Discover the Best Practices for eCommerce Search

How big of a deal is it to have an eCommerce search engine on your site? If you are selling a variety of products, it’s ideal to have an eCommerce search engine on your site. Specifically, an eCommerce search bar at the top of your site is helpful for users to easily navigate your site. Without it, people are left to endlessly scroll through pages that are full of products they aren’t interested in. And it’s likely customers aren’t going to scroll through 50 pages just to get to the one product they want. Especially if another site offers the ease of getting search results that eliminate all other irrelevant content. Being able to search keywords, brands, and product names gives users narrow-downed results that makes finding the products they are interested in much more simple. If users are searching on your site, they are most likely there to make a purchase. By making your eCommerce search engine top notch, you can give your customers the best user experience that can ultimately lead to a purchase.

The Search Bar Location

The eCommerce search bar is a feature that retailers can add to their eCommerce sites to allow users to type or speak words about products. This then creates results for specific criteria in products and eliminates all other irrelevant products that don’t match the criteria mentioned in the search box. A common practice is to have your search bar easy to locate for users. It should be on the first page when users visit your site, and appear on all pages relevant to products. If your eCommerce search bar is hard to find, it will not be utilized and therefore be a wasted opportunity for users to find products easily. A best practice for eCommerce search is to have a search bar that is easy to find and use.

Data, Data, Data

Without understanding your potential customers, you can’t sell them products. Since eCommerce retailers are selling online, they are not meeting customers face-to-face. This means they solely rely on collecting data about what their customers are searching, buying, and sharing. Your eCommerce search engine must include ways for you to collect data,. This way, you can learn how to improve your business based on what you know about your customers. Having a search bar is one of the best ways to learn about users. This is because you can see exactly what customers are looking for before they even make a purchase. If you see many customers are searching for the same thing, you can leverage that knowledge by marketing your most popular products and running promotions that target the users who search for these products. A best practice for eCommerce search is to make sure you are leveraging the data your search bar is giving you.

Automated Features

Having features on the search bar that do the hard work for users makes eCommerce search that much better for customers on your site. One automated feature is spell correction. This feature automatically fixed errors made by users typing in the search box. They might not know how to spell a word correctly, or they typed too fast on their mobile device and made a mistake. Without a spell correction feature, the search results won’t be correct for the user. Although they can put in the extra work to make their search correct, having a spell correction feature makes the process easier for customers and increases the chances they will make a purchase on your site. Another feature is autofill. As a user starts typing, suggested searches will pop up, giving the user the ability to click on what they want to search instead of fully typing it. An added bonus of this feature is that you, as the retailer, are predicting what users want to see. By pointing them in a certain direction, it’s easier for you to tailor your products to meet the needs of your customers. A third automated feature is natural language processing. Because computers speak ‘machine language’, having a natural language processor allows users to type in their native, human language, and not have to type in code. This way, generic words and phrases can be used when searching for products and customers can get their ideal search results. Having automated features is one of the best practices for eCommerce search.

Best Practices Applied

Knowing best practices for eCommerce search is not enough. You must apply the practices to your site in order to make the most of the users have the ability to search within your site. Starting off with the search bar being in an obvious place for users is important to make sure it’s being utilized. Collecting data and using that data to learn about your customers is vital for eCommerce sales. Leveraging that data to create a better experience for your customers can boost conversions and increase returning customers. Adding automated features can enhance the user experience and make predicting what your customers are interested in much easier. Apply these practices and improve eCommerce search in your site.