Since implementing site search from Netrics Inc., National Business Furniture has reduced by 70% across its three web sites the top searches that erroneously returned zero results for items that are actually available, e-commerce director Matt Boyce tells Internet Retailer.
NationalBusinessFurniture.com, aimed at larger companies, government and military customers, is an extension of the office furniture company’s 30 year-old flagship catalog. OfficeFurniture.com for small to mid-sized office customers and FurnitureOnline.com, a residential furniture site, are pure dot-coms with no corresponding catalogs. Previously, National Business Furniture had been using the site search solution bundled into its e-commerce server for all three sites.
“It wasn’t providing the amount of detail we needed. For instance, we might have a product description that this desk would look great with this bookcase. Our old search might find the word “bookcase” in the description and return it in a bookcase search, but the product itself was a desk. So it didn’t really have the ability to allow us the flexibility to control the logic that was in the search,” says Boyce.
By contrast, the Netrics product allowed National Business Furniture to build more variant terms into search. “If someone was looking for something that we had named differently, we could map that out so those products could be found in a search,” Boyce says. One of the first goals for the implementation was to reduce the number of times zero results were returned on items that the sites actually did offer. In monitoring the top 20 to 30 most searched-for items that weren’t being found even though the products were actually available, Boyce found after the Netrics implementation that the rate of incorrect zero search returns for those items had been cut by about 70% “almost immediately after we turned on the switch,” he says.
Boyce’s next step will be to conduct an audit deeper into search results to determine if the same reductions in no results are occurring across a broader set of search terms. Eventually, he plans to correlate that reduction to recouped sales or incremental sales. “The first step is just to get rid of our zero results, the next step will be to try to quantify it,” he says.
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