Tower of Power: Tower Records builds sales with a new catalog search server
By Debra Judge Silber

From Direct.com

July 31, 2000
Your trained musical ear can discern his London Symphonies from his Sonata in C Major, but if Haydn sounds like H-e-i-d-e-n to you, searching for the composer's work on your average Web site is likely to result in a classic case of database disappointment. That's why intuitive search technology-sophisticated enough to find what the customer is looking for even when the customer himself isn't quite sure-is such a valuable tool for Web sites offering voluminous online catalogs.

One example is TowerRecords.com. The online retailer of music and videos has seen sales increase 400% and conversion rates double in the year since it implemented the IntuiFind catalog search server developed by Mercado Software Inc.

"One of the things we love about it, for example, is if you search on 'The Godfather' in music, you'll eventually come up with James Brown," says Kurt Foy Booker, Tower Records' Webmaster. "It pretty much guar-antees customers will get something back on their search, and we've definitely seen sales and conversion rates improve."

Yaron Dycian, Mercado's director of product marketing, adds that the Web site saw a definite improvement in its 2.5% shop-to-buy ratio after IntuiFind was installed in June 1999. While TowerRecords.com had made a number of improvements, Booker, who declined to discuss actual conversion figures, agrees IntuiFind played an important role in the improvement. "The search results page is far and away the number one page on our site-right now it gets 25% to 30% of our hits," he says. According to Dycian, a close correlation can be seen between the number of searches performed and the increase in Tower's conversion rates.

Since its launch in 1996, TowerRecords.com had relied on an Informix search product, which wasn't well suited to Web catalog searches. Not only was it case-sensitive and lacked sophisticated linguistic tools, but it could only search one data field at a time.

Using IntuiFind's advanced search function, customers can misspell a name, give an incorrect title, and not specify what data field they're trying to match-and in many cases still successfully track down a CD, video or DVD. If all they can remember about "Animal House" is that it had something to do with a fraternity and starred John Belushi, typing the phrase "fraternity with Belushi" will return the right selection. They can even misspell both words-"fraterity with Beluchi"-and the search still delivers.

How's that? The solution starts with IntuiFind's more than 50 linguistic engines, which can convert plurals to singular, correct misspellings and substitute synonyms as it searches for any one of the 600,000 items in Tower's online catalog. At the same time, the tool searches for clues throughout the database, freeing the user from having to specify a field such as title, actor or director. For instance, it recognizes "fraterity" as "fraternity," and finds that word in the notes field of the database. It sees "Beluchi" as "Belushi," which is found in the actors field.

Catalog searches at Tower competitors CDNow and Amazon.com, while highly sophisticated, still require the customer to indicate the field to be searched. In the example above, Amazon's was able to recognize the actor's misspelled name when the correct field was searched. CDNow's did not, although its search software does incorporate linguistic tools. IntuiFind's ability to perform complicated linguistic analyses in an unstructured search is one of the things that sets it apart from its competitors, says Victor Votsch, research director with the Gartner Group.

"They make it seamless, which is their big advantage," he says, adding that Mercado also has made strides in leveraging search functions as a business tool by enabling promotion and personalization to weigh into relevancy. Those features are a big part of the next generation of IntuiFind, version 3.0, set to be released June 26. "We realized the search is the gateway to your e-commerce business," says Dycian, "and that leveraging this gateway would be a great thing."

Booker expects Tower to upgrade to 3.0, but is unsure of the degree to which Tower would incorporate personalization into its search. In the meantime, the site is moving ahead with additional improvements, including an express checkout function and 70,000 downloadable Liquid Audio files, in its efforts to catch up with the two market leaders. "Our goal is to be on the same level in every way," says Booker, adding that when planned improvements are complete, "We'll be right there with them."

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