eCommerce platform specialist and owner of magic42, a Birmingham based development agency.
Here’s a repeatable process we use that will help you understand your customer search experience on your eCommerce site in just four steps… 1️⃣ Pull together a report of the top 100 search queries from the last month 2️⃣ Group each query by similarity, such as… iPhone case, iPhone X case, iPhone X leather case, and so on into ‘buckets’ 3️⃣ Using your own website search fields, input each of these types of search queries to see their results. What would be the best result for a user for each? Is it a product, category or buying guide? The end result may surprise you. In our experience, product results aren’t always the best search results on their own. If you have a large catalogue of items, just think of how many will appear for each search query. Many items will likely be hidden out of sight on a limited screen size, or their stock and review info lost in a sea of multiple products. When paired with the fact that many search queries aren’t product-specific, it’s difficult for your website to recommend the right products. However, provided category pages (PLPs) will provide a varied list of related products to the customer’s search queries. For example, instead of “iPhone” bringing up a list of all iPhone products in your catalogue, it could bring up a top-level category page with iPhone devices, iPhone cases, or iPhone peripherals to give the customer three easy choices. These could then break down the products further for site visitors to find what they need with ease. Search is complex, but you likely have data available at your fingertips, and your own knowledge of your site to help provide solutions for your customers. But does your search solution give the right results? Need advice in this area? Let me know as we’ve evaluated and recommended solutions across platforms for many years. #eCommerce #CustomerExperience #OnlineRetail #CustomerSearch #ProductListings
