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Our View of Online Retail in Mid-2019

The state of online retail in mid-2019 has been frequently described as ‘dead’ or ‘dying’. Amazon has disrupted online retailers to the point that today we are seeing a big push by brands to go to a direct-to-consumer model, or double down on it.

Examples

Companies like WarbyParker, Casper, Allbirds, along with many others, are good examples of how this can be successful in the morphing ecommerce landscape we currently find ourselves in.

Instead of reading about the next Amazon, WayFair, or Jet, we hear about new direct-to-consumer brands.

What We Are Doing 

At Searchspring we recognized this shift and have been focusing our efforts to help retailers and direct-to-consumer brands launch and merchandise their sites.

Whether on Shopify, Magento or a custom platform we feel that the need for direct-to-consumer brands to merchandise their products has eclipsed the need for an amazingly relevant search.

Peter Messana, CEO

Having smaller product sets make search less important when compared to merchandising. This is why we have made sure that our merchandising platform is second to none. We have provided the ability to control your landing pages, search results, and category pages to highlight what is most important for you to show. This can be done simply, quickly, and easily, without help from a developer.

Our end goal is to provide tools like this that open up new possibilities, and that make it easier to do things you already have to do every day.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we aren’t investing in search. We absolutely are. We recently updated our relevancy model and are in the process of upgrading our spelling correction solution too, but we are recognizing the need to be able to support a wider variety of customers, be it a direct-to-consumer brand with very few products, or a product heavy online retailer.