If I can’t find it, I can’t buy it, right? If you are in a store and can’t find a product, you would then look for help from the sales staff. However, if no one were to help, you would probably walkout.
Similarly, in an e-commerce site, the search feature plays a key role to help and guide you. If the search fails, then you are likely to lose your customer to the competition.
According to Econsultancy, 30% of customers use the site search feature, which accounts for up to 14% of the revenue. A large study performed by Baymard Institute on the top 60 e-commerce sites in late 2019 showed some surprising statistics:
60% of sites are unable to return all the results for product type synonym, and they require the customer to use the same term. For example, ‘blow dryer’ might return 10 results, but ‘hair dryer’ returns 100 products in the search result.
27% of sites will not return results if you misspell a single character in the search text. For example, type ‘iPhnoe’ instead of ‘iPhone’ in the search, and you might not get any result.
32% of sites do not support symbols and abbreviations. Therefore, the search result will vary. For example, type the word ’TV 32 inch’ instead of ‘TV 32 in’, and the search will return different results.
46% of sites do not support thematic search queries such as ‘living room sofa’ or ‘spring coat’ or ‘winter jackets’ instead of sofa, coat & jackets.
Let’s address some of the main problems with site search and the best practices with reference snapshots from other e-commerce websites to overcome these issues.
- Search query type
- Site search field should be visible
- Autocomplete and error tolerance is a must
- Never return a ‘No results’ or ‘0 results found’ page
- Result layout and filtering options
- Optimise site search field for mobile
Search Query Types
This is the backbone of onsite search. A good search engine experience is fully dependent on how well the search queries have been categorised. Some of the commonly used search query types are:
- Exact product, product type, feature type, thematic type and natural language search.
- Some complex query types are difficult to handle from the search engine perspective. This includes symptom search query, relational search, compatibility search and others.
Now, how do we make sure we have covered the wider scope of search query types to provide the best search experience to customers? Here are some of the best practices to start with, which can eventually be improvised upon in order to improve the customer experience.
- Ability to allow search for a product name, product id, or a product category, which should be straightforward and easy to handle
- Feature search allows flexibility to find products with feature queries.
- Thematic and slang searches are tricky to handle and may not align with the actual term used by the site’s search engine but are necessary.
- Non-product search is another important feature commonly used by customers to save time and avoid contacting customer support service.
Example 1: Amazon does a good job at allowing exact keyword search by product id or model numbers.
Example 2: Curry’s feature search allows the flexibility to find products with feature queries such as search query ‘28 litre microwave’ instead of ‘microwave’ or ‘52-inch Samsung TV’ instead of ‘Samsung TV’.
Example 3: IKEA is a good example for ‘Thematic’ search since it allows customers to further narrow down the search result based on various filters such as price, category, customer ratings, etc.
Example 4: Amazon has set the bar too high when it comes to site search capabilities. Here is another example of slang search. When you search for ‘shades’ it automatically maps it to sunglasses in the result set.
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