Cambridge, Mass., September 8, 2003 - Endeca, the only provider of Guided Navigation and advanced search solutions, today announced that KBtoys.com has chosen Endeca InFront with Guided Navigation and dynamic merchandising to enhance the search and navigation capabilities of its two popular toy sites, KBtoys.comTM (www.kbtoys.com) and eToys® (www.etoys.com). With Endeca InFront, KBtoys.com will provide its customers with a more precise search feature. Plus, Endeca technology allows the e-tailer to present special products and offers directly related to the customer’s search.
KBtoys.com wanted to give its customers tools to tailor their searches and help them navigate through the extensive toy and video game brands, categories and characters featured on KBtoys.com and eToys. In addition, KBtoys.com wanted to continue offering specialty shops dedicated to the most popular toy characters and brands, like Barbie® and LeapFrogTM. Endeca’s search, Guided Navigation and dynamic merchandising offer the flexibility, functionality and scalability that allow KBtoys.com to fulfill those business objectives.
Specifically, Endeca InFront will create a dramatically enhanced user search experience, helping KBtoys.com and eToys customers find exactly what they want. Coupled with the dynamic merchandising capabilities, KBtoys.com expects to maximize its conversion rates by giving its customers the best possible shopping experience.
"Because we offer thousands of toys in our online store, our customers need the most efficient search engine available. We know customers have a high probability of purchasing an item if they can find it quickly and easily," said KBtoys.com Chief Operating Officer Michael J. Wagner, "Our search engine was good, but we wanted the best. Endeca InFront was the solution that integrated search, navigation and merchandising functionality in one package."
Endeca InFront will provide KBtoys.com the capability to increase average order sizes through merchandising of related items based on navigation paths selected by the customer. Customers will be presented with promotional items relevant to their search, and the option to further refine their searches to discover sometimes overlooked merchandise.
"Guided Navigation is the perfect solution for creating customized 'boutiques or stores' of related merchandise and provides a win-win situation for KBtoys.com and its customers," said Jim Baum, president and COO of Endeca. "InFront will actively help toy and video game shoppers find what they are looking for, while simultaneously helping them to discover new products more effectively."
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.
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, Eddie Bauer, 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 and is a preferred provider of IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Group. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About KBtoys.com
Denver-based KB Online Holdings, LLC owns and operates two of the most popular online toy sites. KBtoys.com™ (www.kbtoys.com) offers thousands and thousands of the hottest toys and must-have video games. eToys® (www.etoys.com) features an incredible selection of popular toys and video games, plus unique learning and specialty toys. KB Online Holdings, LLC is the online subsidiary of Massachusetts-based KB Toys, Inc., the nation’s largest combined mall-based and online specialty toy retailer.