October 17, 2017. Today, Searchspring is announcing the newest version of their Relevancy Suite with several relevancy and merchandising improvements. These include search context detection and as product boosting rules extended to main site search pages.
“Producing the most relevant search results, quickly and seamlessly for shoppers is critical for online retailers to stay competitive and grow their businesses,” says Gareth Dismore, CEO of Searchspring. “Today’s news validates our commitment to helping these retailers continually deliver the most relevant shopping experiences that delight customers and drive conversions and profits.”
The new Relevancy Suite can address the needs of shoppers searching by both product type or product attributes. Product type-based searching is similar to window shopping. With the shopper using more general terms such as “pink summer dress”. Searchspring’s product awareness technology identifies the primary item being sought (dress) and then determines the best fits through an analysis of the store’s items (meaning results like “pink summer shorts” will be deprioritized, even though they contain the same descriptors). This helps guide shoppers to exactly the kinds of products they’re looking for immediately. It avoids inundating them with non-relevant results which are often conversion killers.
In product attribute-based searches, the shopper uses more specific terminology such as “black iPhone 7”. In this case, the searcher knows exactly what he/she is seeking and is very close to the point of conversion. The Relevancy Suite is equally adept at matching search terms directly against product attribute data (name, brand, SKU) in order to bring exact results to the forefront.
The Relevancy Suite now also extends Searchspring’s product boosting capabilities. This puts online merchants in the driver’s seat by allowing them to rank and display search results according to various business priorities including – best-sellers, house brands, margin or newness, for example. Previously, product boosting capabilities were only available on category pages; now, they have been expanded to search pages. This enables greater merchandising consistency and control for retailers on a site-wide basis.
Other Relevancy Suite enhancements include accuracy improvements for synonyms, enabling faster and more flexible search; and a redesigned Search Preview tool. This provides retailers a real-time view of how and why the algorithms rank products in a certain order.