eCommerce Search: How To Increase Online Conversions

Our benchmarking shows that visitors who use eCommerce search are 3 to 5 times more likely to become customers. By creating a seamless path to purchase and removing any difficulties in the buying process, eCommerce businesses can easily guide shoppers to conversion quicker.

eCommerce Search: How To Convert More Customers

In this blog, we're sharing three features and functionality to look for when evaluating eCommerce search platforms. Though there are a ton of features available to help customers search within a site, we recommend choosing a platform with these three features as they help convert high-intent customers.

Choosing An eCommerce Search Platform

Visitors who search within a site are more likely to convert, so why not invest in an eCommerce search platform that will help your business drive more revenue? When evaluating different platforms, we encourage you to check if they have the following features.

Filtered Search

Improve the user experience by allowing your website visitors to filter their searches. Include refined categories in the site search box as someone is typing. For example, if I'm searching for an oversized sweater on a women's fashion site, I'd be more compelled to filter my search if I had the option. I could refine by price, size, color, availability and more so that I'm shown the sweaters I'm interested in.

Filtering searches by custom attributes helps your visitors find what they're looking for quicker and easier. It accelerates the buyer's journey and aids in converting more traffic into customers.

Autocomplete

Predicting people's searches before they finish typing a phrase in your site search box not only shows them search results faster, but it also makes the search process run more smoothly and help them discover other items that they might not have thought of.

This is a great tactic for modestly cross-selling related items. For example, if I'm searching for an oversized sweater, the autocomplete functionality can display "oversized t-shirts" if that's what a brand offers. Since I was originally searching for a different oversized product, I could potentially be interested in something else that is oversized and convert from that search.

To implement autocomplete, you'll need to place JavaScript code on your website. We also recommend displaying product images with the phrases, so shoppers are more likely to click and land on your product or category pages.

Promotional Banners

When conducting a search and seeing a promotional banner with an enticing offer, people are bound to engage and, potentially, convert. Display promotional banners in the site search box based on a user's search query. For example, if your eCommerce store is running a promotion on sweaters, like buy one get one free for instance, then that'd be an enticing call-to-action as I'm searching for my oversized sweater.

This is another great tactic if you want to increase average order value. Offering value makes your customers feel like they're getting a great deal and encourages shoppers to purchase more than they intended.

Our Site Search Recommendation

There are both free solutions and paid providers when it comes on-site search tools. Based on our experience with clients, we encourage eCommerce brands to to invest in a paid provider because it directly helps grow revenue in the long-term.

Plus, paid tools offer powerful features, like the ones discussed above, that improve the user experience and guide shoppers on the path to purchase. We often recommend SearchSpring to our clients because of its unique features and functionality.

SearchSpring

SearchSpring is an eCommerce search solution that offers out-of-the-box functionality to convert more searchers into customers. With its unique product search, the software automatically understands which part of a person's search query is an attribute and which part is a product.

It also understands abbreviations and displays accurate results to those who search with a special character. For example, it understands that "feet" and "ft." are the same thing. It corrects typos and is even optimized for long-tail keywords. This means your search bar will comprehend which part of the search is an attribute, modifier, category, product type, etc.

Conclusion

SearchSpring is clearly not the only eCommerce search tool out there, so we recommend conducting some research to determine a tool that best fits your website and search needs. Evaluate tracking and reporting features, like popular searches and search revenue, before investing in a tool.

If you have any questions or are looking to partner with an eCommerce agency to improve your website design and development, contact us through the form below. Also, check out other eCommerce solutions that we know and trust for building beautiful websites. We're happy to help you improve the customer experience and exceed your business goals.