In six years of operation, CableOrganizer.com has built a solid e-commerce niche selling everything from grommets to cables and label printers.

The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company earned $10.2 million in sales in 2007, an increase of 17 percent from the previous year, and senior vice president Paul Holstein expects growth of 26 percent in 2008.

Business-to-business customers make up 80 percent of the site’s total sales, but general consumers account for 80 percent of total orders. Holstein and his tech crew sought a way to focus messages to both types of customers without polarizing the content offerings.

“We’re moving more into personalization,” Holstein says. “We’re getting much, much deeper into personalizing the web experience for every browser.”

CableOrganizer.com personalizes content based on triggering rules that generate a page based on geography, referring domain, keywords, time of week or other criteria “dynamically generated for the purpose of meeting the user with something they would expect to see, based on their prerequisites for ending up on our site,” says e-commerce initiatives manager Daniel Shields.
 

When a user searches for “label maker” on Google, for instance, CableOrganizer.com consistently is one of the top 10 organic listings. If the customer clicks on the CableOrganizer.com link, he will go to a landing page titled “Label Printer, Dymo Label Maker, Automatic Wrap Labelers.” A patent-pending precognitive search mechanism developed by CableOrganizer.com allows users to view relevant information based on the keywords for which they searched.

Top five sellers
The execution came with a little help from SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand search services. CableOrgani¬zer.com officials write the java script that collects the search terms; SLI Systems provides the search results and sends a formatted box that merchandizes to the customer: on the right-hand side of the page are the top five selling label makers.

“We’re showing not only what Google thinks is a good search result for ‘label makers’ but what we think are good results for ‘label maker,’” Shields says. “Nobody else is doing this.”

Before, users of Google and other search engine users were bouncing out because the home page wasn’t catered to the specific keyword or phrase.
“When you look at our homepage, it has nothing to do with label printers,” Shields says. “We wanted to add all the proper search results … wherever they’re searching so that we can match what the customer’s looking for. We’re personalizing the site based upon what we know about the customer.”

The results have been higher conversion and spend rates. Non-search users have a conversion rate of 1.5 percent versus 7 percent from those coming from Google; non-search users spend an average of $1.53 per visit, compared with $6.10 for search users.

“The strategy is to get customers where they want to go as quickly as possible, to show them what they were looking for as soon as possible,” Holstein says. “And throughout everything we do we’re … showing [repeat customers] what they bought in a little box on the right every time they visit the site. They can go quickly to the last page that they looked at.”

With more than 10,000 products, CableOrganizer.com wants to streamline the navigation of its site. In March 2007, it installed SLI Systems’ Learning Search and Site Champion hosted site-search and search-engine optimization offerings. The data pulled from Learning Search is analyzed and used to change the site to meet customer preferences.

The result of this on-site search improvement was a 40 percent increase in product searches – results that are quite common, says SLI CEO Shaun Ryan, adding that Site Champion helps websites generate higher organic rankings in Google.

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