Best Practices For Ecommerce Site Search
04 May 2023
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Onsite search is a critical function for an eCommerce site. It can make or break the experience of your customers, and affect your revenue positively or negatively.
If the onsite search function is hidden in the clutter of your site, it totally ruins the customer experience. They move to another site that offers better functionality.
Frustrating!
Now, as you ignore the importance of this function, your competition is already using premium search services such as LupaSearch, and grabbing all of your customers.
Why E-commerce Site Search Is Critical
If you are serious about making a proper presentation of your goods and services in your online store, you need a well-integrated site search engine. This is the software equivalent of a sales representative.
On your online store, the web traffic mostly finds its way to the landing page of your eCommerce website. It can also land on one product page, or on a category page.
But all of the products that you offer cannot fit on the landing page or any other page. With a good onsite search function, your customers can find their way around the store fast.
A good site search engine is not only going to display what a customer searches for. It will go an extra step and display other related products.
This will not just happen. It takes the expert integration of a commercial site search engine.
The search engine also needs to be tweaked from the perspective of the customers. And this leads us to the best practices for eCommerce site search engines, as below:
1. Proper Placement Of Site Search Is Paramount
If your customers have to hunt around to find the search box where they can type their search details, it is akin to having no site search at all.
The best practice is to place the search box above the fold. This is the first thing that customers should see when they get on any of your online business pages.
For the best visibility, you should place the search beside the logo where it will be impossible to miss.
If you have a catchy, colorful logo, it will be hard to miss. Wherever the logo is on the header, place the site search besides it or somewhere close.
2. Make The Search Customer, Rather Than Industry-Centric
Again, think from the perspective of the customer, and know the terms that they use for certain products and services.
Use their language to customize the search engine for your site. You don’t want to miss out on making sales just because you missed a few terms.
When you are in business, you do not speak the industry language, unless it is to other industry players.
For the customers, use their language, the terms they use, and their jargon. Even the autocomplete function should be set this way.
3. Make The Site Search Smart – With Fast Autocomplete
The site search function should be able to autocomplete terms correctly. You want to assist the customers who come to your store but they can’t recall the names of your items.
The search function will help by autocompleting the terms, even if they type the first three letters only.
The search function should autosuggest and display the products even before the customer completes typing.
Even when the customer spells a function wrongly, the autocomplete should be able to automatically detect where the search is headed.
4. Never Leave The Customer Stranded
A customer would be stranded when searching for something that you don’t sell. In that case, the search function should suggest other closely related items.
But if there are no related items, it should still not leave a customer stranded. Rather, it should prompt them to connect with a customer service representative, if there is one on duty.
If there isn’t one, it should prompt the customer to do something else, like even displaying totally different items, but never make them hit a dead end.
5. Filtering Functions
Make sure your customers can filter the search results using different parameters such as size, price, new, old, color, featured, sponsored, and so on.
These built-in filtering functions make your online store easy to use. Filtering helps you to meet the needs of your customers efficiently.
Whether they want to see the products with the highest number of reviews or the cheapest ones first, it will display them.
6. Test For Mobile Responsiveness
With more people using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to access your eCommerce site, ensure the site is responsive on mobile.
You need to test thoroughly to make sure everything is working, from the call buttons to the site search engine. Keep testing all the time. This should not be a one-off thing.
7. Add The Call To Action Button And Shopping Cart To The Search
Most customers will make a buying decision when they see the item’s image, even before they click on the product to read the description.
When the product is displayed, the call to action button, the price, and the star rating can convince someone to buy immediately.
Conclusion
If you consider the above 7 eCommerce site search practices, you are going to score highly with your customers.
With so many options available and only a click or two of the mouse button away, it only takes one second of frustration and they will move to other sites.
Above all, make the search engine responsive for mobile, as most customers like to search for the products and services that they need while they are on the move.
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