CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 9, 2002 - Endeca, the only provider of Guided Navigation solutions, today announced that ChristianBook.com and Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSX: IDG) have chosen Endeca InFront for Guided Navigation, search and dynamic merchandising on their online stores. Endeca InFront’s Guided Navigation functionality will give ChristianBook.com and Indigo customers the ability to easily browse through the millions of products available on their sites to find the precise items they’re looking for and to discover items they didn’t already know existed -- leading to increased sales, higher customer satisfaction, improved customer loyalty, and higher conversion rates. ChristianBook.com, Indigo and Barnes&Noble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN), are now among the online book and specialty goods retailers to benefit from the power of Guided Navigation, further demonstrating Endeca’s leadership in the market.
ChristianBook.com, the leading distributor of Christian books, bibles, music, videos, games and giftware, chose Endeca InFront to make it easy for shoppers to browse through its multiple-source online catalog and to quickly narrow down searches to efficiently find the products they’re looking for. The new application, which ChristianBook.com calls EasyFind, is now live. After looking closely at the way its customers shopped, ChristianBook.com realized that the majority of users were typing single word queries. This would often result in long lists of products, and customers were left with few options on how to refine their searches.
"Endeca’s Guided Navigation offers the best of both worlds. Our customers can continue to shop the way they feel most comfortable, but now with Endeca, they can easily navigate and explore a list of results to find the item they want and make a purchase," said Mark Pepin, IT manager Web development for ChristianBook.com. "Our team was able to rapidly deploy Endeca -- we were up and running in a few short weeks. We were also impressed with Endeca’s ability to easily scale to meet our needs for future growth. What’s been most exciting is that we’re already seeing lift in our browser to buyer conversion rates."
Indigo, Canada’s largest retailer for books, music and videos, turned to Endeca for a new, enhanced, online shopping experience for its customers. "Endeca InFront offers an integrated solution with search, Guided Navigation and merchandising -- something we hadn’t seen from other vendors," said Tracy Nesdoly, vice president communications and product development for Indigo. "We’ll now be able to provide our customers with an incredibly effective and efficient way to explore our site, discover new items and make purchases. At the same time, Endeca’s merchandising technology empowers us to offer specific promotional products based on a customer’s search path." Indigo’s new Guided Navigation solution is scheduled to go live to the public in Fall 2002.
Guided Navigation from Endeca eclipses conventional "query and response" approaches to search, which place the burden on users to be familiar with the data set, have an idea of what to look for and how to describe the item, and finally to structure a query in a way the system will understand. In contrast, Guided Navigation provides an intuitive interaction model that eliminates all irrelevant information, and dynamically guides customers with only relevant and valid product choices.
"Increasingly, online retailers are searching for creative and innovative ways to make their customers’ shopping experiences more productive. With the flexibility of Guided Navigation, retailers can dynamically create unique shopping experiences or ‘stores’ for each of their customers, based on the customer’s preferences -- making the visit to the site much more satisfying and efficient," said Steve Papa, CEO and founder of Endeca. "We’re pleased that leading online bookstores like ChristianBook.com, Indigo and Barnes&Noble.com have selected Endeca in order to offer their customers a much better and more productive shopping experience."
Endeca solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors like retail, financial services and business-to-business with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content and catalog management as well as enterprise information access and retrieval.
About Endeca
Endeca offers innovative Guided NavigationSM information delivery solutions for companies who need to integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve the business problems associated with information overload. Endeca technology is already at work for leading retail, financial services and business-to-business companies like Barnes & Noble.com, Fidelity Investments, Eddie Bauer, Spiegel, Tower Records, Arrow Electronics, Putnam Investments and IHS Engineering. Endeca solutions empower users to explore and discover relevant relationships in data and find accurate and precise results with unprecedented speed. Patent-pending algorithms provide a scalable, Web-based infrastructure for data exploration, leading to highly relevant and meaningful results every time, and this technology can be applied across a wide-range of enterprise and customer applications including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, catalogs, directories, search and portal integration. Endeca is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Ampersand Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About ChristianBook.com
ChristianBook.com, Inc. the online home of Christian Book Distributors, Inc. (CBD) is the country’s leading direct-mail and e-commerce provider of Christian books, music, videos and gifts to Christian consumers. Founded in 1978, the company specializes in offering a large selection of products at reduced prices. With 20 years experience, CBD has a proven reputation for aggressive prices, convenient ordering and fast shipping.
About Indigo Books & Music Inc.
Indigo is a Canadian company and the largest book retailer in Canada, operating bookstores in all provinces under the names Indigo Books Music & more, Chapters, Coles, SmithBooks, and World’s Biggest Bookstore. Indigo operates www.chapters.indigo.ca, an online retailer of books, videos and DVDs.
Indigo is a publicly traded company, listed on the TSX under the stock symbol IDG. To learn more about Indigo, please visit the About Our Company section of chapters.indigo.ca .