The 7 pillars of an awesome search solution

“The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in determination.”
– Usain Bolt

Like star athletes, successful businesses focus on building systems that are convenient and consistent while creating value for both their customers and merchants.

Today’s global eCommerce retailers can literally sell anything you can possibly need. Consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to products and the sheer convenience of buying a product they want when they want it. However, shoppers are now evolving into discerning connoisseurs of retail convenience. 

They are demanding more value for not just their money but their time and patronage to your brand. When businesses can’t, or worse, don’t want to adapt to the changing ecosystem, they perish. Case in point, Toys R’ Us.

What many businesses seem to forget is that shoppers still make 85% of their purchases via a journey that is connected with an experience they’ve had.

This post talks about the seven integral pillars of your eCommerce search solution.

Infrastructure

Like physical stores, an eCommerce store should have a stable infrastructure, be secure, and remain accessible 24/7. You need a system that cares about your customers just as much as you do.

The key infrastructures that are needed to support eCommerce applications are networks, Web servers, Web server support and software, electronic catalogs, web page design, and Internet access components.

While it is right that you need to stay a step ahead of competitors, it is more important to keep your shoppers safe on your site. If your eCommerce site doesn’t run as quickly and as reliably as shoppers expect, the only things your business will experience are high bounce rates, lower conversions, and more abandoned shopping carts.

Relevancy 

Historically, businesses focused on selling products and sacrificed customer satisfaction in the process. Today’s shoppers look for meaningful retail journeys. They expect online stores to enhance if not augment a brick and mortar store. They also expect that experience to be consistent. 

Tracking your shopper’s preferences and getting them exactly what they want when they want it, is relevancy. 

But that’s not all. 

Because consumers can buy products anywhere, so, to grow, you need to create experiences that are both unique and personalized. Else, you risk losing customers and business faster than you can say  ‘Free Shipping’.

Insights

In a world of ‘Amazon’ and ‘Google’, traditional merchandisers need to track and analyze actionable user events to drive personalized merchandising and marketing campaigns. 

As shoppers spend longer periods online, they generate massive troughs of raw data about what they do and how they behave. Retailers and merchandisers can use business intelligence solutions to turn unstructured customer data into powerful actionable insights. 

By using a data-centric approach, you can understand and analyze shoppers’ purchase patterns to create and consistently deliver tailor-made retail experiences. As a merchandiser, you can understand which products are doing well and which aren’t. This insight allows you to manage your inventory optimally to achieve the maximum Return On Investment (ROI). 

Let’s consider the revenue statistics of two online stores that sell similar brands of fashion clothing.

At first glance, it would appear that Store A is doing better than Store B.

Surely Store A has 3x more transactions than B and has more sales. But if you’d look closer, you’ll realize Store B has better Conversion rates, Average Session times, and a higher Average Order Value than A. 

Asking the right questions can help you get more insight into what you can do to improve conversions.

• How is a shopper’s retail experience while searching, browsing, and completing an order?
• What’s encouraging shoppers at Store B to spend longer? 
• Why are shoppers spending more while shopping in Store B?
• What is Store A doing that is attracting more shoppers to their store? Can Store B replicate this?
• How are the two stores’ site search solution build?

Seeking answers to these questions will help you trap lost opportunities for product placement and get that extra order to your cart. For instance, as someone who is training to compete in a triathlon, I was searching for bodysuits but had to refine my search to find bodysuits capable of withstanding the temperature of open seas. If the site had advertised bodysuits apart from swimming trunks in the ‘Swim wear’ page, I wouldn’t have had to refine my search filters. Thankfully (for the site), I had the patience to search. I’m sure there could be many others who didn’t have the patience to dig deeper and just left the site midway. 

Using user-driven insights can help you position your products correctly, fix issues with product suggestions, optimize merchandising options and predict demand and resolve supply issues before they crop up.

After all, failing to plan is planning to fail.

Optimized for Conversion

Conversion. The one metric most entrepreneurs and merchandisers care the most about. In the previous post, we spoke about how conversion can help you build your business. 

But conversion isn’t going to happen automatically and it surely won’t grow your revenue unless you optimize it.

According to Forrester, 1/3rd of all retail sales in 2018 was done through mobile devices. In other words, If your store does not provide a great mobile experience, you are missing out on a third (or more) of all sales. Period.

For shoppers, optimizing for conversion means they interact with an online store that ‘studies’ their behavior (using AI and ML), ‘understands’ the way they ‘speak’ (using Natural Language Processing), corrects incorrectly spelled queries (using builtin Autocorrect and Spellcheck) and suggests the right products on the fly (using Semantic Search Relevance engines).

For you, optimizing for conversion means shortening the time and effort your shoppers take to search, browse, and buy a product from your store.

To understand how you can optimize your conversion rates, think about what you’d like to experience when you’re shopping.

Would you like to view high-resolution images and different angles of a particular product? Research reveals that having multiple hi-rez images allows a shopper to ‘touch and feel’ a product online and helps increase the conversion by 3x and reduce product returns by half.

Not sure if you’ll return to buy something online? How about if you get limited-time discount coupons that you can use when you return.

Merchandising

Simply put, merchandising is the art and science of displaying the right products and offers at the right place at the right time at the right price on a website with the goal of increasing sales. 

There are a couple of ways successful retailers do this: 

Home Page

You’ve got about 3 seconds to grab your shoppers’ attention. Choose the product images you want your shopper to view, display offers that they can’t refuse, feature personalized products that are based on their shopping and browsing history, and you’ve set up the ideal ‘Home Page’ for your shopper.   

Personally, I love the way Amazon’s home page has evolved over the last 10 years. Today, as I log on to Amazon, it welcomes me with personalized shopping recommendations and promotions tailor-made for me. By the way, this is exactly what Unbxd can do for you as well. 

They even add free shipping to this mix and I’m deliriously happy to stay and shop.
So, adapt such tips and tricks to capture your shopper’s attention and make them stay!

Category Page

Over the past 3 years, shoppers have moved from using Google to search for products to searching for a product within Amazon. Another brilliant example is Lowe. Their category pages aren’t exactly glamorous but like a trusty steed, it does a pretty good job of guiding shoppers through multiple levels to the product they want. 

Or you could just use filters to help shoppers cut through the levels and get to the product. 

Product Display Page

Conventionally, shoppers use the Product Display Page(PDP), to read more about the product before they add it to their shopping cart. As a merchandiser, this is where you’ll have to convince your shopper to buy. 

Choose your CTA options with care, giving shoppers enough information about the product. Adding comprehensive product descriptions, user reviews, and product testimonials help shoppers to make a well-informed decision before they buy the product. Besides ensuring your shoppers know what they’re buying, a detailed product page with high-definition images will also reduce returns.

As for the records, when one store added customer photos to their PDP, conversion rose by 24%!

Cart Page

As the shopper makes the home-run towards order completion, ensure you cut the clutter, make it easy for your shopper to know what comes ahead, and the process is safe. 

Simplify the checkout process. 

Tweak. Test. Repeat.

Identify shoppers who’ve abandoned their cart midway, and encourage them to complete the purchase.

Integration

The internet is chock-a-block with stores and your competitor is just a 2 second Google search away. While shopaholics will trawl the internet for their next retail fix, they will visit and buy from more established brands because of their popularity, accessibility, security, choice of products, and familiarity.  

It is estimated that the bigger marketplaces cater to millions of visitors every day.

Choosing between getting a fully functional site search that is proven to work or building one from the ground up can be a daunting task. 

Just as there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, integrating a well-defined site search engine into your store helps you solve issues unique with your store. You could you be an SME or a multi-billion dollar enterprise, your site search needs are unique. What works for HSN won’t work for a store that’s selling car parts online.

Is your site search learning from queries or are they simply automating tasks?
Is your search solution solving real issues that plague shoppers?
Your site search solution should cater to use-cases specific to your business. Search engines work differently in fashion and stores selling groceries. 

Which is why we at Unbxd work closely with you from the moment you sign on the dotted line until your store is ready to go live.

User Experience

According to Adobe, 38% of shoppers will leave a website if they find it unattractive. 

Corporations worldwide are investing billions to understand how they can create an interface that is clean, easy to navigate, and intuitive. 

eCommerce stores need to go a step forward and ensure their interfaces convert casual shoppers to confirmed buyers. Because there isn’t real-time human interaction with shoppers. As merchandisers, you need feedback, both positive and negative, to drive the overall user experience and ultimately enhance user perception. 

The days when all you needed was an aesthetic template to lure shoppers in are over. Research shows 76 out of 100 visitors end up abandoning their cart mid-checkout. While you know the reasons behind it, these are appalling statistics. 

As in brick and mortar stores, your online store should reflect your brand while also delivering the user experience your shoppers have come to expect. Word of mouth works the same way too. Case in point, Amazon. While they’ve always delivered great value, they have worked on feedback from millions of shoppers to chip away at what was a cluttered interface to make it what it is today. An interface that is personalized, polished, and human-like.

Starting from the home page right up till your shopper has checked out, ensure interactions are both logical and real-world, transitions are simple and natural, feedback is real-time and features add to their convenience.

“The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not to just meet them but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Sir Richard Branson

Unlike physical stores, customers won’t think twice before they switch to a competitor that makes them ‘feel’ better.

Wrapping up, it is safe to say that running an eCommerce store can be easy. But making your brand matter and creating value is science. 

Site search allows your brand to connect with your shoppers, helping them on their journey, on their terms, making the whole experience seamless.

No single pillar of eCommerce search is more important than the other. Bringing it all together to create a successful business takes years of precious blood, sweat, and tears.
Or you can use our Site Search solution. 

Curious to know more? Drop us an email here and let us build your site’s search engine while you focus on your brand.

 

The post The 7 pillars of an awesome search solution appeared first on Unbxd.

from Unbxd https://ift.tt/2DJ2blK
via IFTTT