We announced today a new program that permits online merchants to evaluate how e-commerce site search would boost sales on their site. The program is free of charge and requires little or no effort on the part of the merchant.

Under this Site Search Prototyping Program, an online merchant can actually see how his products would be presented in search results and how Reinhart Technology’s CyberSiteSearch E-Commerce site search tool facilitates their purchase. An online store owner simply sends his product data and Reinhart’s staff sets up an actual live e-commerce site search of his products for evaluation. This is accomplished in such a way that there is absolutely no disruption to the live online store.

Prior to this plan, merchants would have to imagine how this technology would be applied to their site and products by viewing canned demos or a sample of other merchants’ sites and products. This program has been launched to eliminate the natural uncertainty that a storeowner might have concerning the use of this technology with his products and his site.

You can read today’s full press release here.

It seems that the financial crisis is on everybody’s mind and web merchants are certainly no exception. As we enter the all-important Holiday shopping season, consumers are anxious about the economy, and their spending is coming into question.

Just about the only group with higher levels of anxiety than these consumers are the retailers selling to them, and online merchants are no exception. Nobody knows what to expect going forward.

You might think that online retailers cut their ad spends during uncertain times and many certainly have done so. However, as I have noted in a recent CyberSiteSearch Blog post, search marketing clients generally have not decreased their PPC ad spending. But what has changed is that they have increased their conversion optimization efforts by a whopping 300%!

This is certainly a strategy that makes a lot of sense. Decreasing PPC ad spending can only lead to lower traffic to a merchant’s site, which of course translates into lower sales. Not exactly an appealing option to most online retailers, but one that many choose out of economic necessity.

But what if that lowered ad spend could actually yield the same sales as the old, higher advertising budget? Or maybe keep the same budget, garner more customers and actually increase sales?

The key to that approach is of course converting more visitors into paying customers. Always a noble goal, it has become exceptionally important now since we are operating in an incredibly complex economic environment. Even small changes to landing pages, site navigation, and usability can mean the difference between success and failure.

Study after study has pointed to a starkly sobering fact: if site visitors cannot quickly locate products of interest on a web site, they leave and try the next site. Even more sobering is the fact that the time it takes for them to make that decision is usually measured in seconds.

The key to engaging these visitors and converting them into paying customers is a robust e-commerce style site search. It helps visitors to not only rapidly locate products of interest, but also assists them in making favorable buying decisions by showing product images, promotional messages, product availability information, etc. One of our customers has recently reported a whopping 40% increase in Google sales using our CyberSiteSearch product.

In this economic environment, conversion is no longer King; it’s become God!

E-Commerce Guide.com did an article today entitled Find Holiday Profits with Revamped Google Product Search, which basically urged merchants to utilize the Google Product Search to increase sales at no additional cost (the service is free). The author also pointed out a number of best practices.

We thought it appropriate to point out that the Google Product Injection feature of CyberSiteSearch implements every one of these features to help insure that our merchants achieve the best possible increase in sales. And best of all, it does this entirely automatically and requires no additional work on the part of the merchant.

It seems that the financial crisis is on everybody’s mind and web merchants are certainly no exception. Nobody knows what to expect going forward.

As quoted in a recent post to the Search Insider Blog, search marketing clients have not decreased their PPC ad spending, but what has changed is that they have increased their conversion optimization efforts by a whopping 300%!

This is simply a reflection of the fact that we are operating in an incredibly complex economic environment. Even small changes to landing pages, site navigation, and usability can mean the difference between success and failure.

The time couldn’t be better to implement CyberSiteSearch. If a customer cannot rapidly locate and purchase products on a web site, they leave within seconds. And CyberSiteSearch not only helps site visitors do exactly that, but it also offers integrated marketing features that bring additional, highly targeted visitors to your product pages.

In this economic environment, conversion is no longer King; it’s become God!

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you not only survive, but also prosper.

Some time ago we noted in this Blog that our company President and Founder was invited by Work.com to author a guide to e-commerce site search entitled “Guide to E-Commerce Site Search: So What Exactly Is It?”.

This article explains the fundamentals and important advantages of this style of site search for online merchants and has garnered high ratings by readers.

Apparently, as a result of those rankings, Business.com has now picked up the guide and is featuring it in their E-Commerce section. It is ranked in position 14 out of only 33 articles in that section. You can read the guide on Business.com here.

Business.com is the leading business search engine and pay-per-click advertising network. We are proud that they saw fit to include us.

We’ve recently added new features to CyberSiteSearch that permit easy customization of search results.

With these new features, merchants have complete control over the appearance and content of product search results. Examples of how this feature might be used include:

• Implementing multiple “buy now” buttons on each product search result, such as for the site’s own shopping cart, Pay Pal, and Google Checkout.
• Add a “New” or other attention graphic to specific products results.
• Adding a drop down list of product options.
• Showing multiple images for each product.

The combination of our product’s robust handling of merchant defined product attributes with this new enhanced customization feature permits merchants to show attribute information in search results such as color, voltage, flavor, pattern, axle diameter, or any other attribute they wish to define.

Best of all, this powerful new feature can typically be implemented using simple HTML.

You can read today’s press release here.

Marketing Sherpa recently posted to their blog “Before You Write Copy Or Blog, Make A Keyword List”. It makes an interesting point concerning the importance of keywords.

While keywords are most often thought of in connection with search engine optimization (SEO), Sherpa notes “Keywords are the highly specific words that your target audience would use to describe anything that has to do with your offerings, as well as the personal reasons why they’d buy” and “nothing is more compelling than speaking in a prospect’s language – describing their own desire or pain to them in exactly the words they would use.”

Hmmm … speak to customers in their own language, using their exact words?

Do your users search for “garbage can” or “trash bin”? Do they search for “Kousmichoff” or “Kusmi”? “Car” or “auto”? “Balsamic vinegar” or “aceto balsamico”? The list of questions goes on and on.

So where might you find the answers? Use the CyberSiteSearch search reporting to ferret out those keywords. It provides easily sortable reports of keywords based on frequency of use, click volume, sales volume, etc.

With those answers you’ll be better equipped to speak to your customers using the words they themselves use.

In response to a few comments that we’ve received, here are links to the full series of postings that we did about Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search, listed in chronological order. It’s a lot easier to read in this fashion.

• So What Are Product Attributes?
• Product Attributes In The Real World
• Product Attributes In The Online World
• How Site Search Tools Should Not Obtain Product Attribute Information
• How Site Search Tools Should Obtain Product Attribute Information
• Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search Tools: The Real Payoff

We noticed today an announcement  by Google concerning their support of alternative data feed formats to Google Base. Basically, they now support incoming feeds formatted for Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com in addition to their own feed format.

One interesting aspect of this announcement is that it mimics our own strategy of supporting popular feed formats, except that we can accommodate feeds formatted for not only Shopping.com, and Shopzilla, but also Shop.com, Google, Yahoo, Price Grabber, Smarter.com, Become.com and others. Merchants may use existing feeds in one of these formats to send product data to CyberSiteSearch. In fact, our Merchant Console permits rapid and easy use of virtually any existing feed format.

But the other interesting aspect is that although it may provide some convenience to merchants, it also comes up short in terms of taking advantage of optional and custom attributes.

CyberSiteSearch continues to fully support these attributes in data sent using the Google Product Injection feature.

This is the final installment in our series concerning product attributes and their importance to e-commerce merchants. In previous posts we discussed what product attributes are, the use of product attributes in the real, offline world, the importance of product attributes in the online world, how site search tools should NOT obtain product attributes, and the way to best obtain product attribute information.

So why should an online merchant care about all of this? Because it affect sales!

We made a real effort to explain the importance of product attributes in the real(offline) world and how essential they are to commerce. The real point here is that if customers are accustomed to using attributes in the offline world, they would naturally expect to use them in the online world.

To facilitate this, a site search tool like CyberSiteSearch must implement a user interface that allows site visitors to rapidly locate desired products using their attributes.

CyberSiteSearch implements product locators that permit exactly that. Merchants can easily add product locators to their web site in the form of dropdown lists that permit specification of any set of desired attributes, and then send that information to the CyberSiteSearch software which returns all of the matching products.

By easing the navigation through products with attribute based search, merchants can significantly increase their conversion rates and revenue.