Finding wedding favors becomes a piece of cake

Choosing the ideal wedding favor can be a daunting task, especially as tech-savvy brides hunt for these parting-gift options across vast e-commerce sites. This becomes a bigger challenge as they use primitive search tools to scour Web sites. Eager to make this less of a chore for its already harried brides-to-be, American Bridal added an intelligent search engine that supports easier navigation.

The San Francisco-based wedding favors company was not unlike other multichannel retailers that struggled with how to provide customers with an easy way to browse and filter through its site, www.americanbridal.com.

The company previously used a default site search included in its e-commerce platform. The solution wasn't intuitive enough to understand what people were searching for, and the results often didn’t match the keyword terms they used. It also didn’t account for spelling errors or make suggestions for related products.

Eager to improve the relevance of its site-search results and drive more traffic from natural searches, American Bridal turned to Cupertino, Calif.-based SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand, intelligent search services for e-commerce sites.

SLI's Learning Search solution continually "learns" from past site-search activity by tracking visitors' aggregate search queries and click-throughs, and uses that data to deliver results based on popularity. Then the solution returns the most relevant search results.

For example, when a consumer searches for a specific item on AmericanBridal.com, the solution automatically ranks the items where the most-clicked items are listed at the top. Learning Search also shows how many products exist across specific categories, and gives visitors the option to sort the results by ascending or descending prices, or by category.

Since implementing the solution in 2006, American Bridal consumers have been effectively searching for the products they want, and easily finding them.

“We have been fortunate to see a big jump in sales since implementation,” Tan said. “Our revenue stemming from customers that use search is now up 230%.”

Tan said that the company continues this momentum, even amid the recession.