Mar 12, 2024
The process of searching for products is so natural that we often take for granted how essential it is to the entire shopping experience. At the same time, customers are still faced with a plethora of site search issues like:
When these issues occur, most shoppers don’t continue browsing the site in hopes of finding what they need. They bounce, which forces brands to either retarget them with expensive ads or lose out on potential customers.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about eCommerce site search, including how to avoid these common pitfalls. We’ll explore the benefits and importance of a good search experience, key features and best practices when it comes to choosing an eCommerce site search solution, and more.
What is eCommerce site search?
The benefits and importance of good eCommerce site search
eCommerce site search software: Best practices and key features
The 3 best eCommerce site search solutions
Deliver completely personalized shopping experiences at scale with Insider
The term eCommerce site search refers to the technological solutions that deliver relevant results to people using your website search function.
These solutions (sometimes called site search engines, eCommerce search engines, or search-as-a-service) let shoppers search through your product catalog and help them find what they’re looking for as fast as possible.
They do this by combining various artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques like natural language processing (NLP) to extract the exact intent behind each query.
A good eCommerce site search experience matters for one simple reason — users expect it and will leave your site if they don’t get it. People use a website’s search functionality in around 20% of all sessions, with a 12% exit rate after an unsatisfactory result.
Put simply, if your search experience isn’t optimized, you’re losing potential customers. At the same time, when someone uses your site search bar, you get a chance to make a sale by delivering a smooth, useful, and personalized user experience.
The benefits of a good site search experience include:
When it comes to eCommerce site search, the first and most important thing to do is to make the search box highly visible. Giant retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Alibaba all do this by placing the search bar at the top of the homepage or even in the middle of the hero section.
Beyond this obvious (but still overlooked best practice) there are a few other site search functionalities to consider. Below, we’ll explore four essential features to look for and the best practices they enable.
At a fundamental level, a site search solution has to return accurate results to every user. This is easy when searchers use very specific language that describes the product and its attributes in detail.
However, these are a small number of all searches. According to the Baymard Institute, there are eight key search query types:
Using a solution that supports as many of these search query types as possible is essential for delivering a great customer experience. According to Baymard, over 42% of all websites perform below the acceptable eCommerce UX performance level across these eight types, so supporting just a few of them can set you apart from the competition.
Sorting is another common behavior that users perform when searching for products, especially when their queries aren’t very specific and they need to organize the results in a way that suits their needs.
For example, price-conscious customers may sort from cheapest to most expensive, while customers looking for the best-possible option may sort based on ratings and reviews.
Put simply, the more sorting options you can provide, the higher the chance each searcher can organize the results in a useful way.
The term faceted search refers to the process of using attributes to filter down a large selection of data. In the context of eCommerce, this means letting users narrow down their initial search results using various filters like:
Again, this is something that the top eCommerce brands have done for years, yet many online stores still haven’t implemented it. That’s why it’s a good idea to look for a site search solution that lets you configure different types of faceting filters, based on your product catalog and customer needs.
Like we said, people rarely search for the exact product they need in explicit detail. They often use synonyms and make typos, so your site search solution should still return relevant results in those cases.
Many site search solutions have this as built-in typo tolerance that works automatically. Some also let you manually add synonyms to a specific keyword, so you can be sure that they yield the same results.
In this section, we’ll explore three platforms that can help you deliver a personalized site search experience to shoppers.
The first one (Insider) is a complete personalization platform that can tailor all elements of the customer experience, including site search results, product recommendations, emails, push notifications, messaging channel communications, and more. The final two providers (Algolia and Hawksearch) also offer some complementary features but are mainly focused on site search.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp.
As an advanced personalization solution, Insider has been ranked as the best personalization engine by customers on G2.
Our platform offers a specialized site search and merchandising solution called Eureka. This AI-powered solution lets you improve product discovery by:
Below, you’ll learn how you can leverage Eureka for your business and use the rest of Insider’s toolkit to deliver personalized customer experiences that improve conversions, revenue, and retention.
In a nutshell, Eureka works by:
You can easily integrate Eureka on your site and launch instant search campaigns without coding. This is possible thanks to our pre-built template and no-code visual editor, which lets you easily customize all styling and CTA elements.
Alternatively, you can connect to our API and customize everything to your needs using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Beyond that, EUREKA also lets you take advantage of:
As an advanced website personalization solution, Insider also lets you tailor all other elements of your site (outside of search results). This is essential for optimizing your conversion rates and making the most out of the budget your spend to bring people to your site.
With Insider, you can personalize your site’s:
Lastly, Insider offers a ton of proven templates for all sorts of eCommerce website personalization and engagement use cases, like:
You can easily customize these templates using our no-code editor. This means you can quickly launch, analyze, and optimize website personalization campaigns, without a heavy reliance on technical teams.
Unlike many website personalization platforms, Insider doesn’t just focus on tailoring the customer experience across your site. Instead, our platform brings together 12+ plus channels under one umbrella, including:
This means you can reach customers across these touchpoints and personalize every interaction you have with them. For example, you can use Insider to:
2. Reach users on messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE. These channels are fantastic for a plethora of use cases, like sending personalized promo messages, price drop alerts, event reminders, and more. You can even create end-to-end shopping experiences inside WhatsApp using its conversational commerce feature.
3. Target specific detailed customer segments across Google, Facebook, and TikTok. With Insider, you can build highly targeted customer segments using standard, predefined, and predictive characteristics. You can then export and target those segments across various ad networks. Monster Notebook used this strategy to generate a 2.9x return on ad spend and reduce CPA by 65%.
You can bring all of these channels together and ensure you’re delivering a cohesive experience with Architect — our customer journey builder and marketing automation tool. Architect can be used to build simple automated flows and complex omnichannel campaigns for all sorts of use cases like:
You can control the entire process via a simple drag-and-drop editor. Plus, Architect’s AI-powered capabilities ensure every message is sent on the right channel, at the right times, and to the right audience segments.
For more details, you can check out:
Overall, we’ve seen that Insider’s ability to consolidate so many channels under a single umbrella helps companies:
Algolia is an AI search suite for eCommerce, marketplace, media, and Saas businesses. Its AI Search product helps users find what they’re looking for by combining semantic search with keyword search. It also uses other techniques like query categorization, dynamic re-ranking, personalization, and more to deliver the most relevant results. Lastly, Alogilia can be used in different scenarios, like product search, image search, voice search, and more.
Hawksearch is a product discovery solution for businesses in industries like eCommerce, healthcare, higher education, entertainment, publishing, and more. Their Smart Search tool supports four main use cases:
Insider’s Eureka enables your website or mobile app to proactively recommend the most relevant products to each customer based on their browsing history, preferences, and more. Eureka also delivers a smooth search experience with advanced faceting filters, typo and synonym tolerance, and more.
At the same time, Insider offers way more than a site search solution. Using our enterprise marketing platform, you can:
Finally, Insider versatile setup options, experienced support team, and massive template library will let you get started and see a meaningful return on your investment as quickly as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).