Vermont Teddy Bear Company Tailors the Shopping Experience to Customer Needs to Drive Greater Sales with Site Search Solutions from SLI Systems

During Valentine’s Day and Throughout the Year, SLI Increases Traffic and Enables Vermont Teddy Bear Co. to Make More Targeted Merchandising Decisions for Its Three Leading Sites

CUPERTINO, CA – February 12, 2008 – Teddy bears, pajamas and flowers, oh my!  Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to purchase these specialty items, and with the help of SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand search services for Internet and e-commerce sites, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. is making it easier for consumers to do just that.

The parent company to Vermont Teddy Bear (www.vermontteddybear.com), Pajama Gram (www.pajamagram.com) and Calyx Flowers (www.calyxflowers.com) is not only generating more traffic with SLI’s search solutions, but is also now able to better tailor the ecommerce experience specific to shoppers needs and better merchandise its products, resulting in higher sales and more satisfied customers.  Since deploying SLI Systems' Learning Search hosted site search and Site Champion user-generated search engine optimization offerings, Vermont Teddy Bear has seen an increase in traffic to all three of its sites, and has significantly improved customer service by making it easier for shoppers to find the exact products they’re looking for, whether those products are teddy bears, personalized pajamas or unique floral arrangements. The search improvements are expected to have a positive impact on business this Valentine’s Day and beyond, according to ecommerce manager, Bill Cronin.

“Our previous text-based search solution was not producing results that were useful to our customers,” said Cronin.  “For instance, a search for ‘roses’ wasn’t picking up the numerous items with roses on the Calyx Flowers site, and our customers were complaining about the disconnects. From the moment we started working with SLI, our traffic increased while customer complaints decreased. The metrics SLI provides allow us to tailor our sites to customer needs by redesigning navigation and providing URLs for the searches that are most popular. And, SLI has helped us with merchandising decisions, which is critical during special occasions like Valentine’s Day. SLI has gone above and beyond what we expected from a site search solution.”

When Vermont Teddy Bear Co. realized the search solution that accompanied their ecommerce platform was not performing sufficiently, they looked to other online retailers for guidance and found SLI Systems was powering the site search on a number of the sites they admired, such as Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (www.greenmountaincoffee.com). After researching a couple of additional site search solutions on the market, including products from Endeca and Celebros, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. found SLI best suited its needs and thus implemented the hosted site search and SEO solutions on its Vermont Teddy Bear site. The company was so impressed with SLI’s results they decided to use SLI for two of their other sites - Pajama Gram and Calyx Flowers – soon thereafter.

In addition to the ability SLI’s Learning Search provides to ‘learn’ from past site search activity, SLI also enables its customers to determine the top search terms entered on a site. Using this information, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. is able to more effectively display its merchandise and create pages and URLs that will better guide shoppers to the products they’re seeking. For example, during the recent holidays, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. found that shoppers on its Pajama Gram site were searching a great deal for the term ‘personalized,’ but that the results displayed too many products for them to easily navigate. Because of the insight provided by SLI, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. was able to develop URL promotions and add a gallery of personalized pajama options, designated by gender, which allowed customers to narrow down their selection in just a few clicks.

“We know that disappointed Web shoppers will leave a site quickly and often won’t return again if they can’t find what they want within the first couple of minutes,” said Dr. Shaun Ryan, president and CEO of SLI Systems. “SLI is able to help online retailers truly tailor the shopping experience to customer needs, through a number of different methods, to not only ensure that customers aren’t lost, but to keep repeat customers coming back again and again. The fact that Vermont Teddy Bear Co. is using SLI solutions for three of its websites is a testament to the fact that our site search and SEO solutions really live up to their promise.” 

In addition to experiencing greater traffic volumes to all three of its sites, reduced customer complaints and the ability to better promote products based on customer search terms, Vermont Teddy Bear Co. was pleasantly surprised to learn that SLI could also serve as a guide to the types of merchandise it should be offering on its sites.

“We found that, on our Vermont Teddy Bear site, four of the top five searches were related to ‘bear outfits,’” said Cronin. “Until we had the SLI search data in hand, we didn’t know that there was such a large market for those types of products. So, we added a number of new bear outfits to our product line and used SLI to help guide visitors to those outfits, resulting in a noticeable increase in sales.”  

About Learning Search and Site Champion

Based on SLI’s patented “Learning Search” advanced analytics engine, the company’s hosted site search, hosted navigation and automated SEO solutions “learn” from user behavior by tracking the search terms people use on a retailer’s site and the resulting items they click on. The SLI solutions give retailers greater insight into what terms they should be linking products to and including in product descriptions, and what products are the most popular for various keywords. As a result, retailers can ensure the products people are searching for show up in the right searches - whether those searches are conducted on their own sites or on an Internet search engine like Google.

Learning Search is a hosted site search solution that continually tracks visitors’ aggregate search terms and the corresponding items clicked on, and uses that data to deliver results based on popularity. For example, if someone searches on “comfy pajamas,” Learning Search automatically ranks the items so that those with historically higher click-rates are listed at the top. Learning Search also shows how many products exist and in what categories, and gives visitors the option to sort the results by ascending or descending prices, or filter by category. Learning Search is supplemented with a free Site Search Feedback Tool, which is designed to help e-commerce and other Web sites better understand the quality of their site search functionality based on customer input. More information is available at http://www.sli-systems.com/feedback.

Site Champion is an automated search engine optimization service that integrates with Learning Search, tracking visitors’ search terms and using them to automatically create related search links for each page of a retailer’s site. When visitors click on these ’related search’ links they are presented with site search results for that term, directing them to additional relevant content and commerce opportunities - making it easier for a site’s visitors to find what they want, and helping retailers generate more sales. The links also drive more natural search traffic to the retailer’s site by giving the retailer’s results pages links that are crawled by search engine spiders.

More than 250 sites use SLI Systems’ hosted search offerings including ULTA, Tupperware, Harry and David, Smith & Hawken, NRS (Northwest River Supplies), FTD and eTronics.com, among others.

About SLI Systems

SLI Systems is the developer of learning-based search and navigation technology for corporate Internet sites, e-commerce destinations and consumer Internet portals that Searches, Learns and Improves the user experience.  SLI Systems’ hosted site search and automated SEO solutions empower businesses to enhance customer satisfaction while increasing sales, reducing costs and yielding valuable customer information.  Unlike traditional search software, SLI Systems’ patented technology continuously “learns” from the behavior of visitors over time to deliver more relevant results. SLI Systems is a privately held company, with offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Christchurch, New Zealand.  For more information, visit www.sli-systems.com.