Searchandising is the art and science of blending search and merchandising to drive ecommerce conversions. It is one of the most effective ecommerce sales-boosting techniques.
How can searchandising help you show the right products to the right customers in an engaging and sales-driving way?
How can you design it to bring the most profit? Keep on reading to find out.
Why should you exploit searchandising?
Nearly 30% of ecommerce shoppers go directly to the search box. They expect to find relevant and accurate results that match their intent and preferences.
If they don’t find it, they usually switch to a competitor’s store.
Searchandising helps to meet those expectations and maximize the chance of a conversion. Searchandising filters out irrelevant products showing only highly-relevant ones.
Therefore, by optimizing the ranking and display of products, you can highlight your bestsellers, new arrivals, or high-margin items, so the shoppers notice them first.
All these tactics create a great user experience on your website, improve search relevance, provide more personalized recommendations, and, hence, boost sales.
How to design searchandising to boost conversion rates?
Use ecommerce search that supports searchandising
First things first, you need to have a flexible search engine (like LupaSearch) that can handle complex queries, synonyms, typos, filters, facets, and more.
Default search solutions that you can find in your CMS are not enough to ensure a converting site search experience. They usually do not support searchandising or other advanced search features.
Exploit searchandising: 10 tested design and functionality strategies
Once you have a converting ecommerce search, introduce a highly relevant, conversion-boosting searchandising functionality.
Here are the ten tested strategies on how to design searchandising for maximum value.
Develop search rules based on your business goals, KPIs, seasonality, inventory levels, etc. Adjust the ranking and display of products according to these rules. For example, you can boost certain products to the top of the results based on popularity, profitability, availability, or relevance.
Use product boosting to highlight specific products or categories you want to promote. For example, you can promote products with high ratings, reviews, discounts, or special offers.
Use personalization to customize the ranking of products based on customer preferences or behavior. For example, you can rank products higher if they match the customer’s previous browsing history.
Implement an autocomplete feature to make it easier for customers to find the right products while they type a search query.
Refine search with faceted search and apply filters to help customers narrow their search results based on specific criteria such as price, color, or size.
Use recommendation algorithms to promote related or complementary products to customers while they are searching or browsing.
Showcase promotions and discounts on search results pages to encourage customers to purchase.
Conduct A/B testing to evaluate different searchandising strategies and determine which are most effective in boosting conversion rates and sales.
Use custom ranking to sort products based on custom attributes or criteria important for your customers. Get back to user behavior data and check how relevant are your custom changes.
Look beyond the obvious and continuously improve search relevance. Consider testing how well the search processes long-tail keywords, understands complex queries and delivers query-matching results.
A key to searchandising success - continuous improvement
As said, searchandising is both the art and data science. While you can always apply UI-friendly changes, don’t forget to get back to hard data.
Customer behavior, preferences, and expectations can change over time, as well as market trends, competitors’ strategies, and product availability.
To keep your searchandising effective, regularly collect and analyze user behavior data to apply well-reasoned changes.
To do that, pick an ecommerce search solution that supports searchandising and delivers real-time data reports.
LupaSearch - your go-to partner for exploiting searchandising
Partner up with Lupa Search and exploit the benefits of searchandising. This AI-driven ecommerce search is compatible with all the major platforms and is easy to use. (Our team is always there for you.)
LupaSearch comes with all the advanced and most-wanted site search features needed for your business growth: Natural Language Processing, search customization, personalization, and data reports, to name a few.
Partner with LupaSearch to create a better shopping experience for your customers and drive more revenue to your store.