In this article I am following up on from the research by MarketingSherpa and from our previous post “perpetual shopping cart have significant impact on your conversion“. In their research, 64% respondents found a perpetual shopping cart to be an effective way of boosting sales, followed by optimized site search where 60% of responders found it to be an effective way of boosting sales.

As more than 70% of website visitors start their journey using site search when searching for products, then clearly, if your website provides  good site search with relevant results, you can expect increases in conversion rates on your site, simply because your visitors can find exactly what they were looking for.

The problem is, that many off the shelf searches found in standard shopping carts can’t handle misspellings and alternate words for the same products.  As you can see below in the feature list, it simply provides tremendous power not found in ordinary shopping carts.

So what’s the solution? Use 3rd party site search solutions with merchandising from providers like sli-systems, nextopia, omniture, atg, celebros to mention a few. These solutions from 3rd parties are easy to integrate and will work with almost any e-commerce store regardless the technology used as it’s a hosted solution. Before you commit to a full contract you are offered free 30 – 45 day trail of their products which allows you to evaluate the solution and most importantly to measure improvement in conversion rates gained by using such a solution.

Features (used from nextopia.com):

Merchandising
Control product ranking within search results on an automated and scheduled basis.With merchandising you can:
- Display promotional banners
- Create custom landing pages
- Promote select products to top of results

Error tolerant fuzzy matching
Error-forgiving logic will return relevant results based on:
- Partial term matching
- Sounds like matching – “sandels” will find “sandals”
- Singular and plural variations

Spell correction
Customers are automatically presented with suggestions based on corrected spelling.

Synonyms
Customers looking for “notebooks” at a computer retailer using “laptop” in their product descriptions will still get relevant results.

“Did you mean?” suggestions
For example when you have typed “Cannon” instead of  “Canon” did you mean suggestions offers your customers intelligent alternatives to their search queries.

Advanced search refinements
Allow narrow search results or sort by any relevant field such as size, color, brand etc.

Metrics driven ranking
Products are dynamically ranked based on variables from multiple data sources including:
- Customer search behavior
- Historical sales data
- Number of times a product is viewed or purchased
- Margins, sales rank and inventory levels etc.

Reporting and Analytics
Comprehensive reporting and analytics of customer search behavior. Reports generated include:
- What customers are finding and not finding
- Most popular search terms
- Poorly performing searches
- Highest converting keywords

Inside Sales Module
Equip your internal sales force with a customized version of search results.This custom search is only available to select staff and contains additional product information aimed at enabling increased sales.

Advice: All of these solution providers need your business so try to get a 60 day trial from them instead of 30 – 45 days. You will be more successful in your negotiations if you already receive significant traffic to your store, so if you have just started and / or have low traffic, then it may be trickier to negotiate a longer trial period, but still worth trying. During the trial period get a calculator and analyse what impact it has on your store. If there is no impact, then don’t waste money on it, but if it works, pays for itself plus makes you a profit, then go for it.