our website at www.easyask.com or contact us at 1-800-425-8200.
Overstock.com is a registered trademark of Overstock.com, Inc.
Contact:
Akemi Tinder
781-455-8250
akemi.tinder@rfbinder.com
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