Site search is an excellent source of an usually overlooked stream of ecommerce income. A relevant search influences almost 40% of all online purchasers.

If you provide a highly accurate and converting site search, you can drastically boost your customer spending, increase sales and brand recognition, and scale your business.

So, how can you achieve that?

Why is a relevant site search critical for ecommerce success?

An ecommerce site search, depending on its effectiveness, can make or break your ecommerce business’s success.

The role of a site search is to help website visitors find the products they are looking for. If it does the job effectively, site search can increase customer satisfaction and improve user experience.

Additionally, a site search allows customers to discover products they did not know existed. It leads to increased sales and higher average order values.

What’s there to lose?

If you do not satisfy the expectations, every fifth website visitor will immediately abandon your website. [1]

As a retailer, you have limited chances to let your customers down. Instead, learn how to boost customer spending by improving your site’s search engine.

Here’s how.

1. Intuitiveness to use:

Start with the basics. Is your search box easy to spot when landing on a website? Every third website visitor uses the search box if he sees one.

Then, make sure your site search is intuitive to use. A well-designed and user-friendly site search function can radically improve the user experience for your customers.

It can make it more likely that they will find what they are looking for and ultimately lead to increased spending [2].

2. Assist users in the search process:

A relevant site search should predict user search intent and help users refine their search queries.

For that, use search suggestions and autocomplete features. Search suggestions and autocomplete can help guide customers to products or pages they may be interested in.

Besides, you can narrow down the search term that would help to provide highly accurate product suggestions. It can increase the discoverability of your products and lead to higher sales [3].

3. Make data-driven decisions:

Long-term and sustainable business growth translates to continuous improvement of usability, accuracy, and product offerings. For that, it is beneficial to analyze search data.

By analyzing search data, you can gain valuable insights into what your customers are looking for and what products or categories are trending.

Use this information to optimize your site and product pages to better meet customer needs, which can lead to increased spending.

Also, you should pay close attention to queries that do not satisfy your users. These are the ones that brought users to no-results pages.

Analyze the data to know what products customers expect your website to have, plan your stocks accordingly, and increase customer spending on your website [4].

4. Offer promotions and discounts:

Just like in a brick-and-mortar store, offer special offers directly in your ecommerce search. It can be a great way to drive sales and boost customer spending.

You can rank certain products (or categories) higher on the search results page. (For that, use Product Merchandising.) For instance, you can boost some brands or discounted products. It helps your website visitors notice them first and fall for the I-want-to-buy moment.

Eventually, this can translate to increased consumer spending for your ecommerce business [5].

LupaSearch - an effective site search partner for your business success

LupaSearch is an effective ecommerce site search solution that can help you radically increase your business sales. This AI-driven site search solution increases customer spending by providing a more accurate and converting site search.

On average, businesses that introduced the LupaSearch search engine on their website reported increased conversion rates by up to 8 times [6].

Make the most out of your ecommerce site. Contact the LupaSearch product consultant, request a free demo, and see how this site search works on your website.

References

  1. Tsagkias, M., King, T., Kallumadi, S., Murdock, V., & Rijke, M. (2020). Challenges and research opportunities in eCommerce search and recommendations. ACM SIGIR Forum, 54, 1 - 23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3451964.3451966.

  2. Jansen, B., & Molina, P. (2006). The effectiveness of Web search engines for retrieving relevant ecommerce links. Inf. Process. Manag., 42, 1075-1098. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2005.09.003.

  3. Singh, S., Farfade, S., & Comar, P. (2023). Multi-Objective Ranking to Boost Navigational Suggestions in eCommerce AutoComplete. Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3584649.

  4. Srivastava, A., Mahmood, A., Chaudhary, A., Sahai, A., Kumar, P., Banerjee, K., & Kumar, A. (2023). CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR PREDICTION FOR ONLINE SHOPPING: A REVIEW. International Journal of Engineering Applied Sciences and Technology. https://doi.org/10.33564/ijeast.2023.v08i02.039.

  5. Harris, L. (2005). B2B Marketers Integrate Precision Search to Boost Profitabilityand Increase Satisfaction Across the eCommerce Value Chain. The Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, 10, 1-4. bb-marketers-integrate-precision-search-to-boost-profitability-and-increase-satisfaction-across-the-ecommerce-value-chain.pdf (icommercecentral.com)

  6. Trotman, A., Kallumadi, S., & Dagenhardt, J. (2020). Introduction to special issue on eCommerce search and recommendation. Information Retrieval Journal, 23, 115 - 116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10791-020-09370-4.