What is an Ecommerce Site Search Solution?

An Ecommerce site-search solution is at its core, a search engine that is either built or is integrated with your Ecommerce website. It helps user in finding relevant products by comparing the keywords entered by the user on the search bar with the catalogue of products in the inventory. However, the mechanism isn’t as simple as it seems on the surface with complex mechanisms like product rankings, faceted search, semantic search and synonym management involved in the process. The only difference between an Ecommerce site search and Google search is while Google depends on context and text searching, the former relies on a structured attribute search with filtering and sorting playing key role!

The numbers show crucial importance of the effectiveness of Ecommerce site search solutions. 30-40% of Ecommerce customers rely heavily on site-search options with the conversion rates estimated to be 6 times higher than the conversion rate of other shopping options at the website. Search users are looking usually looking for specific products increasing the chances of conversions massively, roughly a search user is bound to convert 7-10 times than a regular webpage visitor. Site-searches are also a major source of revenue for Ecommerce companies, drawing around 30-60% of the total site transactions.

As important as a sturdy Ecommerce site search solution is for an Ecommerce site, many companies fail to identify the need to improve upon their site-search solutions resulting into customer frustration. These happen mostly because site-search solutions aren’t optimized to the natural and diverse vocabulary people use in their searches. A recent survey revealed user’s biggest frustration with retail site searches. Irrelevant product results, failure to find the searched product, long loading times, not recognizing the words entered and bad UI experience topped the list for most of the users.

Best Ecommerce Site-search practices to adhere by:

Companies could enhance their site search Ecommerce capabilities by adopting some minor practices. To start with, and it goes without saying that the search box should be placed at a location which is easily accessible and visible to the user. The Ecommerce site-search should be capable in handling errors and auto-corrects to account for minor typos. A search-query auto-complete feature could enhance the user experience. Leveraging the ever-growing features of Artificial intelligence to learn and capitalize on user behaviour, searches could go a long way in defining a positive user outlook towards an Ecommerce site.

User Behaviour:

Users landing on an Ecommerce site could roughly be classified into two categories:

Search User - A user who has a specific product in mind they are searching for. They know exactly what they’re looking for.

Browsing User - A user who is more in a mood of “window shopping”, they aren’t sure  what they are looking for.

The role of Ecommerce site search is vital in converting both of these users. They should be able to handle and interpret user behaviour and present them with a relevant set of results. The results could be catastrophic if the search tool fails to handle or identify, understand or learn from user behaviour.

It’s paramount to have a powerful search tool for any Ecommerce site. It not only improves the average customer experience making them more likely to revisit the site but also helps in numerous other ways like collecting important data points. A powerful Ecommerce site search tool is vital for any site to grow and a seamless search experience would only encourage buyers to engage more with the site. Some of the practices for a successful site search could seem daunting but the returns in regards to consumer retention, experience and brand loyalty are huge. 

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