7 Best Practices for Superior Ecommerce Site Search

By: Richelle Monfort

Our online search behavior has been conditioned by our long association with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.

Our hands and eyes unconsciously seek a magnifying glass in the top menu or sidebar in order to type in our queries.

We take it as a given that every website would have a search box—too gaudy, too small, too huge, but a box, nevertheless.

However, you would be surprised how many websites have ignored basic UI, ecommerce, and conversion optimization rules. In fact, some websites (mostly non-ecommerce) don’t have a search bar at all. Take the University of Rochester’s sports site, for example:

Unimaginable! What if someone was trying to recall the name of the soccer coach during the years they went to the university?

Contrast it with a B2C product seller—the Chicago Music Exchange, which offers an advanced search engine with top searches, suggestions, and product listing snippets for their guitars:

This led me to think why having a search bar or box is so important and what could be some best practices for site search.

According to the 2015 Econsultancy Conversion Report, 59% of site owners use customer journey analysis to improve conversion rates. Site search is an integral part of customer journey analysis. Your search data provides a glimpse into your consumer’s habits and product trends, which in turn help you derive valuable insights into user experience and marketing.

Another major benefit is that search brings home conversions (read, sales). There are truckloads of examples out there of how a strategically placed or smart search bar improves sales.

So here goes—let’s dissect the various attributes of the product search function.

Have the Basics in Place

I think the standard best practice for everyone is to have a prominent search bar with autosuggest.

But a lot of websites are far from this best practice. Case in point, the main website for the University of Rochester (hey, I’m not letting them off so easily).

It has the standard search box on the top right.

All good so far.

Whatever happened to those innumerable UX and CX guidelines and best practice lessons? Are they only restricted to websites like eBay and Amazon? Are visitors to small business websites supposed to carry a spade?

Thankfully, that’s not true. A lot of ecommerce builders offer smart search add-ons and extensions that offer rich auto-complete, suggested items, semantic matching and even images to improve the shopping experience and drive sales. From a DIY website builder like Squarespace to the enterprise ecommerce platform Shopify, you will find many tools that offer advanced search plugins that can be integrated with your site. Shopify alone has over a dozen of these in their app store.

Read More >> https://www.salehoo.com/blog/7-best-practices-for-superior-ecommerce-site-search