Sports publisher Beckett Media LP struck gold selling sports trading cards and collectibles on the Web way back in the rookie years of 1995. A decade later the site had 165 affiliated dealers, 4 million SKUs in its inventory and did $13 million in e-commerce sales. But as the online business grew, Beckett began to notice the site didn't have the stamina to keep up with that pace.
Specifically, the site's search capabilities weren't meeting the new needs of Beckett or its customers, and crashed frequently.
“We started out using Alta Vista, which was the best [site search] platform available at the time,” said Beth Grimsley, Beckett's e-commerce director. But the search-relevance stats were in the cellar; users could turn up thousands of pages with content related to Lou Gehrig, for example, but wouldn't be able to sort through the cards, collectibles and articles that turned up without doing a second search of those results pages.
In February 2005 Beckett was sold to New York-based Apprise Media and quickly began a six-month review of new site-search applications. It settled on an off-the-shelf solution from Endeca Technologies, primarily because the company had proven results with other e-commerce operators dealing with large-scale inventory similar to Beckett's.
With the new search function, built using Endeca's Guided Navigation technology, site visitors can enter terms in Google fashion and come up with the specific items they're seeking immediately. They can then sort those results by price, condition (a big factor for card collectors), and quantity.
Going with Endeca also allowed Beckett to offer dealer affiliates the chance to pay for sponsored listing status in the search results pages.
Additionally, Endeca's landing-page template would let Beckett place links to relevant online articles from its 20-year archive of sports and collecting content on the results pages.
“We've only begun to fight on the content side, because we really wanted the e-commerce implementation up and running for the 2005 holiday season,” Grimsley said. “But integrating commerce and content is very important to us.”
