Retail and eCommerce are accelerating at a rapid pace and our roadmap has developments that will help you stay ahead of the curve including: Personalization, Rules Based Merchandising and further improvements to Relevancy.
5. 2017 SearchSpring Product Updates
● Merchandising: Putting retailers in the driver's seat
● Personalization: Present products tailored to shopper’s individual
preferences
● Unified “Relevancy API”: The SearchSpring API powers digital
commerce experiences
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6. ● Increase gross margin
○ Automatically boost items based on item-level gross margin
○ Promote house brands
○ Gain pricing leverage with manufacturers/brands by promoting their product
○ Attract “Full Price” shoppers by showcasing higher quality brands
● More automation (save time)
○ Automate the ordering of products on search, category and brand pages
○ Use metrics to continually optimize product placement
■ CTR, conversion, revenue-per-visit, etc
○ “Set it and forget it” rules
● Tools for fast fashion and high-turn retailers
○ Easier control of in-stock vs out-of-stock items
○ Showcase new and in-season items
Merchandising Vision
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7. Personalization Vision
● Create the traditional in-store experience online
● Know your customers
● Adapt product listings pages and widgets to the shopper
● Easier & faster shopping for customers
○ Less clicks to get to product pages
○ More engagement at the product level
● Consumers want:
○ To be personally greated
○ Feel like retailers know them (without being creepy)
○ Adapt the online experience to their needs
● Marketers want:
○ To richly target consumers with relevant offers (need rich customer profiles)
● What not to do:
○ Don’t promote irrelevant product to customers
■ I bought cologne on Sephora, then received promotions for makeup
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8. ● 70% of traffic is now mobile - speed is critical
○ Search query spelling is getting worse
○ “Questions” are more complex
● Answer complex customer questions
○ “I want a black dress for New Year’s Eve”
○ “Which herbal teas help with sleep”
○ I like this product but the color isn’t right - “what else do you have?”
● Merchandising needs
○ Show the customer similar items from the same brand / category
○ Automatically include recent promotions in Autocomplete
○ Whitelist & blacklist capabilities across product recs and autocomplete
● Developer needs
○ Easy to consume on web, mobile, in-app and back-office
■ Fast response times, small payloads, CORS headers
○ Consistent access to products and related content anywhere on the site
○ Offload search-related machine learning and NLP to SearchSpring
■ More time for app development, frontend and integrations
SearchSpring API Vision
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21. Product Exclude Rules
● Allows merchants to control which kinds of
products to hide, and where
● Visual Merchandising: What doesn’t belong?
○ For Example: I don’t want red items to ever show up in this Blue
items campaign
● Global Rules: What should never show up?
○ Example: Always hide Out of Stock Products
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26. Personalization
● Discover your shoppers needs and wants
● Leverage preferences to elevate relevant products
● Create a custom tailored shopping experience
● Provide transparency as to how search results are
being customized
26Jenny
34. Unified “Relevancy API”
● Unification: Consistent functionality across all endpoints
○ If you can do it in search you should also be able to do it on product recs
● Faster: All of our relevancy smarts and promotional intelligence, even
faster than before
● Easier to Use: More documentation, frontend starter SDKs, richer
payload control (get more / less data as needed), CORS support
● Content Integration: Promotional pages, Blog entries, shipping
information, product reviews, social posts, POS/offline data, etc.
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37. ● A new feedback program for our
users
● Your chance to play an active role
● Capping at 25 beta testers: Some
open spots remain, so email us!
● Benefits: Get the newest features,
influence how our product works
for you
● Always evolving, so let us know
your thoughts
The SearchSpring Beta Program
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Survey: What kind of Merchandising do you use?
38. Community Feedback
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● New community feedback forum for all: searchspring.userecho.com
● A space to ask questions, submit ideas, vote up and offer thoughts
on the ideas of others
● Allows SearchSpring to actively see what we can improve, what the
demand is, and the different needs of merchants.