Tag Archives: site search

Findability on an E-commerce Site

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Findability on any e-commerce site is a beast all on its own. What if visitors’ searches return no results? Will they continue to search or did you lose your chance at a sale?

While product findability is a key factor of success in e-commerce, it is predominantly enabled by simple search alone. And while simple search usually doesn’t fulfill complex needs among users, website developers and owners still regard advanced search as just another boring to-do item during development. Owners won’t go so far as to leave it out, because every e-commerce website has some kind of advanced search functionality, but they probably do not believe it brings in much revenue.

Research shows:

  • 50% of online buyers go straight to the search function
  • 34% of visitors leave the site if they can’t find an (available) product
  • Buyers are more likely than Browsers to use search (91%)

What can’t be found, can’t be bought:

  • Search is often mission critical in e-commerce
  • Users don’t know how to spell
  • Users often don’t even know how to describe it

First of all, Findability can accelerate the sales process. And faster sales can increase conversions, because you will not be losing customers who give up trying to find products. Furthermore, fast, precise and successful searches increase your customers’ trust.

On both e-commerce and shopping comparison sites, users can find products in two different ways: searching and browsing. Searching obviously means using the site search whilst browsing involves drilling down through the categories provided by the website. The most common location for a site search on e-commerce sites is at the top of the page, and generally on the right side. Many e-commerce sites have a site search, user login, and shopping cart info all located in the same general area. Keeping the site search in a location that is pretty common will help it to be easier to find for some of your visitors who are accustomed to this trend.

Faceted search should be the de facto standard for an e-commerce website. When a user performs a simple search first, but then on the results page, he or she can narrow the search through a drill-down link (for a single choice) or a check box selection (for multiple non-overlapping choices). The structure of the search results page must also be crystal clear. The results must be ranked in a logical order (i.e. for the user, not for you) by relevance. Users should be able to scan and comprehend the results easily. Queries should be easy to refine and resubmit, and the search results page should show the query itself.

Spell-check is also crucial. Many products have names that are hard to remember or type correctly. Users might think to correct their misspelling when they find poor results, but they will be annoyed at having to do that… or worse, they might think that the website either doesn’t work properly or does not have their product.

Query completion can decrease the problems caused by mistyping or not knowing the proper terminology. Queries usually start with words; so unambiguous character inputting is crucial.

Search analytics, contextual advertisement and behavioral targeting is more than just finding a page or a product. When people search they tell you something about their interests, time, location and what is in demand right now, they say something about search quality by the way they navigate and click in result pages and finally what they do after they found what they were looking for.

A good e-commerce solution uses search technology to:

  • Dynamically tailor a site to suit the visitors’ interests
  • Help the user to find and explore
  • Relate information and promote up- and cross sales
  • Improve visitor satisfaction
  • Increase stickiness
  • Increase sales of related products or accessories
  • Inspire visitors to explore new products/areas
  • Provide-increased understanding of visitor needs/preferences

–> Convert visitors into returning customers!

What Differentiates a Good Search Engine from a Bad One?

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That was one of the questions the UIE research group asked themselves when conducting a study of on-site search. One of the things they discovered was that the choice of search engine was not as important as the implementation. Most of the big search vendors were found in both the top sites and the bottom sites.

So even though the choice of vendor influences what functionality you can achieve and the control you have over your content there are other things that matter, maybe even more. Because the best search engine in the world will not work for you unless you configure it properly.

According to Jared Spool there are four kinds of search results:

  • ‘Match relevant results’ – returns the exact thing you were looking for.
  • ‘Zero results’ – no relevant results found.
  • ‘Related results’ – i.e. search for a sweater and also get results for a cardigan. (If you know that a cardigan is a type of sweater you are satisfied. Otherwise you just get frustrated and wonder why you got a result for a cardigan when you searched for a sweater).
  • ‘Wacko results – the results seem to have nothing in common with your query.

So what did the best sites do according to Jared Spool and his colleagues?
They returned match relevant results, and they did not return 0 results for searches.

So how do you achieve that then? We have previously written about the importance of content refinement and information quality. But what do you do when trying to achieve good search results with your search engine? And what if you do not have the time or knowledge to do a proper content tuning process?

Well, the search logs are a good way to start. Start looking at them to identify the 100 most common searches and the results they return. Are they match relevant results? It is also a good idea to look at the searches that return zero results and see if there is anything that can be done to improve those searches as well.

Jared Spool and his colleagues at UIE mostly talk about site search for e-commerce sites. For e-commerce sites bad search results mean loss of revenue while good search results hopefully give an increase in revenue (if other things such as check out do not fail). Working with intranet search the implications are a bit different.

With intranet search solutions the searches can be more complex when information not items, is what users are searching for. It might not be as easy to just add synonyms or group similar items to achieve better search results. I believe that in such a complex information universe, proper content tuning is the key to success. But looking at the search logs is a good way for you to start. And me and my colleagues here at Findwise can always help you how to get the most out of your search solution.