Posted by Vishal Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, NoMoreRack Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Vishal Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer of NoMoreRack, an online retailer of discounted brand-name apparel and household products based in New York City. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say. When we launched NoMoreRack in 2010 we started out with eight products a day on our website. Today, we have 15,000 apparel, home, and electronics products at any given time. To make our fast-growing inventory easy for customers to find, we’ve chosen Google Search Appliance (GSA).
As we evolve NoMoreRack, we’re working hard to turn the flash-sale shopping model on its head. We’re not about buying a small number of discount products from closeout companies, and then getting rid of them quickly. We buy thousands of units of in-demand day to day quality goods directly from the same manufacturers and suppliers who sell to top retailers, so we can keep products in stock for days instead of hours. We also want to provide a better online shopping experience than what people usually expect from a discount retailer – which is where the GSA plays the perfect role.
Our previous site search was custom built by our in-house team. It was based on tagging, and although it served the purpose, it did not have advanced features like suggest as you type, relevance or linguistics strategy. This meant sometimes customers couldn't find the exact product they wanted.
GSA gives all of the tools we missed from our homegrown search – both internally and for customers. GSA will index every word from product descriptions, so if customers use some of that language in a search – like “floral floor-length sun dress” – they are far more likely to see these products in search results. We expect the search results to be more relevant, since GSA will adapt to how our customers search, and will serve up better results over time. Our customers will get to use refinements for things like color, size, and price to narrow down results faster and more accurately.
With tools like Searchandiser, a third party tool powered by the GSA, we’ll create special webpages around popular products or brands that customers search for, and display these eye-catching pages once they’ve conducted a search or refined by a category.
We’ve got the right merchandise at the right prices that our customers are asking for – and with the GSA, we can show them the right product at the right time.
