Macy's Doubles Conversion Rate

By Ted Kemp

Macys.com since early summer has more than doubled the rate at which it converts site visitors into buyers, said Federated Department Stores, the retail unit's corporate parent.

Much of the success is credited to new search engine technology that finds a specific product even when a shopper types in keywords that don't match the terms Macy's uses to index the item.

When the Macys.com site was relaunched last July, Federated executives told InternetWeek that boosting the site's conversion rate was a key objective for the holiday season (see Federated Converts, ). Although Federated wouldn't disclose Macys.com's actual conversion rate, it said the rate has increased 150 percent since summer.

The revamp of Macys.com included more product “boutiques,” more customer service options and an upgrade to Mercado Software's IntuiFind 4 search technology.

Rather than try to match shoppers' search requests against a text catalog of goods, IntuiFind 4 runs keywords through “linguistic module” software that corrects spelling mistakes or translates phonetically similar keywords to the terminology in the product database. The engine also normalizes the formatting of numbers and alphanumeric combinations.

For multiple-word searches, the software translates individual terms and then finds where those descriptive words intersect in the product index “hierarchy.” For example, if a shopper types “$35 navy Tees,” the software might translate the request to “$34.99 blue T-shirts” to match indexing criteria, and then pull up goods that match all three of those criteria.

Macys.com plans to update next year to a newer version of the IntuiFind engine that includes a browsing capability.

It's impossible for Macys.com to nail down exactly how much of its higher conversion rate is a result of the IntuiFind technology vs. its site redesign, because the company doesn't yet analyze visitors' navigation paths through to the purchase page. But the retailer is giving the search engine most of the credit. The breadth of the company's product line makes it easier to find individual items if search terms are flexible, said Gary Beberman, Macys.com's director of technical research.

“If you go to some of our competitors and you do a search on a 'shirt' or a 'sheet,' because many of them carry their own product line, it's a fairly focused selection,” Beberman said. “We carry a lot of major brands and a lot of products of those brands.” Macys.com carries 75,000 SKUs.

Implementing IntuiFind 4 took about two months, Beberman said. Before deployment, Macys.com analyzed the search terms visitors had used on its IntuiFind 3 engine and applied that information to build the business logic that would translate or correct terms on the new search engine. IntuiFind 4 has better context-driven linguistics and superior indexing capability than version 3, said Yaron Dycian, Mercado's director of product marketing.

IntuiFind 4 lets non-IT staff design search data mapping through a graphical user interface. The engine reads information directly from the product database, and then a staging server indexes the content based on the mapping designed through the GUI. Search results are fed to the application server via an API link to the search server. A typical implementation of IntuiFind costs $250,000 for a perpetual license, Dycian said.

Most e-retailers mainly serve “discretionary” buyers, so searches must be easy and flexible, said Patricia Seybold Group analyst Sue Aldrich. In contrast, e-commerce sites that serve an expert audience or sell very specific, technical items are better served by a traditional, text-based search engine, she said. “No one search engine is right for everybody.”