Ecommerce Search Product Comparison
How Five Leading Vendors Address Ecommerce Search and Search Marketing
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. Vice President and Sr. Consultant,
September 10, 2009

NETTING IT OUT

There are many technologies deployed to connect customers with products on ecommerce Web sites. In this report, we review five leading ecommerce search offerings. These products are broader than search indexing and retrieval: they provide merchandising, end-to-end search marketing, data cleansing, taxonomy development and data classification.

Four of the five vendors offer managed services, a very attractive offering in these tough economic times. The managed services approach also provides ongoing collaboration for ecommerce success, which is to both parties' benefit. Successful clients result in successful vendors.

This report has two parts. A companion to this report is a spreadsheet with a detailed, side-by-side comparison of all the criteria described in our Ecommerce Search Planning and Evalua-tion Framework, covering seeker interfaces, seeker experience management, marketing management, information collection management, architecture, and product and company viability. This report summarizes the data in spreadsheet and analyzes the key strengths of each of the five products.

If you are in the process of selecting new technology for ecommerce search, you will be successful with any of these products. There's a reason they are leaders. But there are key differences, and this report will help you see which company is more suited to your situation. Inte-restingly, price isn't likely to be your motivation for selecting one of these vendors. We think the key factors will be how well the product delivers the search results you want to see, how well it supports the marketing you need, and whether the vendor offers the right types of support for your business and technical teams. Of course, you are always welcome to call us for a chat or a consult. We are always interested in hearing about your initiatives.

We define ecommerce search as the technologies companies deploy to connect customers with products and answers. This includes search, navigation, and discovery; plus merchandising, searchandising, and tools to manage the customer experience.

Great search and navigation have the potential to deliver huge benefits. We have spoken with companies that have increased cart size by 270 percent and eliminated 60 percent of customer support calls by implementing effective ecommerce search. Whether or not your results reach these heights (or exceed them) depends on how poor your seeker experience is today, the quality of your content, the sophistication of your technology, and how effective your organization is at managing the seeker experience once you've got the right technologies in place.

To simplify the selection of products that can contribute to ecommerce implementation, we've compared five leading ecommerce search offerings, using our framework for evaluating ecommerce search products and architectures. The framework describes evaluation criteria in the areas of seeker interfaces, seeker experience management, marketing management, information collection management, architecture, and product and company viability.

Products in This Comparison

This comparison analyzes the following products:

• Celebros Salesperson 2009, released June 2009
• Endeca IAP 6.1; Endeca Commerce Suite, released March 2009
• Fredhopper Online Marketing Suite V.6.2, released April 2009
• Omniture Merchandising 5.3, released July 2009
• SLI Systems Learning Search, as of August 2009

This report summarizes the key capabilities, and key differences, of these products. The companion report is an Excel spreadsheet entitled Ecommerce Search Product Comparison Matrix¹. The spreadsheet presents a detailed, side-by-side comparison of all of our criteria.

Method

Our approach is to apply our detailed, requirements-driven framework to each product. We gather information from interviews and from studying product documentation. There are certain advantages to this approach—it is similar to the approach IT teams take in evaluating products. The key weakness of our approach is that we lack the resources to implement and test the products. We therefore don't have an independent means to validate scalability claims or to evaluate the most fundamental function of a search engine—its ability to choose the best result. Therefore, when you make your own search engine technology decision, there are two things you'll have to do for yourself. First, talk to at least three customers for each product and ask them how much time they spend tuning search results. You don't want to buy technology that requires more attention than you have to give. Second, you want to include a proof-of-concept test in your evaluation to measure how often the search brings back the right top five items in a series of tests you've defined—and how frequently any of the top five are the totally wrong item.

History

This isn't the first search technology comparison we've published. The most recent ecommerce search comparison, published June 24, 2008, suffered from addressing versions of varying age. This report rectifies this issue, since all the products we're comparing were released from March through August in 2009.

Since 2003, we have been using our earlier evaluation frameworks to assess vendors'; offerings for search and navigation for ecommerce, enterprise, and customer service applications. To date, we've assessed offerings from ATG, Autonomy, Celebros, Endeca, FAST, Fredhopper, Google, InQuira, IBM, Mercado, Microsoft, Northern Light, Oracle, SLI Systems, and Thunderstone, as well as solutions from EasyAsk (acquired by Progress Software), iPhrase (acquired by IBM), Knova (acquired by Consona), Verity (acquired by Autonomy), and WebSideStory (acquired by Omniture).

OUR BOTTOM LINE

Price and Scalability

The five products are quite similar in price. The four that offer managed services range from $1k to $10k per month; three of them can be had for $2k per month. Two products are offered on-premise, averaging $250k and $300k. These differences are not insignificant, but they are not reason to abandon one vendor or snap up another. (See Figure 1.)

Scalability

Similarly, scalability, the last refuge of FUD mongers, is not a credible differentiator. All of the products have demonstrated more than a thousand queries per second, which is more than any ecommerce site is likely to require. That's 86 million searches per 24 hours. No retailer needs that. A more interesting question may be, how many servers will you own to achieve the scale you need. The minimum hardware required to support a product catalog of 500,000 SKUs, 10,000 searches a day, and a team of four merchandisers is one server at Endeca, one live and one staging server with Fredhopper, one management server and one search server with Omniture Merchandising. At Celebros and SLI Systems, “it doesn't matter,” since they provide the servers and manage them. Celebros offers the information that a commodity server can handle a catalog of 50,000 items, depending on the query activity and volume of catalog updates to be processed.

Pricing

© 2009 Patricia Seybold Group.

Figure 1. The pricing for the four managed services products is very similar. Prices are in thousands of U.S. dollars per month

This report continues...

**Endnote**

1) “Enterprise Search Search Product Comparison Matrix,” by Susan E. Aldrich, September 10, 2009.