Sans catalogs, Betty Mills fixes up site search
Posted on 06. Jul, 2012 by admin in Internet Retailer
The Betty Mills Co. has expanded over the last several years from selling mostly janitorial supplies to including a wide range of office, industrial and medical supplies in its product line. And with some 130,000 products, it once relied heavily on mailing paper catalogs to help customers find what they needed.
“We used to send out tens of thousands of catalogs a year,” says CEO Victor Hanna. “When we dropped a catalog, the pickup in sales was tremendous.”
But no more. Betty Mills has ceased its regular catalog mailings, relying instead on a beefed-up site search and navigation system for its e-commerce site. “Nothing is more important to us than site search, because we no longer ship catalogs,” Hanna says.
Betty Mills recently upgraded its site search in February to ConversionPro V8 from Celebros Inc. The new application, which replaced an earlier version from Celebros, is designed to be easier to administer by the retailer’s product managers without the aid of technology experts. This enables the retailer’s merchandising and marketing staffs to more easily configure site search results to promote related and higher-margin products, including best-selling products, Hanna says.
Tests of the new system have shown that consumers who search on the site have a visitor-to-sales conversion rate 30% higher than visitors who don’t engage site search, and an average order value that is 35% higher, Hanna says.
To read more about site search, read the upcoming August issue of Internet Retailer.
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Article source: http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/07/05/sans-catalogs-betty-mills-fixes-site-search
