72% of Sites Fail Ecommerce Site Search Expectations: 3 Steps & a Checklist to Ensure Yours Isn’t One of Them
Ecommerce on-site search is a must have for ecommerce websites. The reason this feature is so important is because it allows your customers to search for exactly what they are after. So you may be asking yourself, why do you need to accommodate for this? Well it has been proven that customers are more likely to spend 3-4x more when using the on-site search. However, just because you have an ecommerce on-site search doesn’t mean it is working to benefit your site. Here are some things to look out for:
First thing is to make sure that your on-site search is easily visible on mobile view. The reason this has become an issue is due to the fact that a lot of the time the search feature is either hidden or hardly noticeable to your customers. Therefore they either miss or can’t use this feature, which reduces your company’s intake. This is especially important as 45% of users view websites of their phone, which is a percentage that you don’t want to be cutting off. So giving it a prime location will benefit your ecommerce site.
Next step is to make sure you are using rich autocomplete with error-correction. This feature will mean that the search engine predicts a search query as it is typed. When this works well it helps users save time, iterates their search queries better, and finds the results they’re looking for, faster. Customers should also be able to find products even if they misspell all or part of their query, therefore making sure that your customer gets to the product they are after.
The last point is to use merchandising to promote products where it matters. Search is all about anticipating customers intent. With machine learning and getting faster, on-site search may be the first place to use these new technologies. This is increasingly more important for mobile view. Due to the small size of a mobile screen, typically most customers will only look at the first couple of products. Therefore, using other factors such as user behavior, location and promotions, merchants can better match your customers intent and display the most relevant results possible. This will reduce the number of customers leaving the search and will make the path to conversion quicker.
Your On-Site Search Optimization Checklist
If you’re struggling to see if your ecommerce on-site search is working effectively go through the checklist below.
- Are customers searching for items that get no results?
- What are your most popular search terms?
- Are consumers using site search at all?
- Do you have a heat map tool to see if users hover or click on the bar?
- Make sure your search bar is visible on all devices.
- Use autocomplete for quicker searches.
- Ensure misspellings still have results.
- Merchandise on-site search results for relevance.
- Turn your frequently searched for items into FAQs for SEO.
Use images rather than only text.