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Solution Spotlight: Endeca Commerce Suite Taps Web 2.0 To Optimize Online Customer Experience

Concept:
An Endeca-powered dynamic storefront is designed to present the most relevant and compelling content to customers, based on their specifications, at each step of the online shopping experience.  By incorporating content like as user reviews, video and buying guides directly into the decision-making process, these storefronts aim to give customers the experience of one-on-one customer service without stepping into a store. Studies have shown that retail web sites that incorporate this broad variety of content into the customer’s online experience have seen increases in traffic, conversion rates and online sales.

Released in March of 2009, the Endeca Commerce Suite was designed to allow merchandisers the ability to provide their customers with a more intuitive and user-friendly online experience, thereby converting more site visitors into site customers.  Its design gives merchandisers increased control over how content is presented on their respective web pages, via features such as Content-Spotlighting™ and Page Builder, resulting in higher site traffic, customer loyalty, and sales.

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Team
Endeca was founded in 1999 by Steve Papa and Pete Bell, who planned to take a different approach to Internet search.  Unlike search engines that simply asked users to enter keywords and then present a long list of results, Endeca would focus on “Guided Navigation,’’ designed to help users narrow down what they were looking for with a few extra clicks; shoppers may be asked for men’s or women’s, then a size, then athletic or business.

After a decade, Endeca has 400 employees in Cambridge, MA and a dozen other offices worldwide. Of the top 100 online retailers, nearly half use Endeca’s technology to make products more “findable,” including Walmart.com, Target.com, and The Home Depot. And today that means about half of Endeca’s business is selling technology to online retailers.

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Market Relevance
eCommerce teams are faced with the difficult task of selling effectively in an environment where consumer expectations change at a lightening pace and become increasingly sophisticated each day. Given the growing number of retail options available on the Internet, customers save little patience for retailers that cannot effectively and efficiently meet their needs.  Customers want an experience customized to their specifications, featuring superior tools and relevant content, to make the best purchasing decision.

The Endeca Commerce Suite is designed to help customers to quickly find the best product to meet their needs by integrating product information with rich content such as user reviews, video, and news articles.  In the future, the Endeca team sees customers having a greater demand for new types of relevant content when making purchases online — whether it is standing in a store and pulling up product ratings on their iPhone, or watching a video about “how to assemble this bicycle” before shelling out $300 for a holiday gift.  Endeca is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the exponential increase in online content, and customers’ demand to use this content to find the best product.

Delivery
The Endeca Commerce Suite powers the dynamic storefront.  It is a software solution that dynamically assembles and presents content targeted to the needs of each customer, based on their query from the moment the customer interacts with a retailer.  It integrates content from a variety of sources (i.e. product data, reviews, reviewer profiles, video, and articles) and presents it to customers in one view based on the context of their search.  The experience is similar to browsing through the aisles of a brick and mortar store, in that the product options presented to the customer change in accordance to their specifications. The result is a more targeted and contextually relevant experience across all channels that attracts and converts a higher number of visitors into high-margin buyers.

The Endeca Commerce Suite is installed software hosted by a retailer or a hosting partner.  Unlike traditional approaches (Web CMS, eCommerce platforms) that deliver content around manually built site taxonomies and static landing pages, the Endeca Commerce Suite ingests data from multiple data sources (PIM system, eCommerce Platform, reviews platform, inventory system, etc.) and then presents that content to customers based on their actions (search, clicking on a category, clicking on an attribute), relevant content available and rules configured by the retailer’s business users.  Merchandising teams use the Endeca Merchandising Workbench (part of Endeca Commerce Suite) to control how that content is displayed, and to continually improve conversion from dynamic pages.

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Proof Points
Today nearly half of the top 100 online retailers use Endeca to power their customer experience.  Endeca’s retail customers include: Walmart.com, The Home Depot, Borders, eBags, a 2009 Multichannel Merchant Award winner, and Tesco. In the past year, Endeca has received several accolades including, being chosen by AlwaysOn as an “East 100 Top Private Company,” by EContent Magazine as a “Top 100 Digital Content Company,” and by CIO Magazine as a one of the “Twenty Companies to Watch in 2010.” In addition, the Endeca Information Access Platform, on which the Endeca Commerce Suite is built, was named by KMWorld Magazine as a “Trend-Setting Product of the Year for 2009.”

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