• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 29, 2023

Search on ecommerce websites and across enterprises has improved in the past few years but still, most of the technology is not on par with Google or Bing.

On ecommerce sites, consumers often cannot find what they want and abandon their search without making a purchase. On enterprise sites, employees often spend hours searching for the documents and information they need to finish a project.

Peter Curran, GM digital commerce at Lucidworks, believes the company has changed that, and attributes various types of artificial intelligence (AI) to making search much better. “Large enterprises have complicated ways to serve the market, which makes it more difficult to find information across internal platforms,” he said.

The company makes search technology for two reasons: ecommerce websites where people buy things online, and onsite search across company databases and cloud servers for employees looking for things like contracts or client records.

Lucidworks commissioned Forrester Research to build a Total Economic Impact Study on the company. The study required Forrester to interview five customers and create a composite organization, a combination of two or more organizational structures, such as design, manufacturing, and retail. This organization has 1,000 employees that generated ecommerce revenue of $750 million annually.

The interviews and financial analysis found that the composite organization would benefit by $17.48 million over three years versus costs of $3.56 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $13.92 million and an ROI of 391%. The results beat scores compared with competitors such as Algolia, and Elastic Search, including a 391% three-year ROI. 

For example, a very large, unnamed B2B ecommerce IT distributor participated in the study. The company sells keyboards, laptops and other electronics, and supports between 50,000 to 100,000 custom catalogs for its customers. The laptop the company sells to Boeing is different than the one sold to Honda because the laptop is configured differently.

If a consumer buys a jar of mayonnaise on the East Coast vs. the West Coast the name of the brand will differ, such as Hellman’s vs Best Foods, Curran said. He added that the platform offers an alternative to out-of-stock items in its ecommerce platform.

The objective of building the composite framework and conducting the study was to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect investment decisions.

Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Lucidworks can have with an organization.