June 13, 2013
American Apparel is a global retail brand with 10,000 employees and more than 250 stores in 20 countries. Its legacy search product was preventing it from providing an optimal user experience for consumers attempting to find products online, either by keyword search, or by browsing product categories.
The retailer was using ATG Search, which suffered from a lack of unity between the search and browse functions. For example, searching for a “green dress” might yield results that listed only half of the products that fit that description, while browsing for a selection of green dresses by clicking available links might return the other half.
ATG Search also lacked guided search functionality to help customers easily and quickly drill down through a broad assortment of styles, colors and sizes to find exactly what they wanted. If customers want to see green dresses, all they want to see in the search results are thumbnails of green dresses.
Since ATG is now part of Oracle’s Commerce product suite, American Apparel looked to Oracle for help. Oracle and RealDecoy partnered to ensure American Apparel’s investment in search technology started yielding immediate dividends. RealDecoy replaced ATG Search with Oracle Commerce Guided Search, a former Endeca product, and integrated this with the rest of American Apparel’s existing ATG e-commerce deployment.
RealDecoy completed this first project within six weeks, and has completed many more for American Apparel over the past 18 months to ensure these new search capabilities are tailored to the retailer’s unique needs. With Oracle Commerce Guided Search, American Apparel’s merchandising team can easily make web pages look pixel perfect, without having to engage the retailer’s IT department or web developers.
And customers can easily find exactly what they want, organize search results in the way they want, and see all of the possible options they have to choose from. Keyword searching and site browsing are now unified and consistent.
The new system also has greater accountability for business users. They understand, for example, why a search for “green dress” may also be returning shoes, because in the description for the shoes, reference is made to how well they match with a certain dress.
Why was RealDecoy Selected?
RealDecoy is a CX applications company working in close partnership with Oracle to deliver Commerce and Insight solutions.
RealDecoy is recognized as the No. 1 Oracle Endeca resource globally, with more than 150 successful implementations in the past decade. In fact, RealDecoy has touched more than 25 per cent of all Endeca implementations ever undertaken. Oracle recently confirmed RealDecoy’s specialized status designation for Oracle Endeca Commerce, which now complements its specialized status for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. RealDecoy is the first company worldwide to achieve Oracle specialization for both products.
RealDecoy is a trusted global resource for Oracle. Its expertise has been critical in securing millions of dollars worth of licenses with brand-name clients. RealDecoy is known for putting customer needs first and tailoring solutions to solve tough challenges in their vertical markets. This was particularly evident with American Apparel.
RealDecoy prides itself on its flexibility and adaptability, to work with any retailer of any size on its terms. This made it a great fit for American Apparel and its desire to break the work into a number of small projects to generate immediate value, rather than proceed with a traditional waterfall-style engagement.