ActivePoint Research Reveals Top Retailers Online Sites Fall Short in Natural Language Search Capabilities

ActivePoint’s sponsored research randomly selected five online retailers recognized by the e-tailing group, inc., as “merchants that excelled at online customer service” in Q4 2004. The five sites (Ann Taylor, Coldwater Creek, Land’s End, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom) were tested on the basis of how well their search windows were able to recognize natural language search terms.

“As one of the e-tailing group’s benchmarking criteria included ‘keyword search,’ we decided to take it a step further and investigate the natural language search functionality of the retail sites,” said Moshe Ofer, CEO, ActivePoint. “Our results show that merchants such as Coldwater Creek and Ann Taylor may provide top-notch email response times and shipping status updates, but their natural language search capability is lacking.”

The research methodology employed three natural language sentences to search for products within all five of the B2C sites. The research took place on May 31, 2005. The terms used were:

• Yellow raincoat with a hood
• V-neck cashmere sweater
• Boot-cut khaki pants

Results for “yellow raincoat with a hood” were disappointing, except for Land’s End, which found 15 relevant products — all yellow with a hood. Both Ann Taylor and Coldwater Creek were unable to locate the item. Despite perhaps not having the item in stock, these merchants failed to offer similar products such as a “waterproof jacket.” Although Neiman Marcus delivered 113 results, sometimes less is more, as the company offered everything from sunglasses to make-up with the first raincoat appearing on page three of the search results.

Land’s End fared well with the “v-neck cashmere sweater” search, locating 13 cashmere and cashmere-blend sweaters. Unfortunately, Ann Taylor and Coldwater Creek were unable to decipher what the consumer was looking for and produced “no results were found as an exact match.”

Lastly, when looking for “boot-cut khaki pants,” the consumer would be out of luck with Coldwater Creek, which delivered — “We’re sorry, at this time we are unable to locate the item you’re searching for on our site.” Although Nordstrom did not deliver exact matches, it provides the consumer with a choice of certain jeans and maternity pants, for example.