If you’re looking for a quick run-down of the top ten fast action solutions you can implement to optimize your online platform, you’ve come to the right place. Today we’ve got tips to help you increase sales and conversion rates through your eCommerce site.

1. Product Recommendations: Why not put in place an easy to use system that implements highly relevant and personalised product recommendations alongside products for your customers to browse? This dramatically increases conversion rates and average basket values.
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2. Visual Merchandising: Apply the same logic used to create enticing in-store displays to your online platform. With a new innovative technology, you can now dynamically manage the sequence in which your products are displayed in a way that is time and cost effective. This has been proven to increase online sales between 15 – 30%.
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3. Use the information you have: Locayta’s latest technology can use information you have on your current customers to ensure that your suggested add on purchases and search results respond to user behaviour in real time, helping you to encourage additional sales.
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4. Spell-correction: Don’t risk lost sales due to incorrect spelling or mis-typed searches. Instead, implement a fail safe technology that catches any incorrect term and ensures that strong, full and relevant search results are displayed to your customers in all circumstances.
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5. Intelligent Navigation: Help your customers find what they are looking for in the most efficient way possible. Intelligent navigation allows your customers to drill-down into options within browse, search and refinement stages in the easiest way possible. You can set and manipulate the options, from category and brand to price, colour, size, newness and more.
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6. Get Mobile: More and more people are conducting their online shopping from mobile devices and / or tablets. It’s more important now than ever to get ahead of the curve with an adaptable, quick and cost effective way to extend your online presence and pick up on the rapidly expanding mobile shopping audience.
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7. Advanced Search: Why put up with inefficient search on your site? Ensure that your search connects customers to the right products quickly and accurately to increase customer satisfaction, click-through rates and conversions.
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8. Enhance your third party advertising: Extend your online reach in an economically viable way with tech savvy display advertising that brings your site and purchasing options directly to new audiences, channelling them directly to buy.
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9. A healthy balance: Sometimes priorities change when it comes to promoting certain products – whether you’re dealing with a new arrival or looking to increase margins, run a sale or manage stock levels. Locayta’s Balance Factor®  technology enables ultimate adaptability where you can quickly change your metrics and the way in which your site responds and places your products.
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10. Keep control: Juggling every element of your online merchandising with different service providers can be a task in itself.  Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® is unique in being able to offer everything you need in one place making it the most time effective and economially viable option.
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eCommerce and the emerging market success story

Emerging market eCommerce is booming and there are logical reasons for it. An underdeveloped high street infrastructure in some areas of Asia and Eastern Europe is driving shoppers online to find what they really want. In India online retailing is expected to rocket from US$10 billion to up to US$ 260 million in the next 12 to 15 years. Meanwhile, Russia saw a 29% increase in online turnover in 2011 alone. In fact, this high rate of growth adds up to a surprisingly low online penetration rate (just 10% in India and 43% in Russia). That means there’s plenty of scope to break into emerging markets for canny eCommerce entrepreneurs. Fashion accounts for a meaty proportion of transactions, but your technology needs to be geared up to maximise the opportunity. Tesco Clothing and Superdry, know their international markets well and can testify to Locayta Freestyle Merchandising‘s® ability to deliver superior performance on the global stage.

Translating eCommerce to Eastern Europe with Tesco Clothing

After launching it’s value clothing range in 2006 Tesco Clothing quickly expanded to 10 global markets and achieved the market leading share across Eastern Europe last year. For Change Manager Mark Wakely a key win has been the ability to cross-sell and up-sell on a multi-lingual basis via Locayta Product Recommendations. “Until we launched with Locayta our systems just couldn’t achieve what we needed to do” Mark told us. “The ability to control product and accessory recommendations makes sure that customers have fast, convenient access to the outfit they seek, ultimately increasing conversion rates and order values”. Because Locayta is fully equipped to translate to an international setting it can easily handle the full search and merchandisingset across Tesco’s markets, equipping them to compete with other global and local providers and continue their fashion eCommerce success.

Matching local services with Superdry

For Superdry, predominant in Asia as well as Europe and North America, the ability to translate search and merchandising functionality to local economies is essential as Head of eCommerce Chris Griffin confirms. “Locayta delivers the same high grade performance regardless of which country the site is operating in. The ability to maintain superior performance on a totally multi-lingual basis has generated phenomenal, if not unprecedented success for us. Our international e-commerce strategy has experienced four figure growth.” Cross-platform compatibility to cope with payment challenges

A key feature of emerging market eCommerce has been the low level of credit card payments online. However World Pay’s recent report on alternative payments shows that online retailing is quickly catching up. AP is used in 87% of Russian and 60% of Indian online transactions respectively. If you’re going to compete you need to be set up to deliver inventive AP strategies.

That’s why Locayta partners with the major platform providers who have the capacity to develop and integrate inventive payment solutions into your system. They include Magento, Venda and Demandware to name just a few. Freestyle Merchandising is developed to be one hundred percent compatible with these industry favourite platforms, giving you the ability to deliver slick visual merchandising, intelligent product recommendations and responsive search as well as the payment options customers want.

Want to know more? We’re here to grow your online business and our the proof is in our clients’ success. Just get in touch today and we’ll run you through the full possibilities.

Read more:

eCommerce without the plastic FT.com, May 2012

World Pay alternative payments report World Pay, May 2012

The sizzling Indian eCommerce industry – how did we get here and what’s next? Boston.com, March 2012

Russian eCommerce turnover up 29% in 2011 Russiansearchtips.com, April 2012

As one of the UK’s undisputed leaders in innovative, design-led stationery, cards and gift-wrap, Paperchase have been around for over 40 years and are now firmly established as the top destination for customers looking for new and different stationary merchandise.

With this in mind, Paperchase turned to Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® to assist them in taking their offline success online, with the optimisation of their transactional website.

What do we do for them?

Achieving a streamlined online shopping experience is no mean feat given the diverse array of products on offer from Paperchase. Since commencing work with Locayta back in December 2011, Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® has introduced Product Recommendations as well as Intelligent Navigation to the Paperchase online platform.

Intelligent Navigation:

In order to deliver search results quickly and conveniently to the Paperchase customer, Locayta implemented their Intelligent Navigation technology. This allows Paperchase to offer premium search services to their customers with ease. Paperchase customers can now refine their search to their own specific requests, whether it be price, size, colour, popularity or newness, directing them straight to the products they want and need. Also, searches within the Paperchase site are now subject to Locayta Search® spell-correction technology, which catches any mis-spellings or mis-typings keyed into their eCommerce site and ensures that strong, full and relevant search results are displayed to their customers in all circumstances. These features serve to substantially increase conversion rates as well as average order values for Paperchase.

Locayta Product Recommendations:

Locayta Product Recommendations have been implemented to place tailored and relevant suggested products to the Paperchase customer. Locayta Product Recommendations are calculated using behavioural algorithms from the collective intelligence from the Paperchase site, plus data on their users’ past and present behaviour. Locayta ensures that Paperchase‘s product recommendations are subject to dynamic updates based on day-to-day selections and search behaviour within their site. Product Recommendations grow sales revenue by up to 45% and influence 8 out of 10 shoppers to make an extra purchase. Implementing this technology for Paperchase has  increased their average order values and average revenue per visit.

Adrian Spence, Head of Ecommerce at Paperchase, points out the benefits from his experience of using Locayta Freestyle Merchandising®,

“Our products are all about driving newness and offering fresh collections,” he explains. “At Paperchase we’re now thinking more strategically about product recommendations in order to increase AOV [Average Order Value]. The ability to automate this process [with Locayta] has saved us huge amounts of time. The search and category functions give us complete flexibility to set and change parameters. For us, a focus on prioritising new stock combined with best sellers is generating beneficial results.”.

How do I  integrate these features within my own retail site?

Locayta Product Recommendations and Intelligent Navigation  are part of a full Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® package, which has been seen to increase sales across the web by between 15% and 30%. To see these features in action and find out more on Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® services as a whole, visit www.locayta.com today.

Over the past few months, we’ve started a step by step series looking at specific elements of Locayta Freestyle Merchandising®, and this is the latest instalment. We’ll be considering the overall benefits, implications and practicality of implementation of Locayta Product Sequencing for online retailers.

Locayta Product Sequencing: What is it?

Locayta Product Sequencing allows you to determine the exact sequencing of products on your category pages and in search results within your online platform. As an online retailer, you’ll know that the presentation of products on your site is of utmost importance. Locayta Product Sequencing technology brings in-store visual merchandising to your online platform, with advanced delivery and a unique element of control.

Locayta Product Sequencing provides the ability to determine the order in which your products are displayed whether it be by stock levels, price, newness, popularity or margin to name just a few. The technology works using a uniquely developed feature produced by the in-house team at Locayta called  Locayta Balance Factor®. This allows you to put business rules in place and weight their importance, influencing your product sequencing according to rules pre-determined by you.

Once the rules have been set, Locayta Balance Factor® automatically updates the product sequencing according to the guidelines in place. This means that although, for example, stock levels and popularity are both very subject to change at any moment, the technology will respond dynamically to those changes and adapt your sequencing preferences. In addition to this, Locayta Product Sequencing allows you to manually manipulate your product displays should this be necessary. All of this is actioned through Locayta’s simple Control Panel.

The eCommerce benefits: What can you gain?

For businesses looking to translate their offer to the internet, choosing the right ecommerce platform can be overwhelming. Forrester research have just published their guide to 30 of the leading ecommerce platforms. The report cites three major trends companies are picking up on to get online. These are the popularity of end to end service, the predominance of open source platforms and the importance of cloud hosting for convenient ecommerce solutions.

Ecommerce platforms: where’s the return?

If you’re choosing an ecommerce platform you’ll be looking carefully at services and functionality – but have you also measured and defined your ROI on your chosen system? One proven way to enhance revenue is by choosing Locayta as an opt in. Our unique technology, Freestyle Merchandising® equips you to enhance your basic platform by implementing powerful search, merchandising and recommendation functionality.

Increasing sales by up to 19% for premium brands including boohoo.com, Tesco Clothing and Superdry, Locayta’s Software as a Service technology provides a convenient cost-effective ecommerce win that plugs straight into your own ecommerce platform without any changes to your base model.

Why are Locayta’s partnerships important to my ecommerce success?

If you’ve chosen one of the major platforms to run your ecommerce system (for example Magento, Demandware or Venda) then Locayta Freestyle Merchandising adds to the mix by transforming your site’s delivery of stimulating visual merchandising, real time product recommendations and user responsive search. The key here is our proven ability to increase ROI by driving conversion rates, cross-sells and average order values.

By establishing official partnerships with other leading players in ecommerce, we can provide accessible solutions that sit on top of your main platform and specifically develop your performance in capturing, converting and retaining customers. You have the confidence of knowing that our systems are fully compatible with and approved by some of the most popular ecommerce providers on the market.

Because Locayta Freestyle Merchandising can be custom tailored to your needs, you can mix and match the services you need to focus your business strategy. These include Balance Factor®, a unique technology that allows product placement to respond to your own merchandising priorities as well as user behaviour, plus Locayta Shop Window and Locayta M-Commerce, convenient and cost-effective tools enabling you to promote a multi-channel presence via third party websites and mobiles.

Which ecommerce platforms does Locayta partner with?

Freestyle Merchandising, with its capacity to control search, visual merchandising and product recommendations via one simple dashboard, is totally configurable with a number of leading ecommerce systems. These include Magento, Venda and Demandware as well as Powa, X.Commerce and Bronto.

Whichever of these you choose, our clients confirm that plugging Locayta in is more than just an add-on. It’s a powerful search and merchandising toolkit with a proven ROI that consistently and significantly improves online retailing results.

For Superdry the technology has “achieved 4 figure growth internationally” (Head of Ecommerce Chris Griffin). For Prezzybox, conversions rates “increased overnight” when they started to use Locayta (CEO Zak Edwards). Whilst for Tesco Clothing the system has “ultimately increased conversion rates and average order values” (Change Manager Mark Wakely).

Have we got your attention? To see what our clients say or find out more about our partners just go to www.locayta.com. We’re standing by to start you on your journey to ecommerce success!

Read more:

SMB eCommerce solutions 2012 Forrester Research May 2012

Why so many small businesses still don’t have a website Wix Learning Centre, May 2012

Locayta Shop Window: What is it?

Locayta Shop Window is a click-to-buy shopping widget that can be deployed on third party external sites across the web in a cost efficient and easy manner. Locayta Shop Window gives the potential to extend your online reach substantially in an economically viable way.

If you use any display advertising across other online platforms such as blogs, portals, social networking or content sites, implementing Locayta Shop Window serves as an efficient way of channelling those audiences directly to buy. In essence, it cuts out the middle man by bringing your site and purchasing options directly to additional shoppers.

Using an innovative web service developed in house by Locayta which stores, indexes and caches your product data, Locayta Shop Window is activated by a simple click or mouse-over action on your image, video or text advertising. The user action then initiates a query to the web service containing your product data, passing any changes on to your main eCommerce system. Within the widget, users can browse and search your product catalogue, view product detail pages, add or remove items to their wish list, and add or remove items from their shopping basket. At the point of purchase, users are sent directly to the checkout on your main eCommerce site.

The eCommerce benefits: What can you gain?

What do we do for them?

Given the diverse array of gifts, memorabilia, membership and ticketing options the British Museum Company offers, providing a streamlined online shopping experience is a complicated task. To serve their recent site relaunch, Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® has introduced enhanced product recommendation capabilities across the site.

Locayta Product Recommendations are an essential marketing strategy for online retailers. Locayta helps the British Museum Company provide tailored and relevant product recommendations to their customers. Using behavioural algorithms, Locayta Product Recommendations are calculated from the collective intelligence of the British Museum Company‘s site, plus data on their users’ past and present behaviour.

[Image:renjith krishnan]

Why is this beneficial?

It’s a well known fact that 80% of online purchases are affected by product recommendations. Implementing this technology has served to increase conversion rates and average order values as well as average revenue per visit. Locayta‘s technology also allows Product Recommendations to be customised to match certain business objectives, giving The British Museum Company increased business management control.

[Image:Master isolated images]

Ecommerce Manager at British Museum Company, Fabrice Druelle is impressed with Locayta’s offering…

“Locayta offered us a tool we simply couldn’t find elsewhere. In the past we were under using the platform, but now we are planning to develop the system’s capabilities as part of our future plans. We have re-skinned our site to enhance the use of product recommendations and give visitors a whole new look and feel with maximised product placement and cross-selling potential. We’re gearing up to tap into the system’s true potential and we hope to roll out the full merchandising and search platform in the new fiscal year. We have truly engaged with Locayta. We enjoy the personal relationship as well as the power of the technology. It’s an exciting time.”

How do I  integrate product recommendations within my retail site?

As part of the full Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® package, Locayta Product Recommendations have increased sales across the web by up to 19%  for clients, including Tesco, boohoo.com and Paperchase. To see Locayta Product Recommendations in action and find out more on Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® services as a whole, visit www.locayta.com today.

There’s no reason though that the damp squib of April’s weather – and indeed other factors affecting the economy – should mean slow revenue. In the same month Sainsburys has reported a growth in overall sales, with ecommerce sales accounting for 20% of their 16.6% overall market share. Meanwhile the US has seen ecommerce revenue for the first quarter up by 17% on 2011, according to new figures from ComScore.

With that in mind, here are some tips to make the most of downpoints in the year and ensure conversions and purchases continue to grow. They’ve worked for our clients including boohoo.com, Tesco Clothing and Superdry – all of whom have reported consistent revenue growth from adopting these tactics.

Gear customers up to buy with clever merchandising opportunities

Internet Retailing’s article quotes Andrew Stewart, Marketing Director at Play.com. “The weather can have a huge effect on retailers” he says. “One way retailers can negate the effect of the weather is to ensure they have a genuine multichannel approach to retailing. Savvy retailers could even use this to their advantage, with online deals on items like coats and macs to help them shift winter stock.”

Adapting deals and offers to fit the weather is a great strategy – as is our strategy for seasonal and occasion led merchandising covered in a previous blog. But even today many online retailers find this kind of immediate response difficult to deliver via cumbersome manual merchandising platforms.

Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® can liberate your ability to respond instantly to market conditions. A choice of manual or automated opt-in means that merchandising opportunities can be controlled and adjusted at the touch of a button.

What’s more, Balance Factor® enables you to tell the system which products you need to push most urgently – so if you’re planning a special offer on umbrellas or coats to match the bad weather Balance Factor ensures those results are optimised. Customers immediately see the offers you’re looking to push, with a potentially dramatic impact on sales.

Enhance the checkout experience

Recommendations are vitally important to conversions as we all know. Locayta Product Recommendations enable you to control how and when products are suggested at any point across your site – and particularly when shoppers view their baskets. Like all of Locayta’s technology, product recommendations are programmed to balance your users’ individual search preferences with your own stock and profitability priorities.

Another word of advice: make sure you’re up to speed with shipping and delivery costs. Time and again we’re seeing evidence that high shipping costs are closely connected with cart abandonment. It’s no wonder that the likes of Sainsburys and Tesco are investing in click and collect campaigns. If you don’t have the facility to deliver this, at the very least ensure that your shipping costs are transparent and reasonable to stay competitive.

Get smart: Get multichannel

Multi-channel is a must these days. If you’re not geared up to deliver you can only expect to disappoint. Check out Locayta Shop Window – a shopping widget that’s easily deployed on third party sites including blogs, social networks, and partner sites. Shoppers can search and select just as they would on your site. When they’re ready to purchase they are then transferred to your main commerce site to complete the transaction.

Add to this Locayta Mcommerce, a powerful click to buy ipad app, and you have some quick, cost effective solutions to make sure you’re meeting your customers’ demand for always on, convenient service come rain or shine.

If you’d like to know more about how Locayta can help you increase conversion rates, up your average order values and grow a healthy return, contact us today for a free demo or to discuss your requirements in more detail.

Read more:

Online sales grow by 9% on wettest April since records began Internet Retailing May 2012

eCommerce aids Sainsburys sales growth Shopsafe, May 2012

Shift to eCommerce channels accelerating SmartPlanet May 2012

The Statistics; mobile commerce is booming

UK mobile commerce is growing. Fact. According to Interactive Media in Retail Group, sales via mobile devices were up 254% for March 2012 compared to March 2011. With a large percentage of online transactions now being made from mobile devices, it’s essential to focus your efforts in this area.

There is, however, room for improvement when it comes to the conversion rates on mobile shopping. Mobile conversion rates have seen a small rise, doubling from 0.7% in March 2011 to 1.4% for March this year, but this still pales in comparison to the conversion rate for traditional eCommerce which is on average 4.13%. Conversion rates for mobile shopping is comparatively low because many retail site platforms are not optimised for use on a mobile device.

The Solution; Locayta M-Commerce

Locayta M-Commerce is a click-to-buy iPhone shopping application that you can deploy as a quick and cost effective way to extend your online presence and pick up on the vastly growing mobile shopping audience. With Locayta M-Commerce, your customers can browse and search your product catalogue, as well as view your product detail pages, add items to a wish-list and add or remove items to a checkout basket all from their mobile device.

Locayta M-Commerce works using an innovative web-service developed in-house by Locayta. It stores and indexes the product data independently from, and requiring no changes to, your eCommerce site. The best news is, it’s really easy to implement and supports the full merchandising features of Locayta Freestyle Merchandising®, including intelligent site search, product recommendations and visual merchandising.

Want more? The next steps…

Locayta M-Commerce is one of many new releases being developed by Locayta as part of their Freestyle Merchandising® platform which is currently optimising sales for the likes of boohoo.com, Tesco and Superdry. If you’re interested in a superior mobile commerce solution for your retail site, visit www.locayta.com for more information and a FREE DEMO.

Locayta Search® spell-correction: What is it?

Locayta Search® spell-correction technology catches any mis-spellings or mis-typings keyed into your eCommerce site and ensures that strong, full and relevant search results are displayed to your customers in all circumstances.

Using two different algorithms, trigram analysis and edit-distance, the technology analyses the search terms entered by your customers, detects any errors and matches them most closely with items in your product data. Trigram analysis divides words into sections and spins them around enhancing possible word matches. This works closely with Edit-distance, which measures the extent to which words have been mis-spelled. The two elements together create a very powerful and dynamic spell-correction mechanism.

Locayta Search® spell-correction is unique compared to traditional technologies used to save lost sales through mis-spelt search terms. These normally involve basic dictionary look-ups where terms are cross-referenced with words in an English Language Dictionary. This is problematic in many ways; brand names and specialised terms won’t always appear and  time consuming manual maintenance and updating is required. In addition, dictionary look-ups do not allow for mistakes made at the start of the word, but only deal with errors in the middle and the end. Locayta Search® spell-correction is based upon what is in your product index rather than a pre-determined dictionary and therefore allows for mistakes to be made in the entire word.