Online sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $523 billion in the next five years, according to Shopify. Your site, which only has a few minutes to capture your customers’ interest, has to be optimized for mobile (where people spend more than half of their online time) and load speed (a two-second delay could increase abandoned cart rates by 20 percent).
One other thing to think about? Site search.
If your customer can’t easily find the product they are looking for, they may click away from your site altogether.
E-commerce search startup Klevu tackles that issue with its self-learning technology that includes natural language processing, merchandising and multilingual capabilities.
The Helsinki, Finland-born startup, which also has offices in the UK, recently opened its North American headquarters in Atlanta.
“The Atlanta office is comprised of business development and onboarding support, all wearing multiple hats and building a solid core team,” says Miles Tinsley, Atlanta business development lead. “We’re excited to expand the Shopify community in Atlanta and bring more of an enterprise level to the already-existing presence in the city.”
Targeting small and mid-size businesses, which are often powered by Shopify Plus, Klevu helps merchants improve their online shopping experience and drive up sales.
“We want to bring those relevant products up fast so they can check out much faster,” says Tinsley. “Today, the primary form of navigation in mobile devices is through search — no one clicks around the navigation. Typically, customers are doing a voice search or they’re typing in exactly what they are looking for.”
Regardless of the complexity of the word order, Klevu’s search product identifies the best product choices for the customer. The technology moves away from just keyword-based matching thanks to its natural language processing.
“We want to get down to understanding the user’s intent. If they search for ‘laptop under $800,’ the search function will not only search for the product, but also the proposition ‘under’ and their behavior,” says Tinsley. “This pulls up more relevant search results within the user’s budget using conversational semantic search, not just keyword-based matching. That’s what differentiates us from any other product in the industry.”
With clients like Jack Daniels, Yamaha Music Soft, Helly Hansen, Atlanta-based Southern Proper, Rebel Circus, and WildFang, Klevu integrates with Shopify, Magento, and other e-commerce platforms. It offers fully customizable features such as analytics, product promotions, and category search.
Next on the pipeline, they’re further developing the intelligence behind their search solution to allow users to have ‘conversations’ with the search option, increase personalized search, and add more voice search capabilities. According to Tinsley, 40 percent of millennials are using voice search on e-commerce websites versus typing and it’s quickly becoming the norm.
Over the next year, the search startup is looking to expand its team in both sales and product, as well as continue building local partnerships which currently include Nicely Built and MailChimp.
“This city is a great community for technology startups and it’s getting more popular for retailer SaaS model products,” says Tinsley, who has been in Atlanta for seven years, including a stint at Springbot. “We would like to build out this office to 30-40 people down the road.”
