How can you help customers find products on your website?

Don't hide the main categories behind a shop menu link as this won't help visitors understand what you are selling easily and puts an extra step in their funnel. Remove any links like blogs, any information ones as these are better in the footer as people will search for extra information when needed. You also do not need a home in menu link these days too.

Statistically, most users will choose search over browsing. It's still vital to use clear and descriptive categories, but don't over-index on thinking it's just for browsing/navigating. Remember that categories feed into facets in search results, too.

Design your website navigation like a well-organized boutique. Clear categories, subcategories, and filters ensure customers can effortlessly browse through your virtual shelves. Make it a journey, not a maze. Another thing to do is embracing the magic of algorithms to provide personalized recommendations. If a customer is eyeing a pair of shoes, show them matching accessories or similar styles. Make it an experience tailored just for them.

I would also add - ensure clear and sufficient product data to avoid hiding from search results relevant products with lack of attributes

Before we help customers find products on the website during the evaluation phase, we should understand the customer journey within the website using analytics and grasp the information that customers are trying to solve on the product page using heat maps. After we appraise the above information to understand the need that the customer wants the product to solve, then we should be able to make them access those categories or products that are most popular easily on the home page as listed categories on the header, banners, best sellers, etc. Category or product titles verbatim again should be based on the most searched keyword used to access the category.

Commerce Search solutions are one the best investments for digital businesses to improve customer experience (and to optimize for business goals like conversion or margin). I performed the Forrester Wave(tm) evaluation for commerce search in Q3 of 2023, including a deep dive into the 10 top solutions. Use them to tune search results and balance manual controls with AI-driven automation.

More than 50% of the visitors might use the search bar to quickly find what they are looking for. And not always the terms they use are the same - althought it should. As such, the search functionality in your website can impact your topline significantly. We used to have a very basic search functionality where product managers would manually add the search terms correspondence, useless to say how poor the whole experience was. Once we integrated an external tool, our home to product traffic increased substantially, driving also the conversion rates up.

In my experience search is what users tend to go towards first, but the categorization drives things home. Having a robust search system enhances a customer’s experience by showing them what they want AND showing them similar things they may be interested in. Having a mature categorization system allows you to have more personable recommendations, improved filters and an overall improved user experience. Not all of your customers are going to be able to get to where they need to be on your site purely by searching. So to close that gap, optimizing search capabilities and improving categorization will do wonders for your e-commerce site.

There are many Marketing Tactics to get customers to lend on your Shopify store; Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Email Marketing. You can leverage many social platforms and find the right customer for your product. You could answer posts on Quora, make solution-oriented videos, and share them on Youtube, Tiktok. You could even create podcasts depending on your product. So the sky is the limit!

The Shop Search is an essential functionality for any online shop. You should invest in fast and reliable solutions. Elastic Search or Open Search on the AWS server is a must for most shops now. There are good plugins that can simplify this activity for users. The search result page or popup is also a great place to market or present what you want. You should invest money to create a very user-friendly search result page. It is worth doing.

No. "Best products" isn't a thing. It's a huge mistake to choose to "pin" certain products to the top of product listings rather than configuring search solutions to personalize (to customer preferences) or optimize (to business goals). Let the system work harder for you.

I don't agree with the idea of "best products" because all users are different. I believe a more powerful strategy for showcasing products is to personalize the user journey using a modern CDP solution such as Simon Data or Segment. These solutions can combine real-time data (clickstream) with historical data (order history) and propensity models developed through machine learning of many other customers to make predictive product suggestions that are relevant to each user.

Don't showcase products. Display real-life solutions to real-life challenges experienced by real-life people. Remember that regardless as to whether you are B2C or B2B. You're always selling to people. 100% of products and services are useless without people. Instead of "Our product combines state of the art software with 30 years of expertise in the Food Industry" try "Joe is able to serve more customers like Anne and Kevin without compromising on quality thanks to our product"

Organize your products into relevant categories and subcategories. This will help customers navigate your website and narrow down their search using filters like price range, brand, size, color, etc. Display related products based on the customer's browsing and purchasing history. This can help customers discover relevant items they may not have initially searched for. Incorporate a review system where customers can provide feedback on products. This feedback can help customers make informed decisions and find products with higher ratings and positive reviews.

Use dynamic pricing so that when competitors have no stock you raise your prices and promote those products, while vice verca pushing promotional products when you lower prices

I have managed numerous UX optimization experiments leveraging an AI solution that enables massively multivariate testing - for clients from diverse industries, most of them premium brands. I understand the importance of branding guidelines, but one should never allow for the design of the Product Detail Page to be prioritized over its purpose. Whatever you define as conversion - brochure downloads, filling out a form, or simply adding a product to the shopping cart/completing a purchase, make sure your call to action stands out. It has to be very clear what action you want the user to take and the Call-to-Action (CTA) button needs to be adequately emphasized - either by removing distractions or selecting a color that focuses attention.

In my experience, details are useful once the user has found the product! If the goal is finding the right product, it’s essential to create a well structured product catalog that includes intuitive categories and subcategories that can be easily discovered through top-level navigation. For large catalogs, visuals that tell a story can improve user way finding through categories. Finally, product entries should be enriched with parameters, keywords, descriptions and tags that can be searched using search facets or keyword search.

We added icons to better illustrate each product proposition. When looking for boxes, customers would either look for protection, experience or just simply low prices. By adding icons on the product pictures the whole process became easier with customers quickly finding on the category pages the products they were looking for. Adding videos to illustrate those value propositions and how to assemble the boxes also played a critical role in driving conversion rates up.

There are two big reasons why a product page can fail your customers 1. There's not enough education for the visitor around what's great about your product and its benefits 2. There's not enough external social proof that confirms that your offering is credible Number 1 can be fixed with brand video. YouTube works well here. If you are a brand big on sustainability, a video about the product's goals works well here etc. For consumer electronics an explainer video or review provides the information needed by customers. For social proof, influencer and UGC social, ideally from Instagram, works best. However, other influencer and UGC formats are worth trying out, especially for areas like consumer electronics.

In crafting product detail pages, the key is to balance information with storytelling. Above the fold, prioritize clarity: crisp images and essential details that answer the immediate questions of what and why to buy. Below the fold, dive into storytelling. This is where you bring the product to life, weaving narratives that resonate with the reasons people buy. This section should immerse the customer in the world of the product, addressing deeper questions and desires. It's about creating a journey on each page, one that informs and then captivates, guiding customers not just to a purchase but through an experience.

Personalization is key, always make sure you make your services/content/product tailored to your customers' needs and preferences. They should feel like your services are custom-made for them. And live chats and chatbots is an amazing opportunity to offer them this personalized help and show them that you care.

If your website needs a chatbot you've probably gone wrong several steps before. Go back and check that the site is clean, easy to navigate and understand. If you are confident that's done then chatbots can be helpful but only if you can provide a nearly instant response. A website with a chatbot that requires long waiting times before providing answers is worse than a website without a chatbot at all and a generic customer support email address or phone number.

Think about triggering chatbots based on detection of struggle like long dwell time or rage clicks. At this point a chatbot can ask if the user needs help and potentially save a lost conversion.

AI chatbots are revolutionizing customer service, offering game-changing benefits when implemented effectively. They provide instant, personalized assistance, addressing customer queries, recommending products, and resolving issues swiftly. By integrating live chat with AI chatbots, businesses can enhance customer engagement, build trust, and foster loyalty. This technology not only boosts conversion and retention rates but also ensures a seamless and efficient customer experience. The key to success lies in their proper deployment, ensuring chatbots are responsive, intuitive, and aligned with customer needs, thereby transforming customer service into a more dynamic, accessible, and satisfying interaction.

Integrating AI into live chat can indeed revolutionize customer interaction. Real-time AI assistants, poised to become game-changers by 2024, offer more than just automated responses—they provide insightful, personalized assistance, mirroring the effectiveness of human interaction. This technology can swiftly address inquiries, recommend products, and solve issues, enhancing the user experience. The key is balancing AI efficiency with the personal touch of real-time communication. By doing so, businesses not only maintain customer engagement but also build trust and loyalty, ultimately boosting conversion and retention rates. This is where AI transforms from a tool to a strategic asset in customer service.

Product discovery is essential when it comes to product merchandising. Gone are the days of standard static featured collection sections. Solutions like Rebuy Engine can equip merchants with multiple merchandising solutions tailored to customer buying behaviour. Carousels, Dynamic Bundles, Product Add Ons used in the right combination allow for multiple merchandising solutions that don't feel redundant or pushy. Take into consideration your merchandising strategy from your Home Page right through to Post Purchase and emulate an in store experience online. With the right logic, these solutions can offer an experience comparable to an in store sales associate- surfacing the right (RELEVANT) products at the right time.

AI and machine learning can be a great help here. If using social media content, made shoppable and personalized with the right technology, AI and machine learning can improve the product matching and delivery of optimal content constantly. Outside of this, control and AB testing is a great way to see if your product discovery journey is going in the right direction and whether one design is better than another for add-to-carts and conversion.

As features are added to sites, it's very easy to introduce additional steps, visual distraction or other factors that directly impact the user flow to and through the point of completing the intended objective. Continual testing as well as connecting these to areas of impact are obviously very important. If I had one suggestion in this area, it would be to not over obsess on customer reported edge cases. It's quite common for a client to get user feedback, but regard this at a higher level than thoughtful testing and ultimately in the interest of appeasing the "live" consumer (the only ones who say something in a sea of an environment where people say nothing), impact many more actual consumers and cause negative, retrogressive affect.

Enhance e-commerce product discovery by A/B testing search, filters, and sorting. Analyze user behavior, implement personalized recommendations, and gather customer feedback. Update categorization, explore new display options, and stay abreast of industry trends. Adjust strategies based on performance data to continually optimize the product discovery experience.

Tools like ParticularAudience.com allow you to test all the way down to the optimal algorithm to run in a carousel slot. Algorithm AB testing is a game changer to level up recommendation quality.

The strategy is highly dependent on the size of your catalog. If you have less than a few hundred items, a simple, well-organized navigation structure might suffice. However, for larger catalogs, it's crucial to implement more sophisticated tools like search functionality with filters, recommendation engines, and personalized content.

Check SEO - the page indexing in Google Web Search or Bing. It is constantly manipulated. If your pages are not visible, there are no sales.

Supplier sponsored products, when personalised to a customer, can be massively margin accretive and benefit rebate negotiations.

Your home page should always feature your 4 best sellers. Therefore, optimize for new clients first. Repeat business would tolerate a little bit of searching and your guidance in community channels. Categorise easily by 4-6 and make sure to have filters based on recency (new/old), and frequency (reviews). Adding a review at the above the fold (product) page helps immensely with conversion, so taylor products by the problems your brand solves and make sure to involve it in the name. I think one of the biggest gaps for brands is creative naming. The name should have the core product, but enhanced with a bit of creativity can add a lot of status to the customer. If your product needs more education (like health), a quiz could help too.

This low-hanging fruit should be its own category in this article, but so be it: QUIZZES! If you sell multiple products with similar functions (e.g. mattresses) or one product with multiple variants (e.g. makeup), use a quiz to guide shoppers toward the right product or variant. Otherwise, they'll be left to read every product description or guess which variant is right for them. Then, they'll likely get overwhelmed and leave your store without purchasing. Even if you only have one product, you can use your quiz to help shoppers understand how your product will help with their specific needs. In my eyes, menstrual wellness brand Marea pioneered this quiz style. Go check it out for inspo.