How Important is Search for an Ecommerce Site? Some Facts and Figures
How satisfied are you with your E-commerce site’s sales? Looking for more? If so, let me ask you a couple of questions -
- Is the “search” in your site working well?
- Are the search results relevant to your potential customers?
As per the survey1 conducted by SLI systems, 57% of retailers are not aware that, the site search results can be used for marketing and sales conversion. Are you one among them? Yes, you heard it right. Search is the key point, which if implemented properly, can be used to increase your conversion rates.
Revamping Search
A case study report2 on revamping site search of a websit,e claims that they have doubled their sales after they revamped their website search. The report says that revamping the search enabled them in maximizing site usability, by delivering more relevant, tailored search results to shoppers whilst collecting significant user data and improving brand loyalty. The predictive nature of the search allowed the customers to search and find what they are looking for much faster than before.
In their annual round table discussion ‘DreamCream’, Econsultancy3 derived some interesting statistics which are:
- The average usage of onsite search was 5.75%, within a range of 18% to 1%.
- However, when used, search performs very well: visitors converted at 4.63% versus the websites' average of 2.77% - that's 1.8 times more effective.
- Visitors using search contributed 13.8% of the revenues.
From the above statistics, it is evident that ‘search’ is helping businesses to attain an increased conversion rate.
User-Friendly Search
A user-friendly search in a website can help businesses offer a streamlined user experience to potential customers, by showing the exact product they are searching for. To be able to achieve this, you should review your e-commerce portal’s search implementation against the basic and advanced search trends.
According to a Forrester research report,
- 8 seconds is the average time visitors spend before deciding whether or not to remain on a site.
- 43 percent of visitors immediately go to the search box and searchers are 2-3x more likely to convert than non-searchers.
- 50 percent of users prefer to use a site’s internal search engine, as opposed to navigating the site.
Hence, for an e-commerce portal, it is important to carefully set up a search to offer a better user experience to their customers and thus increase their sales.
Coming back to the SLI report mentioned earlier; there was a question as to why the retailers are not using marketing search. 10% said their site doesn’t allow this, and about 27% replied they are not sure how to do this.
To address the first issue being their site not allowing, our solution for them is to use Drupal. Now to address the second issue and to help the e-commerce retailers to increase their site’s conversion rate using search, we are planning to publish a series of articles starting from the basic details on internal search tracking implementation, faceted search, personalization, search engines comparison to advanced topics like intelligence and voice search within Drupal. Please stay tuned for the same.
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