Baynote Launches Industry's First Merchandizing & Editorial Console That Blends Community With Control

Combined Power of Visitor Behavior and Expert Control Lifts Average Order Value and Increases Visitor Engagement

Baynote, Inc., a leader in intent-driven product and content recommendations for the business web, today announced the availability of the Baynote Merchandizing and Editorial Console. An Industry first offering, the new management tool allows users to combine expert control with the inherent community wisdom distilled from web visitors' behaviors to optimize the delivery of product recommendations, content recommendations, and on-site search results.

Baynote Recommendations and Social Search is built on a proven social science concept: the collective behaviors of like-minded site visitors is the most effective way to display products and content based on a visitor's true intent. Leveraging crowd wisdom is especially important in content and product-rich "long tail" sites where manual merchandizing and editorializing is not cost or time effective. However, there are common scenarios where a merchandizing or editorial team requires the ability to exercise precise control over product and content recommendations to take into account product margin, inventory levels, promotions, breaking news, cross-channel content linking, and myriad other cases.

While the new console benefits Baynote users in all vertical markets, it is particularly useful to online publishers and eCommerce businesses. For example, The Knot, one of the world's leading lifestage media and services companies credited with reinventing the wedding media industry, has already seen immediate ROI from using the new console. "Baynote's new merchandizing and editorial management capability has already proven itself to The Knot," said Kristin Savilia, vice president of eCommerce at The Knot. "My team was immediately able to see that a particular product was not being found by shoppers and then manually 'pin' the results to the search terms they were using. Previously, that would have required a two week turnaround request through IT." Overall, The Knot is now generating significantly higher average order value (AOV) through Baynote recommendations.

"The technical revolution on the web has long been about taking IT power and putting it directly in the hands of users or business owners, beginning with publishing," said Dan Keldsen, director of Market Intelligence, AIIM. "Web 2.0 has shown the ability of the crowd to deliver powerful end-results in content generation. Combine the intelligence of visitor behavior, such as the crowd with expert business owners, and search can be radically transformed to new levels of effectiveness for all participants."

The Baynote Merchandising and Editorial Console enables customers to:

--  increase or decrease the visibility of specific products and content
    throughout the website, taking into account margin, inventory, and
    timeliness;
--  create promotional offers, execute and measure them as a campaign;
--  boost or diminish the visibility of whole categories of products or
    content;
--  'pin' or blacklist results from on-site search engines and third-party
    information feeds; and
--  control presentation and ordering of 3rd party data feeds from hosted
    search engines, comparison shopping engines and other information sources.
    

"Although the community knows best in most cases, there are times when you may want to promote certain content to the top, remove a particular recommendation on a given page, or provide a more subtle boost to the classes of content that are known to be more valuable to your visitors or company," said Jack Jia, CEO for Baynote. "Baynote's new console blends the power of community wisdom with expert control to deliver customers the best of both worlds."

About Baynote

Launched in 2006, Baynote delivers on-demand recommendation technology and social search for websites. By automatically displaying the best content and products, Baynote increases online revenue, leads and impressions. Baynote's patent-pending UseRank(TM) technology taps into the collective wisdom of the silent majority without collecting any explicit feedback. Over 100 eCommerce, media, and enterprise customers including Motorola, NASA, The Knot and US Appliance use Baynote Recommendations. For more information, please visit www.baynote.com.

Baynote(TM) and UseRank(TM) are registered trademarks of Baynote, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.