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Evans Cycles works in tandem with Avail Intelligence

~ specialist bike retailer sees a two-fold improvement in relevancy of product merchandising for its visitors ~

July 09, 2009

Evans Cycles has implemented elements of Avail’s behavioural merchandising suite to simplify the shopping experience through improved relevancy, with the aim of boosting online conversion rates and average order values.

The retailer has implemented Avail’s Collaborative Searcher, Social Search Optimizer and Navigation predictor modules.

The new functionality has had an immediate and measurable impact on Evanscycles.com. ‘In search’ refinements dropped overnight, halving to nine per cent suggesting recommendations were more in line with shopper expectations.

While the site already had an onsite search engine plugged in, this was quite rudimentary. Offering nothing more than an exact word match, it lacked the functionality consumers now expect. Having identified the limitation through internal testing, the retailer tasked Ominor, its external web development team, with finding and implementing a more intuitive function to simply plug-in.

Using Avails Collaborative Searcher and Social Search Optimizer modules, the search experience for visitors has improved in two ways. Using fuzzy logic and analysis of collective searching behaviours, the site can now return relevant results even in the event of spelling mistakes or based on automatic synonym lookup. Using analysis of past collective search and buying behaviours, visitors are also given personalised product recommendations based on their searches. Suggestions actually get better as time goes on, and the improved relevancy will increase the chances of a purchase and thereby improve conversion rates.

Evanscycles.com has also introduced behaviorally personalised ‘people like you’-suggestions to all visitors on product pages and the shopping cart page, where shoppers’ past buying behaviour is used to shape future recommendations for other customers with a similar profile. These product suggestions become more and more relevant as visitors browse and shop the site and helps visitors quickly find complementary products they perhaps didn't even know they were looking for, and helping to improve average order values.

Executive quote

“Shoppers are far less patient and now expect to find what they want almost straight away,” said Pontus Kristiansson, CEO and co-founder of Avail Intelligence. “As a retailer you have perhaps one opportunity to show the visitor what it is they want. Failing to do so will lead to customers heading elsewhere to make a purchase.

Customer quote

“Implementing Avail has been one of our biggest improvements to Evanscycles.com since we went live with our new site last year,” said Tom Francis, website manager for Evans Cycles. “We are now able to efficiently find and present exactly what our customers want, helpings them to identify goods to purchase in three clicks, no matter where they are on the site.”

About the company

About Evans Cycles
Evans Cycles are the UK’s largest specialist cycle retailer currently operating 34 stores nationwide and the UK’s largest cycling mail order & e-commerce service www.evanscycles.com. Evans Cycles product range spans every cycling discipline including mountain biking, road cycling, leisure riding, kids bikes, BMX, commuting and more.

Evans Cycles are working with employers with their Ride2Work programme which takes advantage of the government’s Green Transport Plan allowing all British employees to save around 50% of the price of a new bike.

For further information or high res images, please contact:

Claire Beaumont 01293 574 954 or claire.beaumont@evanscycles.com

About Avail Intelligence
Avail Intelligence is the leader in maximising the value of visitor traffic to e-commerce web sites. The company’s technology harnesses the community intelligence from site visitors to deliver the most effective shopping experience for new and returning customers.

Using advanced mathematical techniques from its research arm Avail Labs, Avail Intelligence has created the Avail eMarketing suite. The suite comprises a set of tools, which improve relevance when merchandising to and communicating with individual visitors across the entire Customer Interaction Cycle™ of a single web site or across multiple web sites.

The results are significant, immediate and measurable improvements to conversion rates and average order values.

Avail Intelligence’s technology is being used by over 80% of the leading Scandinavian e-commerce sites. Key UK customers include GAME, Berry Brothers and DVD.co.uk.

Contact details

For further press information and photography please contact:
Patrick Hussey at LEWIS, the PR agency
Tel: +44 (0) 161 457 2050
Fax: +44 (0) 161 457 2051
Email: availuk@lewispr.com

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