Understanding the Differences between Ecommerce Search and Content Search

Nowadays, it seems everyone has an online store. If you’re an e-commerce professional, you’re probably always on the hunt for the latest best practices and cutting-edge technology that will boost your conversion and enhance your customer experience, helping your sales soar.

But what exactly do you know about the inner workings of e-commerce search? How does it “think” and “behave”? How is it different from a regular content-based search, such as the one conducted on Google, Bing, or Yahoo??

According to Forrester,?43% of online shoppers go directly to the search bar?when landing on an e-commerce website. And when those searches are fruitful, conversion rates are three to four times higher (on Amazon, they shoot?up to 6x!). Those are?huge?numbers that make a?huge?impact on your sales. Ready for another huge number??61% of e-commerce websites perform below average?when it comes to internal site search.

Understanding how e-commerce search works can directly help you maximize your online revenue. Keep reading to learn more about your online store’s internal search and what makes it so different from content searches through Google.

The Problems

With new technology being introduced all the time, it can be hard to keep up and prioritize the best solutions your online store needs?now. However, it’s important to pause and make a game plan, because when it comes down to it, every online merchandiser or e-comm manager has dealt with some version of the same problems, over and over.?

We’re willing to bet you’ve danced around all of the following issues multiple times, finding temporary fixes that didn’t quite hit the mark.?

Does any of these sound familiar?

• Your search results are not relevant.

This may stem from the items not being properly tagged or not being indexed. A unique problem with eCommerce is that e-comm data has to be weighed, which means that the different parameters have to be ranked in order of importance in an effort to determine the overall relevance. Therefore, the weight of the field may not be high enough for it to show up in a particular search. This issue probably leads the user to give up on your search function altogether and go scour your category pages hoping they make more sense – or, they give up entirely and bounce from your site.

• Your new arrivals can’t be found.

They’ve just landed, they’re super trendy, and everyone wants them… but no one can find them. Somehow, when the user types in the keyword that should magically make them appear in all of their glory, they’re nowhere to be found. The result? Disappointed could-have-been customers eager to jump on a trend, inhibited customer acquisition, inventory surplus, and of course, fewer sales for top-line items less likely to be discounted.

• Out of stock items are appearing?

It may be the SKUs themselves, or certain colors or sizes, and they may appear in broad search results or even after using filters. Regardless of the road taken, showing shoppers items they can’t order is frustrating for them, for you, and for your bottom line.

No one wants a frustrated customer. So, to address these issues for good, get a better grasp on your e-commerce site search. Once you tame the beast, things will turn around quickly. Let’s take a closer look at how things work, starting with some common misconceptions.

E-Comm Site Search vs Google Search

A search is a search is a search? Wrong. Content searches, like Google, were built to find relevant content, with the ultimate objective of meeting the?user’s?expectations. On the other hand, e-comm searches are used to find products (user’s?expectation) and generate sales (merchant’s?expectation). When you dive deeper, the difference becomes even more pronounced.

The Basics of Content Search?

• The User Above All Else

To proceed with a content search, such as on Google, the user first needs to start typing keywords into the search bar. Google then tries to?guess?the rest of the query and uses autocomplete to simplify and hasten the user’s experience, while also relying on aggregate data from content provided to other users in the same location, with the same query. Once they hit Enter, the search engine yields pages upon pages of search results (hello, 8,020,000,000 results in 1.15 seconds!).

In other words, in content searches, results are unlimited. This is why for many searches, a direct answer to the user’s query is shown as the very top, pulled from Google’s knowledge graph. What ensues is, hopefully, answering the user’s query in just a few bullet points, without them even having to visit another website. These are particularly useful for users performing a voice search or browsing on a mobile device.

The main goal of a content search is to serve the most relevant results for the user query, or better yet, for the user’s intent – to ultimately please?the user. Everything is automated to serve that one, clear goal, no matter which direction the user is pointing at: whether it’s navigational, informational, or transactional, their satisfaction is measured through engagement.?

The content search engine measures engagement using metrics such as the time the user spends on a particular site, their bounce rate, as well as the terms entered following that initial search, which serves to indicate whether the search was successful.?

For example, if a user was looking for a recipe, the search will notice that the user only spent 5 seconds on a particular website, hinting that it was not the winning recipe, as opposed to 20 minutes on one they likely deemed satisfactory. This data is then collected for every language, country, and industry, and compared to determine quality, relevancy, and satisfaction in order to refine future searches more successfully.

Learn more about the difference between ecommerce search and content search on our blog.

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