3. The Most Relevant Products Don’t Appear in Search ResultsÂ
Maybe you do or maybe you don’t, but humor us and let’s say you have a boutique clothing store. Search “Small Black Dress”. What do you expect to show up? Black dresses in size small? Black mini dresses in all sizes? What if you meant “Little Black Dress”? Your search tool needs to be smart enough to understand that these words mean different things to different people. It needs to attribute these various meanings to make them relevant. Today’s ecommerce solutions use technology such as AI (artificial intelligence) and Machine-Learning to create relevant experiences based on previous shopper behavior.
2. Ability to Recommend Products, Cross-Sell, and be a Trending Products Hype-Man
An optimized search learns what customers shop for and recommends products they will like based on previous shopping activity and what similar shoppers purchased. You can also boost trending products so shoppers can see best-sellers and top-rated products right away. This leads to a better overall shopper experience and builds customer loyalty. When your customers are happy, they will come back. Better yet, they’ll tell their family and friends about it too.
1. Filtering and Sorting
This is a big one (or two). Without filtering and sorting, your store is a sitting duck. Pretend you forgot about your best friends birthday. We’re not here to judge. Life gets in the way and we’re all adults here. So now you need to get them something fast.
Your friend loves wine so you decide to get them a (sort of) fancy wine opener. You go to your favorite home store and type “wine opener” in the search bar. The results are a mess. You’re seeing everything from manual cork screws to very high end openers to wine home decor. You’re looking for filters but the categories only let you filter and sort by color, size, and price.
There’s no time to figure it out. You bounce and go to a competitors site. Once again, you type in “wine opener” and see electric wine openers with best sellers filtering to the top. Immediately you find how to filter for “electric” and “two day delivery”. You are at the checkout in less than 5 minutes with a personalized note for your friend. This is a good shopper experience – and it’s one you should be providing to your customers. The good news is, you can.
Provide a Better Experience with Better Search
Better search is about so much more than results on a page. It’s about the entire shopper experience and creating customers for life. Create the experience your customers deserve.
