Cambridge, Mass., June 23, 2003 - Endeca, the only provider of Guided Navigation and advanced search solutions, today announced that eBags, the world's largest online retailer of luggage, handbags, backpacks, and travel accessories for all lifestyles, has chosen Endeca InFront with Guided Navigation to enhance the search and navigation capabilities of its award winning online site. With Endeca InFront and Guided Navigation, eBags will be able to provide its customers with a site that eclipses traditional online search, leading to overall increased customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates.
eBags' innovative online catalog helps shoppers accomplish goals not possible offline. These include the ability to find computer bags that fit specific laptops and the ability to find carry-ons that fit certain airline size requirements. eBags also enables shoppers to search more than 180 brands and over 8,000 bags and accessories.
What eBags wanted, was a better way for shoppers to be able to search and navigate through its vast and detailed offerings with greater ease - ensuring more purchases and fewer abandoned shopping carts. The company turned to Endeca with Guided Navigation to enable that transformation. Specifically, Endeca InFront's unique merchandising capabilities will be the critical component in leading customers to find the specific products they are looking for and therefore increasing online conversion rates for eBags. In just one week, eBags saw an increase of 7.5% in its conversion rates using Endeca - especially significant for an already highly recognized Web site.
"At eBags we know our growth has been, and will continue to be, directly linked to enhancing our customers' success in finding what they are looking for," said Mike Frazzini, Vice President of Technology and Operations for eBags. "After evaluating many vendors, we selected Endeca because its unique Guided Navigation and dynamic merchandising capabilities, specifically addressed our goal for improving overall customer experience. Endeca InFront will provide a personalized shopping experience for our customers. This will enable us to maximize our ability to get the right products in front of the right shoppers - helping to increase overall core metrics and better guarantee satisfaction."
Endeca InFront will also provide eBags with contextual, dynamic merchandising, allowing eBags to gain better insight and improve their inventory management. The new merchandising capability will encourage repeat visits and longer - more valuable - session times each visit.
"eBags had an impressive site even before implementing Endeca. But they were not satisfied until they knew they were giving their customers the most precise and un-compromised experience possible," said Steve Papa, CEO and founder of Endeca. "Our technology will allow them to achieve and surpass that goal - resulting not only in more loyal customers, but in an even more competitive bottom-line."
Endeca's Guided Navigation with advanced search solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors including retail, financial services, manufacturing, information publishing and business-to-business with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content, catalog and enterprise information access and retrieval. Endeca solutions are built on innovative technology that makes it possible for the first time to offer Guided Navigation and advanced search on structured and unstructured information with high performance, and low total cost of ownership, even at massive scale.
Endeca ProFind eclipses conventional "query and response" approaches to enterprise 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, Endeca ProFind with Guided Navigation provides an intuitive interaction model that eliminates all irrelevant information, and dynamically guides users with only relevant and valid choices.
About Endeca
Endeca offers innovative advanced search and Guided Navigation 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, Putnam Investments, and Arrow Electronics. 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 search results every time. 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. Endeca is an IBM Advanced Business Partner. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About eBags
eBags.com is the world's leading online provider of bags and accessories for all lifestyles. With 150 brands and more than 4,000 items, eBags.com has sold over 1.4 million bags since launching March 1999. From luggage and backpacks to computer cases and handbags, eBags.com carries a full line of bags and accessories from well-known brands including Samsonite, JanSport, Liz Claiborne, and Camelbak. eBags.com was named "Web site of the Year" by Catalog Age magazine and "Email Marketer of the Year" by ClickZ/MessageMedia. eBags.com is funded by Benchmark Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Amerindo. Additional information can be found at www.ebags.com.