eCommerce On-Site Search - Improving Product Findability
James Pruden
Managing Director at Xigen, Business Investor, Digital Expert & Entrepreneur.
Finding the right on-site search application for your eCommerce store is about understanding your business needs and goals, and choosing a solution that best fits with them, not simply going with the most convenient option: cheapest, most features or a developer's personal preference.
Whether it's a WooCommerce plugin, Shopify smart search, Elasticsearch or Sphinx for Magento, there will be an on-site product search that is a best fit for your business.
Remember, site search has a significant impact on UX, conversion rates and sales—it's one of the most important business decisions that you will make for your eCommerce.
In this article we'll take a deep dive into eCommerce on-site search and discover different types of searches and different approaches to help your customers quickly and easily find the products that they want.?
Returning Relevant Results
Perhaps the most obvious question to ask about site search is 'does it return relevant results?'. If your business has a large catalogue with thousands of SKUs, you want your site search to quickly and accurately find what customers are looking for based on their search keywords.
Enabling customers to refine their search with filters for product types and attributes will further help get to the right product. A situation to always be avoided is a site search that returns no results at all—empty search results will drive consumers away.
Almost 43% of consumers go straight to site search in eCommerce stores.1 These product searches have significantly higher conversion rates compared to passive browsing.
Semantic search
Plain text keyword eCommerce site search is not enough. To return more relevant search results the search context must be considered and be more conversational. Semantic search queries aim to not only find products based on keywords, but to also determine the intent and contextual meaning of those search terms.
For example, suppose an online clothing store's on-site search is non-semantic. A customer searches for 'Converse pink high tops'. Instead of getting the trainers expected in the search results, the search could return pink Converse trainers, or pink tops, or pink Converse tops instead.
A semantic search would have understood 'Converse' as trainers and returned results in that context. Consumers want improved search results, and when it comes to relevancy, a semantic site search will outperform plain text competitors.
39% of purchasers are influenced by a relevant search.2
Autocomplete and Spellcheck
Anticipating what product or type of product a customer is searching for will help to eliminate irrelevant products and get customers to what they want faster.
Autocomplete helps lower friction in shopping journeys and increase conversion rates because results are matched to search criteria immediately, rather than customers having to go through potentially pages of search results. ?
Another benefit of autocomplete is familiarity. Your customers will be used to seeing autocomplete on, for example, Google and Amazon. Using autocomplete for your site search will not only reduced cognitive load, it will also help customers feel more comfortable in your store.
Autocomplete can also reduce friction by checking and correcting spelling as customers type search terms. This is particularly true with brand names and more specialised or technical terms. Enabling spellcheck for autocomplete in your site search will help customers find their products even faster.?
The autocomplete function should be tailored to your products and business needs, but more on that later.??
Avoid Zero Results
As mentioned earlier, returning 'no results' for a product search is like a salesperson shrugging at a customer. Even if there are no relevant search results, finding alternative suggestions or returning the closest matches is better than leaving the customer dangling.?
To help avoid zero results you can use customer browsing history to suggest relevant results based on the keywords used.?
One of the most common site search KPIs in 2020 was eliminating searches that returned zero results.3
Contextual Filtering
Often a site search will return many results. Avoid forcing customers to trawl through pages of products by offering contextual filtering.
Contextual filters enable customers to refine their search results by filtering out non-relevant product attributes, such as type, technical specifications, colour, size, or myriad other attributes, depending on the kind of products that you sell.?
Contextual filters are usually simple check boxes that let customers quickly and easily refine their search with just a few clicks.
This is an example from shoe retailer, Schuh. Notice the search 'Refine' section for filtering size, style and colour.
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Voice Product Search
Text isn't the only way to perform on-site product searches. Voice search is an increasingly popular way for consumers to find products when shopping online.
Voice search is driving more conversational forms of site search with the rise of Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Home etc. and advances in natural language processing (NLP). Voice search signifies a shift in how we interact with our devices; we are conversing with them more as if they were 'human'.
In terms of on-site product searches, the benefits of voice product search are efficiency for consumers—they find products faster. We can talk much quicker than we can type, and speaking is more intuitive. It also enables consumers to interact with your store hands free, especially useful for mobile devices, where typing on smaller screens can cause unnecessary UX friction.
When people do a manual search by typing, mistakes happen—a brand name is spelled wrong or product-specific terms are incorrectly entered in the search. When that happens, the search AI can identify the error and suggests what it thinks the customer might mean. Voice search AI can also do this, suggesting what it thinks a customer may have mispronounced.?
As consumers become more and more accustomed to using Alexa and Siri etc., they will expect continuity of search experience—searching the web and in your online store.??
Image Product Search
An image is so much more instant and memorable compared with text alone. That's why visual site search is more immediate and faster.
Reverse image search, which is where consumers take an existing image, either copy and paste or a screenshot, and use it to search an online store for matching items.??
Reverse image search is useful where products have discernible types, such as hats. This enables consumers to search without knowing the name of a particular style of product that they might have seen in a film, video or on social media: a trilby or deerstalker, or whatever it might be.
Ikea offers reverse image search. Notice the option to the right in the image below which enables customer to upload an image on desktop or take a photo on a mobile device.
For example, Adobe's search and analytics engine Elastisearch is an on-site search used by the likes of eBay, Facebook and Home depot that enables customers to perform reverse image searches, as well as storing data for fast search, fine?tuning for relevancy, offering powerful analytics and more.
Searchandising
Search merchandising, or searchandising, is the process of tailoring searches to offer customers not only highly relevant results, but also additional relevant and related products for richer on-site search experiences.
48% of consumers will spend more when their experience is personalised.?
The searchandising process should be fine-tuned to offer customers more satisfying UX for increased conversion rates.
Searchandising uses analytics to help refine search results further by looking at, for example, underperforming queries and trending products. You can then merchandise searches to show customers popular relevant products and improve search performance to better meet customer needs and your business goals.
For example, prioritising promoted products, only returning in-stock results, and greater personalisation taking into account browsing and purchase histories, and even geographical location. ???
Final Thought
Enabling customers to quickly and easily find the products they want in your online store is a crucial component for creating overall satisfying shopping experiences across your eCommerce.
Fast, intuitive site searches that add value for customers, whether text, voice search or image search, on desktop or mobile, and that are tuned for your business, will help to provide more outstanding shopping experiences and increase conversion rates.
Is your eCommerce store on-site search helping or hindering sales? To find out more about how to get the most out of your on-site product search, get in touch today for a chat with an eCommerce expert.