CAMBRIDGE, Mass., November 15, 2004 -- Endeca, the leading provider of advanced search and Guided NavigationSM solutions, today announced that its Endeca InFront® search, navigation, and merchandising solution has been added to Walmart.com (www.walmart.com).
Endeca InFront offers customers the most accurate and satisfying search experience for online shopping today. It combines next-generation search with Guided Navigation -- a patent-pending technology that allows customers to quickly and easily find results and choose the most relevant and desirable products and information. For example, a search at Walmart.com for "Star Wars" returns 900 results, topped by three predefined best sellers and accompanied by refinement options that break those results down by department or product category: electronics, toys, video games, books, movies, music, brands and price range. By selecting the "Building Sets & Models" option, the customer can narrow results from 900 to seven products in a single click of the mouse.
A September 2004 report on retail site search by independent research firm, JupiterResearch, cited that "just 55 percent of the top online retailers offer the ability to refine search results by brand, price, and style -- a search capability that consumers say they use more than any other."
Adding advanced search functionality to retail Web sites has been proven by industry experts to dramatically improve the customer's online shopping experience while benefiting e-tailers through boosts in conversion rates and sales revenues. According to the June 2004 State of Retailing Online 7.0 report by Forrester Research and Shop.org (the National Retail Federation's association of online retailers), 71 percent of online retailers listed overhauling site search among their top tactics for improving conversion rates, with 96 percent of those retailers reporting those efforts as effective or very effective.
"Endeca has quickly become the solution of choice for the world's most successful retailers by providing immediate-proven ROI, dramatically-improved conversion rates, and increased average sale size as well as lower total cost of ownership," says Jim Baum, president and COO of Endeca. "Endeca has combined industry best practices for commerce search, navigation, and merchandising with an unparalleled knowledge of mass retailing to create a highly-rewarding shopping experience for each and every customer -- on the most demanding and heavily trafficked online storefronts."
The market-leading e-commerce and multi-channel search solution, Endeca InFront, powers fully-integrated search, navigation, and merchandising on more than 125 leading business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce sites. More of the top 100 internet retailer sites (as measured by web-only sales in 2003) use Endeca solutions than the next five competing solutions combined.
About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Search and Guided Navigation solutions help organizations to integrate, discover, and navigate data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of enterprises including retailers (Barnes & Noble, CompUSA, 1-800-Flowers, and BMG Music); finance (Putnam Investments, MFS Investments, and Quick & Reilly); business-to-business (IBM, Arrow Electronics and CDW); content delivery (World Book and Martindale-Hubble) and government (CIA and the Library of Congress). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More info: info@endeca.com.