September 29, 2004 - (PromotionWorld) - Mercado Software, the leading provider of e-commerce search, browse and merchandising software, announced today the release of CSN™ 2.5, the new version of its Commerce Search and Navigation solution.
Many of the major revenue-generating retailers currently power their online retail sites with CSN's best-in-class solution of Intuitive Search™ and Dynamic Browse™ coupled with comprehensive merchandising capabilities. CSN 2.5 takes Mercado's product to the next level by providing online shoppers with increased relevancy of search results while at the same time equipping internet retailers with buyers' behavior data essential for the implementation of successful merchandising strategies.
CSN 2.5 enables online retailers to significantly increase conversion rates by offering shoppers an enhanced self-service shopping experience. Like a well trained sales associate, CSN's patented search technology interprets the diverse buyers' terminology and responds immediately with all the relevant products. To further increase online business results, CSN equips the product managers with a powerful and intuitive commerce management interface, which enables business managers to embed promotions and merchandizing techniques into the search engine results.
"With the right business-oriented administrative user interface, search service can be a very powerful tool to support e-commerce processes," said Tim Hickernell, Vice President, META Group. "Product and service managers must be able to easily manage product positioning and promotion in search results and be able to analyze search engine optimization through user interfaces that are designed around business users, not technicians."
CSN 2.5 highlights:
A Comprehensive and Enhanced Commerce Management Console (CMC™) - Through the intuitive CMC interface, marketing and merchandising business managers can manage, monitor and optimize the user experience and the site behavior. They can implement merchandising strategies and promotions to increase the site business performance.
Fully-Integrated Intuitive Search and Dynamic Browse - For an enhanced user experience, the CSN 2.5 unique architecture seamlessly integrates search and browse, where buyers can use any combination of free-text queries and adaptive browse to explore the web site and to find products quickly.
Extended Reporting and Analysis Features - CSN 2.5 provides extended reporting and analytical capabilities. In addition to the embedded analytical tools, CSN's unique "Web Services" architecture facilitates an easy native integration with any commercial or internal web analytics tool.
NLP Technology, Enhancing the Quality of Search - CSN's patented technology for indexing and searching structured data is now enhanced by the addition of Natural Language Processing technology that improves coverage precision and recall: CSN retrieves all the relevant results and eliminates the irrelevant results. By tracking shoppers searching patterns, business managers can also fine tune linguistic associations.
Web Services Technology for Easy Integration - Mercado's CSN 2.5 is the only 2nd generation e-commerce search, browse and merchandising solution that is XML based and is built from the ground up on Web Services. This technology results in the lowest cost of ownership both for deployment and for ongoing maintenance.
About Mercado Software
Mercado Software's Commerce Search & Navigation (CSN) and Enterprise Search & Navigation (ESN) solutions provide an effective approach to connecting customers, partners and employees with the right information. CSN and ESN provide outstanding return on investment for a broad range of business critical applications including online retail sites, business-to-business commerce sites, customer service contact centers, online self-service, intranets, extranets and corporate portals. Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, Target, Williams-Sonoma, Tower Records, Blockbuster, PETCO, MSN, Caterpillar and OfficeMax, are some of the companies benefiting from Mercado Software's solutions. Mercado's unique technology, combined with its experienced team's commitment to innovation delivers bottom line results for its customers. Such benefits include increased revenues, higher productivity, reduced operational costs, and improved customer satisfaction. For more information about Mercado Software, please visit www.mercado.com or call (888) 376-1400.