Tag: easyask

DollarDays Delivers a Solid Back?to?School Season with EasyAsk Semantic Search

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EasyAsk, the leading provider of natural language semantic technologies, and DollarDays, the largest by-the-case online store for small businesses, shared details of DollarDays’ recent back-to-school season success.

In 11 short years, DollarDays is celebrating several milestones, including doubling the number of SKUs it offers to more than 225,000 and the number of suppliers to more than 500. Traffic on the DollarDays site has increased significantly, as have the number of memberships. All of this translates into revenue growth for DollarDays, even in a business environment where competitors are shrinking or going out of business. 

DollarDays’ CEO, Marc Joseph, attributes DollarDays’ continued success to many key variables, including a growing number of price-sensitive shoppers, dominant marketing (as seen in the company’s back-to-school programs), and an overall exceptional customer experience led by strong site search, merchandising and analytic capabilities.

“As the volume of traffic and the total number of items increases, the more important it is to present the right items to the visitor as quickly as possible,” says Joseph.

DollarDays originally used the open-source search product, Solr, as part of its open-source e-commerce software stack. Solr is an open-source search platform from the Apache Lucene project.

Business Reasons DollarDays Upgraded to EasyAsk from Solr

  • Highly descriptive search—Because of their explosive product catalog growth, DollarDays needed to give shoppers more search functionality and the ability to enter more detailed descriptions in the search box.
  • Faceted navigation—Most navigation systems define static categories. EasyAsk[‘s] natural language automatically generates additional layers of product definitions that greatly improve faceted navigation.
  • Agile merchandising—Merchandisers can leverage EasyAsk eCommerce to create banner ads, promotions, and rapidly identify and adapt as shopper trends develop.
  • Manageability—The scope of managing search terms over a product catalog of 225,000 SKUs can be overwhelming. EasyAsk offers intuitive graphical tools and analytics to make the job easier.

“EasyAsk search dramatically reduced the time for customers to find products and get to that all-important checkout stage,” said Joseph. “As our number of items and seasonal merchandising needs grew, EasyAsk’s superior faceted search enabled our shoppers to more explicitly explore items across multiple dimensions. We offer a number of niche products, and once the visitors get to our site, we need to make it easy to find the exact product they want. EasyAsk helps us do that.”

Kevin Ryan, Vice President of Merchandising at DollarDays, said, “Wholesale sites are generally behind consumer sites when it comes to usability. Many sites only offer basic search and simple navigation by category. Imagine scrolling through 5,000 different products in the same category, such as toys, to find the one you’re looking for. People eventually get frustrated and leave. That is what sets us apart—we are way ahead of the competition.”

DollarDays recently redesigned its homepage, leveraging EasyAsk’s analytics, natural language merchandising and faceted navigation to better guide visitors and present high-priority items for the season in much less space. DollarDays also uses EasyAsk analytics to discover and actively promote the top items its customers are looking for at any given time. An example can be found in its “School Charity Drive” page, where EasyAsk Analytics identifies the 500 most-popular items from last year and promotes these in a blackboard-style category grid.

Joseph is an active contributor to The Huffington Post on economic and business issues. According to Joseph, “Despite the fact that many U.S. consumers believe we are still in a recession, DollarDays is well into our best back-to-school season yet, which is the biggest season for our company. EasyAsk is a big part of our success.”

Original article here:
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2012/09/13/dollardays-delivers-solid-back-school-season-easyask/

DollarDays Cuts Through the Site Search Thicket with “Natural Language” Technology

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The e-commerce site operated by wholesaler and closeout company DollarDays presents a daunting site search challenge. DollarDays sells some 140,000 products spread across 5,000 departments, and the smaller business owners who typically purchase there […] often had to navigate through a thicket of unwanted item[s] before finally finding the desired product[s].

But the e-commerce company says that has changed with the deployment of what it calls “natural language” site search. Software and algorithms provided by EasyAsk enable DollarDays to automatically classify products into categories that better reflect site searches performed by shoppers and return to them results that more closely match what they want to buy.

For instance, before DollarDays began using the technology about a year ago, a shopper typing “blue polo shirt” into the site search box at DollarDays.com might be presented with a long list of results that included not only apparel, but Polo cologne or other unrelated blue items, says Marc Joseph, President and CEO of DollarDays. The EasyAsk technology better understands the prime characteristics of the search—in this case, that the shopper is seeking a blue shirt—and returns a more exact set of results; the software classifies products according to such attributes as price, brand, design and patterns. A search conducted today using that same phrase returned five results, all of them for shirts, and only one of which was not obviously blue.

“We’re a one-stop shop for small businesses who buy from us, and we have to get our customers quickly to what they want,” Joseph says. “The natural language search allows our customers to find the exact product in a single click, increasing our customer conversion rates.”

Since installing the software, Joseph says DollarDays has experienced a dramatic increase in the use of the e-commerce site’s search box by shoppers, who are using longer search terms to find products more quickly. He declined to provide details. The software also works to take product attributes such as price and recent arrivals to create new product categories that help DollarDays run better promotions; for instance, the software helps to place items into such categories as “closeouts,” “49¢ or less,” “hot sellers” and “new products.”

For an e-commerce operator such as DollarDays that installs and manages the site search technology on its own, EasyAsk typically charges a one-time licensing fee of $35,000, says John Morrell, the technology provider’s Vice President of Marketing. If EasyAsk manages the technology, fees start at about $600 per month, he says.

Original article here:
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2011/09/09/dollardays-cuts-through-site-search-thicket/

DollarDays Rings up E-commerce Dollars Using EasyAsk Natural Language Search & Merchandising

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EasyAsk, the leader in e-commerce search and merchandising software, and DollarDays, the premier online wholesaler and closeout company, today announced one of the largest and most diverse uses of e-commerce search in e-retail. DollarDays is using the natural language conversion power of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition to get customers from the home page to the right products in a single click, helping increase purchase rates and revenue.

DollarDays distributes over 140,000 products on its e-commerce site, with over 5,000 categories and subcategories—a product catalog that would rival even the largest e-retailers. In addition, as a small-business wholesaler, the catalog is continuously shifting as seasons change, new products become available and excess product needs to be closed out.

A product catalog of this size, diversity and fluidity created a number of difficult challenges in implementing e-commerce search and merchandising. The product diversity meant that the same search term could have different meaning for different products and the navigation attributes would be widely varied across the different categories. The constant change created a merchandising nightmare in trying to manage promotions and offers. It was clear that keyword-based e-commerce search offerings could not meet these challenges.

DollarDays chose EasyAsk eCommerce Edition because the natural language technology provided a more powerful yet easier-to-use search and merchandising for their e-commerce site. With EasyAsk, DollarDays now has: 

  • A search box that is more accurate, allowing visitors to type phrases describing exactly what they want and getting those in one click;
  • A rich, dynamic set of navigation attributes that adjust based on the categories and products, making navigation faster; [and]
  • Superior, easier merchandising, including the automatic assignment of products to special categories and rapid addition of promotional banners, ads and links.

“The most successful e-commerce sites get the customer to the right products the fastest, speeding the buying process,” said Marc Joseph, President and CEO of DollarDays. “EasyAsk[‘s] natural language search allows our customers to find the exact product in a single click, increasing our customer conversion rates. EasyAsk also makes our merchandising more agile, which is essential in our business, where product offerings are continuously changing.”

As a result of using EasyAsk, DollarDays has seen significant improvement in the performance of their e-commerce site, including:

  • The improvement of successful search rate to 99.8% and the virtual elimination of zero-results searches;
  • A dramatic increase in the use of the search box and the length of search terms to lead visitors to products faster;
  • Greater efficiency in merchandising by replacing a time-consuming multistep process to create promotions with a combination of automated and single-step creation of merchandising programs.

DollarDays uses EasyAsk[‘s] natural language and algorithms fed by operational product data to automatically classify products into unconventional categories such as “closeouts,” “49¢ and less,” “hot sellers” and “new products” (seen across the top of the DollarDays website). Using EasyAsk in this way saves many “man-days” of merchandiser time and completely removes technical staff from the merchandising processes.

“DollarDays is a shining example of how EasyAsk’s natural language search and merchandising can bring an e-commerce site to life and instantly increase customer conversion. Higher conversion equals more sales, leading to higher profits,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “In a marketplace where you need every competitive edge possible, DollarDays found a powerful yet easy advantage by using EasyAsk that is paying off at the bottom line.”

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is the industry leading e-commerce search and merchandising solution that allows visitors to find products faster and receive compelling promotions and offers. EasyAsk understands the content and intent of the search question—“red long-sleeved dresses under $150”—to deliver the right results on the first page. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition customers see the industry’s highest conversion rates, deliver a superior customer experience and see dramatic increases in average order sizes.

About DollarDays
Founded in 2001, DollarDays is the leading supplier of wholesale goods for nonprofits, businesses and betterment organizations. By sourcing affordable products, backed by exceptional service and meaningful community engagement, we strive to inspire and empower our customers to accomplish their missions to improve the lives of people around the world. Recognized as the City of Phoenix Mayor’s Office “2018 Product Exporter of the Year” and Internet Retailer Magazine’s “B2B E-commerce Marketer of the Year” for 2016 and 2017, DollarDays is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. For more information, visit www.dollardays.com.