People make mistakes while they search - that’s a fact you cannot disregard as a retailer. Every typo can lead to a failed user search request.
If your customer is looking for a swimwaer and your website search engine does not provide results for swimwear, you might lose a large part of potential sales.
How can you handle misspellings and typos in your ecommerce site search to deliver a satisfying user experience?
Why does a typo-proof site search matter?
On average, users that use the search account for approximately 40% of total business revenue. However, one condition applies - the ecommerce store has to satisfy users’ search requests and deliver matching products.
Yet, roughly 84% of companies do not allocate resources to optimize and improve their site search effectiveness.
In more than half of the websites, users must use the exact product naming as on the website (like “hair dryer”). If a user enters a different word for the product (like “blow dryer”), the search engine returns a zero-result page.
Now that is a costly missed opportunity.
If customers cannot find the products they are looking for, they tend to feel frustrated and abandon the website. Therefore, a typo-proof search function can increase the chances of customers finding what they are looking for, enjoying a seamless user experience, and making a purchase.
How can you achieve that?
How to handle misspellings and typos in a site search?
One critical step to improve user experience and increase conversion rates is effectively handling misspellings and typos. Here are a few strategies to achieve that.
Use spell-check
Same as a word processor suggests correct spellings, an ecommerce search function can do the same. Make sure your ecommerce site search supports spell-check functionality regardless of the user language. It should automatically recognize the typo, correct it, or suggest a correct spelling variation.
It ensures that customers are presented with the correct products even if they have made a spelling mistake.
Also, check how your site search processes low results. If a user makes a mistake in his query and the search returns no results (or the amount of results is pretty low), the search engine should suggest a “did you mean” query. It should provide possible queries with spelling errors corrected, according to the data in your product feed.
Add synonyms
Another way to handle misspellings is to include synonyms in the search functionality. Use custom synonym functionality to add predefined matches for similar words (like Tv, Television, Televisor), to ensure that the users will always find what they are looking for.
To understand how your users name your products:
- Think of different ways people call the same products (US-UK English differences, jargon);
- Run market research and ask your audience (directly on a website or company’s social media account);
- Look at site search statistics. It should provide an overview of how your store visitors search for and name your products. Use this data to update the synonym database.
Custom synonyms allow you to easily adapt the search experience for your specific product assortment.
Turn on Similar Queries
You might greatly benefit from turning on Similar Queries for multi-word queries that return a low amount of results (or none).
Select a site search that offers the ability to configure Similar Queries. Your site search might suggest similar phrases, without one or more of the words in the original search phrase, to reduce the amount of zero results queries.
It can significantly improve your search relevancy, satisfy more user requests, and drastically boost conversion rates.
Get to the core of search queries regardless of typos with LupaSearch
If you are looking for an effective ecommerce site search that always gets to the core of users’ search queries, look no further than LupaSearch.
LupaSearch is a perfect AI-powered ecommerce site search that delivers a satisfying user search experience despite typos and misspellings.
You can use LupaSearch on any major platform with no coding experience. The LupaSearch team is here to assist you in your business growth journey.
Contact the LupaSearch product consultant today and receive a free demo.