EasyAsk Enhances eCommerce Search Capabilities and Dynamic Online Merchandising; Leading Merchandisers Turn More Shoppers into Buyers and Achieve Rapid ROI Through Intuitive Natural Language Search and Site Navigation

Business Wire, August 2, 2005

BEDFORD, Mass. -- EasyAsk, an award-winning provider of search and information retrieval solutions, and a division of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), today announced that more than two dozen new features have been added to the latest version of EasyAsk for Commerce. EasyAsk for Commerce (B2C/B2B) synchronizes product catalog navigation with the company's flagship natural language search capabilities to drive advanced merchandising. These enhancements deliver a rich shopping experience for customers and increased eCommerce sales for vendors by allowing companies to promote relevant products through the use of metrics such as shopping history, product inventory or special business sponsored promotions.

New features and functionality enhancements equip EasyAsk customers with tools to nimbly react to emerging opportunities, resulting in increased conversion rates and larger average order sizes. Highlights of the new release include:

--Market Specific Domain-Packs: Enable eCommerce companies to speed time-to-value by applying a pre-built set of search fluency definitions, thesaurus and extended attributes tied to a particular vertical market, such as apparel, outdoors and technology, making it easier to match search requests with relevant merchandise.

--SKU Specific Processing: Provides the capability to search and merchandise at both the product and SKU level. This delivers a finer degree of granularity and accuracy to both search and merchandising than ever before. Additionally, this allows for specific merchandising at the SKU level.

--Merchandising Workbench: Enables greater responsiveness to market conditions through industry-specific merchandising strategies. Merchandisers can seamlessly import and test spreadsheet content, receive notifications if multiple users are editing data, and utilize more dynamic diagnostic monitoring. Merchandisers can preview all changes made in the EasyAsk Merchandising Manager and view as a user would see them.

--Hot Score Integration: Enables the dynamic inclusion of business metrics such as customer purchase history and lifetime value through the integration of external data sources into the EasyAsk index, allowing data to be leveraged to produce higher relevancy or to refine the filtering and sorting of search results.

--Role-based Editing and Security: Site Administrators can predefine and manage user groups to act as a security layer to ensure that users can only gain access to information they are authorized to see. These groups can be tied to specific functions within EasyAsk, allowing for a "role-based" approach to user enablement.

--Spelling Suggestions: Through the use of EasyAsk's advanced natural language query and sophisticated linguistics capabilities, eCommerce vendors can easily configure which spelling and word/phrase suggestions a customer sees, tied to the intent of their question, rather than just correcting mistakes or delivering failed results.

Benefiting Premier Online Retailers

EasyAsk's unparalleled eCommerce search and guided navigation, merchandising and analytics solutions have benefited some of the nation's premier online retailers and manufacturers, including Lands' End, Sony, Ann Taylor, Talbots, Hewlett Packard, J. Jill, BassPro and SmartBargains. EasyAsk customers have experienced significant increases in the percentage of visitors to their web sites who actually purchase merchandise, realizing 10 to 40 percent improvements in conversion rates and ROI performance in three months or less.

"J. Jill is focused on delivering the best possible shopping experience to our customers," said Andrea Gulli, operating vice president of eCommerce at women's apparel retailer, J. Jill, a long-time EasyAsk customer. "The latest version of EasyAsk delivers significant website usability improvements with search results based on individual customer needs, and provides greater agility to execute on our online merchandising strategies."

Other functionality that sets EasyAsk apart is its synchronized natural language search and navigation capabilities and the ability for vendors to leverage rich attribution to enable users to quickly refine their search results. Instead of just relying on the customer picking the right keyword, with EasyAsk, the customer can navigate through a product catalog hierarchy or simply type a synonym, an abbreviation, or an English language phrase such as "blue wool sweaters size large". This empowers shoppers to quickly find their desired product while companies promote other merchandise based upon those products or customer lifestyle preferences (e.g. linen shirts could be marketed as "casual attire" or "easy fit"), also known as "persona marketing."

Acquired by Progress Software last month, EasyAsk is a leader in the eCommerce Search and Navigation space. According to Progress Software's senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, Jeffrey Stamen, "Progress acquired EasyAsk because it was the clear technology leader in natural language search with integrated data navigation. Their success in eCommerce speaks to the effectiveness of the technology. We are committed to build on that success and apply this technology to other markets where it is of critical importance."