Guiding Web customers to sales nirvana

It goes without saying that the easier you make it for customers to find what they want on your Web site, the greater the chance you land a sale.

Hence the fascination with improving search technology.

But search only addresses part of the problem. How do you help people that aren't sure about what they're after?

Enter Endeca, a young company promoting the idea of guided navigation in place of the traditional query/retrieve. The problem with the latter, says company co-founder and CEO Steve Papa, is the implicit assumption that the customer knows what he's looking for or how to find it.

Guided navigation is all about helping the customer narrow the options by providing guideposts along the way.

For example, go to Amazon.com, select classical and search Chopin. It returns three favorites and 2,507 other options. It also offers a link to matches in Instruments, Ballets & Dances and Short Forms.

Now try that at Towerrecords.com, a site powered by Endeca. Like Amazon, the site returns an overwhelming 1,405 matches. But the page also lets you narrow the search by price, title, conductor, instruments, recording label, language, orchestra, performer, new releases, out-of- print recordings and live recordings.

Papa says this approach of adding context and providing position and relevance is more in keeping with the way people shop. Endeca claims Towerrecords.com's use of the technology drove order sizes up 28%.

Besides retail, Endeca is focused on internal enterprise use, helping companies find and reuse resources instead of building them anew, potentially a huge cost savings.

The system essentially consists of a set of indexes layered over your product database. The Endeca Data Foundry harvests information from production databases and stages it in the Endeca Navigation Engine, which is linked to your Web application server.

That's easy enough to set up. The hard part is creating the categories used to aid navigation, and mapping products accordingly. While work-intensive - a step that search firms such as EasyAsk sidestep - Papa says Barnes & Noble, which has 2 million books, was able to deploy in two to three months. The system isn't cheap - from $60,000 per year for three years to millions of dollars per year, depending on capacity - but if it can drive sales or help you reuse expensive resources, it might be worth a look.

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