How improving your site search can improve sales

14 Jan 2016 Dominic Comments Off on How improving your site search can improve sales

Many small businesses setup their trading websites thinking that what they purchase off the shelf will be the sole driver of their onsite trading activity. This is not the case and when looking to trade a retail website (especially when budgeting for a new platform) you need to consider not only all the platform costs but all the other costs associated with driving traffic to the website and getting that traffic to buy your products.

Most platforms have site search limitations

Typically many platforms are limited when it comes to how their site search functions –  offering a basic site search which, when used by customers, may return hundreds of products with perhaps one of the keywords included in your search phrase (eg small red dress size 8 may return hundreds of products with “red” in title or description). This is where working with partners such as SLI Sytems, Nextopia or Peerius can really help a retailer improve both the customer experience and subsequently your sales.

The graphic below shows just some of the additional functionality these partners can help with – helping you improive your sales and conversion rates. The benefit of working with an Intelligent Search partner is that many of them offer a one stop shop for all their services.

Don’t lose customers with poor on site search experience

Failed search and cumbersome navigation lose shopper interest. To sell products online, shoppers have to find them and often default shopping cart functionality often lacks the flexibility and intelligence needed to convert shoppers.

By using intelligent site search, your website will be able to dynamically elevate product rank within result pages based-on product performance.

This helps your shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for regardless of how they search. By delivering an excellent shopping experience, you immediately show your customers better relevancy.

Other things Intelligent search offers

• Search-as-you-type
• Search Suggestions
• Product Recommendations
• Advanced Synonyms
• Redirects
• Hyper-relevant Results

Impact of intelligent search

Implementing an intelligent search solution across your site, be that on homepage or possibly cross sell on product pages or checkout pages should immediately see an improvement in sales as customers get a better experience when looking for product – as you can see from below the conversion rate from these more focused site searches is much higher than the sitewide standard

Benefit of intelligent search

Failed search and cumbersome navigation lose shopper interest. To sell products online, shoppers have to find them and often default shopping cart functionality often lacks the flexibility and intelligence needed to convert shoppers.

By using intelligent site search, your website will be able to dynamically elevate product rank within result pages based-on product performance.

This helps your shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for regardless of how they search. By delivering an excellent shopping experience, you immediately show your customers better relevancy.

Other things Intelligent search offers

• Search-as-you-type
• Search Suggestions
• Product Recommendations
• Advanced Synonyms
• Redirects
• Hyper-relevant Results

Implementing an intelligent search solution across your site, be that on homepage or possibly cross sell on product pages or checkout pages should immediately see an improvement in sales as customers get a better experience when looking for product – as you can see from below the conversion rate from these more focused site searches is much higher than the sitewide standard.

Categories: All Posts, Site Search, Trading Tips

Tags: site search