Article

Search essential to online retail

Many e-commerce sites aren't taking full advantage of site search.

June 8, 2008

As more and more consumers shop and conduct other personal activities online, their expectations for a seamless experience grow ever higher. While most marketers recognize that effective site search is a powerful way to convert browsers to buyers, in a recent Marketing Sherpa report over half the retailers rated their site search as being poor. What this means is that either marketers don't understand the steps they need to take to design an effective site search, or they don't have the time (or don't think they do).

There are simple ways to improve key areas of the search function and navigation on your site that can turn your browsing visitors into buying customers.

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1) Provide relevant site search results

Consumers expect to find what they're looking for quickly — particularly when looking online - so providing relevant search results is imperative. When customers can't find the product they're looking for, they'll assume you don't carry it — even when there's a chance they just used a search term you didn't anticipate. As such, your search solution should give you information about what terms generate good results as well as what terms generate poor results. The terms with poor results usually mean that you either need to add new products to your inventory or change the way your products are described so they match those search terms.

A good example of this is furniture retailer Nebraska Furniture Mart. Before implementing their current hosted site search solution, they had no way to track which products customers were looking for. While 'Microsoft Zune Player' was among the most popular items being searched for, it was generating zero results because they hadn't yet added it to their inventory.

Once they implemented a site search solution that provided useful data about site visitors' search behavior, they quickly realized that they were missing out on a big opportunity to sell this product to their visitors — and immediately added it to their online offerings.

2) Make sure the placement of the search box is in an optimal position

Black Forest Decor realized an 84 percent increase in average revenue per site visit, just by moving the search box to the center of the page.

Clear placement of the site search box seems like an obvious component of any site's design, but even a simple change in size or placement of the search box can have a dramatic effect. Online home furnishings retailer Black Forest Décor recently moved their search box from the upper right-hand corner to the middle of the page, and also made it bigger. As a result, they've seen an 84 percent increase in the average revenue per web site visit (by site search users) and a 34 percent increase in web site conversion rate.

3) Include the right information with each search result — in a format that makes sense

In addition to showing relevant results, you want to make sure each result includes the right information that will give visitors added incentive to click on the item. For example, including thumbnail images, descriptive text, pricing, customer reviews, discounted shipping offers and any other promotional information — all within the search results — can give customers added incentive to purchase without requiring them to click through, and helps them feel like they're making an informed buying decision.

Once you determine what information to provide your customers, you need to decide how to present it. The design of your search results page determines whether your customers can view more products (grid view) or more information (list view). The list view allows for only a small number of results per page but provides a significant amount of information on each result, while the grid format may be more appropriate when it's important to include product images.

4) Offer "faceted search" capabilities

Faceted search, such as this example from Footwear Etc., allows users to refine searches by a number of product attributes.

Faceted search is extremely useful when you have lots of products for customers to sort through. Essentially, faceted search gives visitors further options to refine their search using specific criteria, such as brand, price, color, product type, etc. For example, at Footwearetc.com, customers who search for "slippers" will be presented with more than 70 results. From there, site visitors can refine the results to view only those items of a certain brand, category, size, color, or width, helping them more easily find what they're looking for. In addition to narrowing the results, Footwearetc.com presents the products so that those that are most popular within the specific criteria appear at the top of the results page.

5) Make it as easy as possible for your customers to purchase the product

By integrating the "buy now" or "add to cart" button within the search results, you've now given your customers one less step to go through to purchase your products — which is always good. Likewise, adding the "search" box to the shopping cart page makes it easy for customers to keep shopping once they've viewed their selected items. In other words, you don't want to risk losing a customer by forcing them to backtrack to find more products or make the purchase.

Turning browsers into buyers isn't always easy — but it isn't rocket science either. By improving the search and navigation of your site, customers will quickly find the products they seek and are more likely to reward you with their purchases.