by CIO New Zealand

Site search system helps lift revenue for Kiwi online retailer HealthPost

News
Oct 14, 20142 mins
Technology Industry

SLI Systems, an e-commerce acceleration provider for mid to large-size e-commerce vendors and Internet retailers, has reported its site search systems have significantly lifted online revenue at HealthPost, a worldwide supplier of natural health, skincare and household products.

Since implementing SLI’s technology in July, HealthPost’s e-commerce portal has seen a 60 per cent increase in the usage of the website’s search functions, and a 13 per cent increase in the number of people who subsequently used the results from that search to buy products.

These have both driven an 8 per cent increase in HealthPost’s online sales revenue.

Abel Butler, HealthPost CEO, said more than 60 per cent of their online revenue comes from products located via site search. “So, having highly effective search tools that present the products that customers are most likely to buy is vital to the ongoing success of our business,” he said in a statement.

He said SLI helps to make our site easier to use by providing highly relevant search results and by highlighting popular products that encourage customers to keep coming back.

According to SLI CEO Shaun Ryan, HealthPost is one of the more than 800 websites across the globe using SLI’s technology to accelerate e-commerce by connecting shoppers with the products they’re most likely to buy.

HealthPost started as a one person, catalogue mail order operation in 1988, supplying products to the New Zealand market. It was an early adopter of e-commerce, and now employs more than 60 people sending products around the world.

“We have an extensive range of products, ranging from vitamins to beauty supplies,” said Butler. “So the ability to refine search results, based on actual customer preference, is an ideal way of sorting. The alternative was for HealthPost to estimate what would be the most popular product to put at the top of the search results, or manually put the most popularly searched-for products at the top. With SLI, it just happens automatically.”

HealthPost has implemented SLI’s Learning Search, Rich Auto Complete and Site Champion systems.

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