Cambridge, Mass., September 24, 2003 - Endeca, the only provider of Endeca Search and Guided Navigation solutions, today announced at the 2003 Shop.org Annual Summit in New York City, the addition of 14 new Endeca InFront customers to its installed base of clients, confirming the market leadership predicted by the top industry analysts for Endeca in the e-commerce and online catalog search market. Leading e-commerce companies in both the B2C and B2B segments have chosen Endeca InFront with Guided Navigation to provide unparalleled improvement in the online search experience they offer their online consumers.
Newly signed Endeca InFront customers include Abebooks, the largest online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books; collectiblestoday.com, the web marketing arm of the leading International provider of limited-edition collectibles; Diamond.com, the leading online retailer for the highest quality GIA graded diamonds and fine jewelry; and Orvis, the premiere outfitter of the distinctive country lifestyle and sporting traditions since 1856; as well as, Ashford.com, Batteries.com, Book Depot, Drs. Foster & Smith, Finish Line, Infinity Resources, Inc., Interstate Batteries, Sierra Trading Post, Inc., Walter Drake, and World of Watches.com. All of these new customers recognize that improving metrics like conversion rate, basket size, and average sale are dependent on users who can find what they’re looking for and discover new products and impulse buys along the way.
Endeca Search and Guided Navigation guarantee customers find what they need without being frustrated by endless lists of millions of results or dead-ends with no help on what to do next. Endeca Search and Guided Navigation present site visitors with only relevant and valid choices for discovering what they are looking for. Guided Navigation is also especially powerful at introducing buyers to relevant items they did not know exist. Only Endeca InFront offers dynamic merchandising, which promotes items of interest based on how a user is searching, and the new Business and Developer Studios, which put site management and updating directly into the hands of business users and developers who need to quickly make additions and changes based on new business information, competitive demands, or user trends.
According to Paul Sonderegger of Forrester Research in his June 2003 report titled, The Future of Enterprise Search, he states a simple list of links is not good enough for the next generation of search results. Instead, search solutions need to help users understand what they have found by grouping related pages, allowing the user to refine the search by applicable filters, or explicitly depicting the relationships between returned items.
The recent wave of new customer acquisitions comes as current customers report outstanding results flowing from their Endeca deployments. 1-800-Flowers reported a double-digit improvement in conversion rates and a 20% increase in successful searches since deploying Endeca; high-end specialty retailer Brookstone experienced an early ROI in improved conversion rates; and eBags experienced a 7.5 percent increase in conversion rates after just one week using Endeca InFront.
Endeca brings together the best in next generation search combined with Guided Navigation for results that are delivered in-context and provides users with all the best, most relevant next step options for refinement. This approach ultimately leads to the products and/or information users’ desire, and it is this functionality catalog and commerce customers gravitate toward when evaluating and choosing Endeca InFront.
Finish Line, Inc., a leading athletic retailer specializing in brand name footwear, apparel and accessories chose Endeca InFront after a competitive evaluation to find the best vendor to improve the overall shopping experience and search functionality on their site. "Endeca's Guided Navigation will facilitate the easy and manageable site search we need to keep ahead of our customer expectations," said Kent Zimmerman, director of e-commerce for Finish Line, Inc. "With Endeca InFront, we selected a powerful integrated search and navigation solution with features that will provide our customers with better search and more comprehensive refinement options, while providing a wealth of new opportunities for dynamic merchandising of our extensive online catalog. This new functionality will go a long way to improving our overall conversion rate and customer satisfaction."
Endeca InFront customers are able to use the power of Endeca Search and Guided Navigation to provide customized search and deploy dynamic merchandising to highlight premium products that encourage more purchases. And Endeca InFront allows retailers, suppliers and distributors to further cultivate loyalty and satisfaction with their customers through search and purchase success, while at the same time allowing them to customize and refine their marketing and selling processes.
"We are extremely pleased with the swift pace of our new customer acquisition and the rapid market acceptance of Endeca InFront. This momentum directly reflects the market need for improved ways of finding products in online catalogs and directories, and proves the intuitive value of our search technology featuring Guided Navigation as the best way help users find what they are looking for," said Jim Baum, president and COO of Endeca. "Our ability to execute and deliver solutions that provide almost immediate customer value goes a long way in promoting the appeal of our offering and our ability to help our customers achieve their online and multi-channel business goals."
Endeca Search and Guided Navigation solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors including retail, financial services, manufacturing, information publishing and business-to-business with search 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, 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 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.