One of the most important elements of running a successful multi-vendor eCommerce store is providing a seamless shopping experience to the shoppers. Regardless of the industry you’re in, if your customers aren’t able to find out the products they’re looking for, they will hardly take a few seconds to switch to some other site or a competitor’s. On the other side, if they quickly find products with a painless search experience, your customers will continue shopping and will surely come back to your site in the future.
Today, consumers buy more on mobile and online, and it is becoming more difficult for a retailer to stand out from the crowd. Considering that more than 40% of online shoppers who purchase from an online store use the site search, and 80% of those customers are likely to abandon a site after a poor site-wide search experience, you’d surely think more online retailers would invest in site search.
As compared to other metrics of an eCommerce website, search features have a direct impact on user experience, bounce rate, conversion, and sales. More precisely, a good search feature helps increase the sales by minimizing time & effort spent by customers on their purchases.
So how can you improve your eCommerce site’s search features to do more than just return results? Here are some essential features that make Search more user centered, customizable, and interactive:
Improving Conversion Rates with Search box
Search bar or Search box is the first and most important point of a product search journey, but it is often overlooked. It is an incredible tool for any eCommerce store that takes customers to their desired product and leads to the path of improved experience, and sales.
So, your site’s search box needs to be visible to the users, or they’ll head to competitor’s site to complete their shopping. Here are four ways to enhance your search box, if it isn’t:
Include a clear and visible search icon and nicely differentiated input fields which entice visitors to perform the search.
Place the search box at a convenient and noticeable location where customers can find it in a few seconds.
Auto-complete is an additional tool that shows up the suggested products faster even with the spelling mistakes.
By featuring the product images in the search results, visitors can see the products available without browsing through the product pages. Thus, increasing the chances of a customer buying. Make sure that the images are clear in a thumbnail form and displayed along with the product description.
Filters & Sorting Options
Offering various customization options as per your customers’ taste can be helpful to your business’ growth. You can implement filters for special categories like best-selling products, new arrivals, featured products, etc., to create more engagement. Apart from that, filters based on brand, size, preference, color, price, etc., can be implemented to streamline the product search process so that the customers don’t have to browse much on your store to arrive at the product of their choice.
UI/UX Design Aspect
Everyone knows, the poor user experience is one of the major reasons behind shopping cart abandonments and enhancing the UI /UX of the e-commerce website helps in leaving a lasting impression on your potential customers.
Provide various options like breadcrumbs, multiple product images, option to add to favorite/add to wish list for later purchase or an option to change the layout of the search results as per their preference.
Divide the search results into multiple pages, or show them in chunks with a ‘Show More’ option rather than implementing an infinite scroll for every result set.
In a nutshell
eCommerce owners must continuously strive to enhance the customers’ shopping experience for a seamless business growth. In the hustle of bringing more traffic to your site, you should not forget to provide the customers an easy way to reach the products they want to buy.
When a visitor on your website quickly finds the desired product, it leads to the satisfying shopping experience. In the long term, it also helps in creating a loyal customer base by persuading customers to come back to your store for their future purchases. Ultimately, this is all an eCommerce business is all about.
Is there any other search feature for eCommerce website which can contribute towards better conversion? If you think so, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from our readers.
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