For Wedding Site, Enhanced Search Is Bliss

Shirley Tan has stayed true to her first match in e-commerce—mostly. She set up the AmericanBridal.com Web site in 1996 after tiring of long hours spent assembling a paper catalog for her business selling wedding favors and bridal party gifts, along with other nuptial necessities. Quickly realizing that she didn’t know much about e-commerce (“It was 1996—nobody knew what they were doing,” she explains), Tan signed on with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions to get Internet retail necessities such as store design software, shopping cart and online marketing assistance.

She still likes the platform and, 10 years later, her AmericanBridal.com site is still on Yahoo!, along with two others she operates selling business gifts and personalized bags. “It’s a great starter kit,” she says of the Yahoo! program. The AmericanBridal.com site now generates about 2 million page views each month.

But Tan saw one large flaw in the match between AmericanBridal.com and Yahoo!’s e-commerce platform: Its site search capabilities were not up to what she and her staff needed search to do for them and for their customers.

“If you did a search on our site for ‘coaster favor’ [using the default Yahoo! site search], you got all the results that contain either of those two words, even if they weren’t together” Tan says. “Our Web site has 8000 pages of products and content, so you’d have to sort through a mountain of results. When users come to e-commerce, they’re mostly looking to search and buy products, not to search through content. It was unmanageable.”

Lack of a full-fledged site search was particularly troublesome because American Bridal customer reps use site search themselves when taking phone orders via the toll-free number—something the company winds up doing with 20% to 30% of its sales.

“Customers call in orders because they want to be reassured that they’re placing that order securely and not just sending it out into cyberspace,” Tan says. “Often we’re talking to a bride who’s been planning this function since she was 10. She doesn’t want to just click a button and not know where the order winds up.”

But to offer that help, American Bridal needed to be able to navigate its own changing inventory quickly. “If someone called to order coaster favors, we didn’t want to have to ask if they knew the item number, because they never did,” Tan says. “They’d say, ‘Just be happy I remembered your 800 number.’”

So about six months ago, Tan strayed just enough from her Yahoo! vows to reach out to another site search platform. She signed up for SLI Systems’ hosted site search, known as Learning Search, at the same time enrolling her sites for SLI’s Site Champion optimization service.

Implementation of the SLI service was pretty quick and painless, since Tan’s product data was already in a format that could be used. “They promised me the service would be up and running on our site in a week, week and a half, and it was,” Tan says. “They had the demo store up and I was able to see what it could do for us.”

The more powerful site search has been largely responsible for increasing Tan’s revenue per visitor by 400% over the last half-year, while the proportion of revenue coming via search has increased to 9% from 3%.

Tan attributes much of that increase to the “search suggestion” capabilities in the SLI platform, in which visitors entering search terms can get back related items other searchers on those terms ultimately bought. The SLI system returns those suggested searches at the top and bottom of the results page, so that a visitor searching for “cufflinks” will get links to all engraved gifts, all “father of the bride” gifts, and specific jewelry designers in both locations.

“It’s like what Google is doing now with their results pages, offering further search suggestions,” Tan says. “They ask, ‘Did you think of chocolate wedding favors, or beach wedding favors?’”

The best feature, she says, is that with the new site search, results are ranked in order of popularity, with product photos, pricing details and links to other items related to that specific product. “The system automatically puts the current most popular items up top, which means I don’t have to go in and manipulate those listings to get our best-sellers highly placed,” says Tan. “The users are choosing this popularity ranking, and SLI is picking up on what they’re telling us.”

SLI also offers reporting about what customers are searching for, and Tan is aware that data can be mined to turn up items her company may not offer. So far, she hasn’t made use of that intelligence.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t logged in to get that reporting in a while,” she laughs. “I’m too busy running the business and collecting for what I’ve already sold to stop and find out how much money I’m leaving on the table.”