Holiday Prep: Cabela's revamps retail site
 
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This is the first in a series of stories about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for holiday sales. Stay tuned for more.
At a meeting last week, Tim Miller, director of Cabelas.com, asked how many in the room could spell "camouflage." His point in asking was to underscore the importance of adding "fuzzy search" features to retailer Cabela's Web site.
"We have a lot of interesting words," Miller says, referring to Cabelas.com's lineup of 110,000 hunting, fishing and outdoor products. Items like Pflueger fly reels, Abu Garcia rods and Kahles binoculars are prime candidates for misspelling by online shoppers.
Newly deployed portal infrastructure software from Verity will allow Miller's team to handle such misspellings - for example, directing a visitor to a selection of Pflueger reels rather than responding with a "No match for: Flueger" message.
Cabelas.com is dedicating at least one and possibly two people to the task, Miller says. Frequently misspelled terms will show up in Web logs, which the team will use to define relationships between entries. Miller hopes to have fuzzy search capabilities in place by mid-2002. The infrastructure exists to do it, thanks to a yearlong reconstruction of Cabelas.com. Now it's just a question of refining the features, he says.
Web overhaul
Cabelas.com made it through the holiday shopping seasons of 1998, 1999 and 2000 with a largely homegrown e-commerce setup. But it became apparent after the 1999 season that Cabela's was outgrowing its Web infrastructure. In particular, its homegrown search tool wasn't living up to customers' expectations.
Last fall, Miller and his team selected ATG's Dynamo platform and Verity's K2 Catalog portal software. After a summer of testing the software, the new Cabelas.com site went live in September. With Verity's search technology, customers get more accurate responses to their keyword queries, along with thumbnail images of products. Within the next two weeks, Cabelas.com will launch suggestive selling features, Miller says. If a customer is looking at boots, for example, the site also will show compatible boot dressings and socks.
To-do list
Synonym support also is in the works, so that "fishing rod" and "fishing pole" will yield the same results. The Cabelas.com team has been defining links between synonyms, and the expanded functionality will be available early next year.
For Miller, that's one of the best parts about the K2 Catalog tools - that they enable his internal team to tweak site functions without going to outside developers each time Cabelas.com wants to try something new.
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