When it comes to rolling out the red carpet for high-value browsers, it pays to invest in the experience your customers get while engaging with your store’s search functionality. At its best, the on-site search can have an exceptionally positive impact on the experience of modern ecommerce customers – helping them hone in on the perfect product, efficiently and effectively.
The statistics suggest that retailers should sit up and pay attention when it comes to the performance of their store’s search features. According to research conducted by Forrester, 43% of store visitors go immediately to a search box, and customers who engage with search are two to three times more likely to convert than those who do not actively look for a product in this way.
In this article, we’ll highlight some of the opportunities that onsite search presents and suggest a few ways that you can ensure you’re optimizing the experience of these important, highly motivated visitors.
The Future Focus: Product Discovery
Let’s start by thinking in broader terms, looking at the growing importance of product discovery within the modern ecommerce experience. The process that a shopper goes through to find a product with perfect appeal should not be an arduous one – in fact, it should feel effortless. Customer expectations are certainly rising here, largely thanks to continued improvements within the way that data can be intelligently leveraged in this respect.
Advancements in personalization mean that brands can, theoretically, provide every customer with a truly curated product discovery experience, leveraging knowledge of gender, age, habits, previous purchases, and even AI-derived insights to ensure the perfect products are prioritized in the merchandising of the store they encounter as an individual.
The process of product discovery should not stop when a customer lands on an individual product page but can instead be continued all the way through to conversion, with personalized recommendations, cross sell, and bundled products.
On-site search functionality offers a huge opportunity for impact within product discovery, as products can be prioritized within search results based upon their likely relevance to the searcher – or even manually boosted for increased prominence if there’s a need to shift stock quickly.
The Key Role Played by Digital Assets
To master your product discovery experience, you need to leverage close control of all your digital assets, for example, within quick “search overlays” as customers input their queries. Graphic previews of products need to be appealing, clear and accurate. You might even wish to experiment with other forms of media at the discovery stage, for example embedding product video elements into your search results category pages. When it comes to adding appeal – the better your mastery of existing digital assets, the more creative and compelling your merchandizing can become.
Modern onsite search functionality has seen some significant improvements in recent years. With some providers, merchants or retailers can optimize visual merchandising down to variant level. This means that the most popular variant image or bestselling colorway would pull through to be the “leading” image displayed in your search results – theoretically offering maximum appeal.
Of course, for this to be effective, you need to be in complete control of your digital assets – confident that they’re accurate, complete and easily accessible, ready to be put to work enabling the very best, seamless product discovery experience.
The Opportunity Ahead
When it comes to product discovery, consumer expectations are in an unquestionable state of acceleration. Increasingly, personalization and a continuous, intuitive omnichannel experience represent the new baseline. With most of the leading brands and retailers moving towards this standard of service, any gaps in provision will become increasingly apparent.
Onsite search is a fairly simple way to optimize your store and differentiate on customer experience. We need only look to the marketplace behemoths of online retail to see how powerful dependable, sophisticated, and intelligent search functionality can be with regard to winning business.
62% of ecommerce journeys begin with a search engine – but this means that 38% of journeys start with the retailer. The chance to guide customers landing on your website to the perfect products (and increased chance of conversion) should not be squandered. Learn to leverage insight into your product attributes and characteristics to discover what constitutes appeal to your customer base. Keep close control over your product taxonomy using a digital content experience platform to organize and perfect this.
Take The First Steps Towards Better Product Discovery…
With the wealth of solutions available to help perfect your store’s search and product discovery and search, there’s no excuse for a poor experience in this field.
In fact, a poor product search experience could prove increasingly costly, according to Forrester frustration here can lead to a churn rate as high as 68%.
Lean on a superior DAM system, to ensure your digital assets are optimized, complete and working hard for you to meet the new expectations of product discovery.
