Search, Merchandising and Mobile Web Capabilities to Drive Growth and Customer Experience

London - July 11, 2011 – Endeca Technologies, Inc., an agile information management software company, announced today Buyagift, Plc, the UK’s leading gift experience company, has selected Endeca InFront™, including search, merchandising, and mobile web technologies. This will support the rapid growth of Buyagift’s global business by enabling more targeted and personalised customer purchasing experiences across channels.


Endeca logoBuyagift Plc, part of Smart & Co, a multi-million pound international group of gift experience companies which operates in 17 countries worldwide, has embarked on a global expansion plan aimed at building upon its success in the UK. In doing so, Buyagift sought a scalable solution for search, merchandising, and mobile that would support the company’s expansion across geographies while giving its marketers and merchandisers greater oversight and control over the customer experience.

Buyagift chose Endeca technology, including PageBuilder, SEO, mobile, and internationalisation capabilities, not only for this unique combination of functionalities, but also because it could integrate with existing technology and serve as a platform for growth for the future.

“Endeca is an integral part of our expansion plans,” said Kashif Abbas, Chief Technology Officer at Buyagift. “Its exceptionally powerful technology will provide us with the necessary foundation to build upon our success to date by enabling us to deliver a customer-driven experience across all channels and geographies.”

Specifically, Endeca technology will allow Buyagift to:

Create, deliver, and manage content-rich, multichannel customer experiences from a single platform, allowing merchandisers and other non-technical users to deliver targeted, always-relevant customer experiences that drive conversion rates and accelerate cross-channel sales.

Generate more targeted clicks at a much lower cost through SEO integrated with site taxonomy and search, creating a dynamic site with millions of different paths to products of interest. As more data and content is added, such as user-reviews, video, and product guides, the attributes of the site expand creating more possible pages, and amplify these core capabilities by automatically publishing dynamic site maps and removing duplicate links.

Provide fully-featured mobile customer experiences tightly integrated with existing backend technology and merchandising tools, within a single platform that Buyagift merchandisers can use to deliver a consistent, quality mobile experience.

Deliver enhanced search and navigation across Buyagift sites, including UK, France, Italy and Spain.

“As part of our go-to-market strategy, Buyagift creates themed landing pages to promote specific gifts and categories of experiences when consumers search on a term,” said Alison Wade, head of marketing at Buyagift. “Using Endeca, we will not only be able to leverage landing pages across geographies for the first time, but our merchandisers will also be able to better position experiences that are converting the best at any given time. The integration of mobile web, SEO and merchandising represents a critical growth opportunity we couldn’t deliver with our existing technology or with any other vendor we considered.”