Web stores will cease to be a safe haven from pushy salesmen, if Endeca, a designer of personalised merchandising software, gets its way.
The company, with clients including Barnesandnoble.com and IBM.com in the US, and Tesco in the UK, has released Infront 4.5, the latest version of its software. Its mission is to emulate the cross-selling and up-selling activity that has been honed to a fine art in traditional retail outlets.
Endeca product manager Phil Braden said: 'Over 100 years retailers have developed the art of cross-selling, which online stores have abandoned. Worse still, they've made navigation of online shops harder.'
Endeca's business case is that imprecise information on online shops is detracting from sales. Braden claims that Endeca increased the size of orders for online store Overstock.com by 20 per cent, after providing more precise, intuitive interrogation tools.
He says: 'If a customer types Bill Clinton into a Web store's search engine and gets 100 listings, they're going to be put off by all the irrelevant stuff.'
By saving customers time, Braden believes they are more likely to be responsive to offers of complementary products. He adds that IBM.com boosted its conversion rate by 50 per cent after using Endeca's online marketing techniques.
What of the customers who like online stores because they hate being chivvied by pushy salesmen? 'You can't bully people online. Sometimes we can cross-sell, sometimes we can up-sell, but we should always look for smarter sales,' said Braden.
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