E-Commerce Challenges

According to Forrester Research, online retail sales in the business-to-consumer market reached $175 billion in 2007 and are projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012—in the US alone. In order to fully capitalize on this growth, ecommerce business needs to:

• Maintain the interest (and loyalty) of fickle, impatient shoppers
• Boost average purchase amounts
• Control advertising and IT costs
• Boost search engine visibility (SEO)

Exalead's Solution

Offer Quick, Accurate Search Results

For each search request, users receive a list of highly relevant results in less than one second. Search results are automatically ranked by a number of pre-determined criteria (for example, by price or sales promotion). Automatic spell checking and fuzzy matching features dramatically help to reduce the volume of queries returning zero answers.

Boost Cross-Sales with One-Click Access to Related Products

Exalead exploits and automatically extends the organizational structure of your catalog to offer customers one-click access to related products and services based on their search query. Easy online tools enable you to control ranking, product presentation and cross-referencing. High end reporting tools allows you to monitor the search engine on a daily basis to fine tune performance.

Stabilize Fickle Audiences with Stickier Content

Up 30% in Loyalty, 40% in Conversions

"Customer loyalty has increased by 30% as a direct result of our implementation of the Exalead search engine. Perhaps most important, we saw a 40% increase in our online catalog sales conversion rate."

– Pierre-Olivier Brial, E-Business Director, Manutan International
Manutan Case Study

In addition to more successful search, Exalead's sophisticated extraction tools enable you to enrich your content with external content drawn from partner or public websites, providing instant depth, for example, through reviews, blog coverage or partner support content. Exalead also serves as your shortcut to serving up a steady stream of rich media innovations:

• Enhanced video search
• Video (and audio) transcript searching
• Advanced text indexing and query processing
• Exclusive Wikipedia search
• Advanced image search
• Mobile search
• Social search

You can test-drive the latest Exalead search innovations at Exalabs.

Reduce IT Costs While Boosting Performance

CloudView enables access to database content that is as rich yet 100s of times faster and much less expensive than traditional relational database technologies. Switching primary access to your database content to the CloudView index can help you dramatically boost performance and scalability, with lightning fast 'read' access designed to provide real-time access to petabytes of data by thousands of simultaneous users, and can help you reduce hardware, software and license costs via Database Offloading. See also Search-Based Applications, or download our whitepaper, The Hidden Costs of Scaling Search.

Boost Search Engine Visibility, Control Search Engine Ad Costs

According to a Forrester Research survey, online retailers say that search engine marketing is their most effective method of acquiring new customers.

With more successful search and a more engaging user experience, you can become more of a first-stop resource in your market, reducing your dependence on costly search engine advertising. In addition, as you build editorial value and strengthen audience loyalty to increase direct referrals, you can also use the CloudView platform to implement effective new SEO strategies, such as generating highly specific content for Web crawlers from your native content, or serving up a steady supply of fresh 'mashed-up' internal and external content to keep the Web bots coming back for more!