Site search matters, yet many ecommerce sites are actually deterring customers through poor experiences. Indeed, a fifth of UK shoppers are not satisfied with retailers’ search results.
RichRelevance has surveyed consumers about their attitudes to site search on retailers’ websites, finding that some retailers have room for improvement.
Across the vast expanses of the Internet, drawing customers to your site is half the battle. The other half is helping them out once they get there.
Many, if not all, e-commerce sites have a function allowing consumers to quickly search for (and hopefully find) the products they want. And consumers are happy to use them. RichRelevance reports 83% of consumers say the search box on a Web site is important or extremely important when shopping online, and three-quarters of them say they always or often use the search box when shopping on a retailer’s site.
Some 48% of shoppers participating in a study released Tuesday say the ability to easily search and find products on a retailer’s Web site can make or break a deal. For 37% the stakes rise during the gift-giving season, according to those participating in the study.
Advertising Week seems to signal the beginning of the holiday shopping season, when retailers put a stronger emphasis on fine-tuning search and seem to pay more attention on Web site design.
OK, so when U.S. consumers are searching for gifts online, they apparently are most concerned about the ability to search for and find products on a retailer’s site, according to a recent report.
Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit survey said that more than one-third of shoppers ranked the ease (or lack thereof) of finding and searching for products on a retailer’s or brand’s site their top priority when shopping online for gifts.
More than a third of shoppers rank the search box as more important when gift shopping compared with everyday shopping, according to a new study.
Consumers shopping for gifts on an e-retail site rank the ease of searching for and finding products as the No. 1 site priority, according to a survey released today at Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit.
Interactive search experience adapts and learns throughout each shopper’s journey to surface products they want to purchase
Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit — Dallas, TX — September 27, 2016 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today launched Find™, the newest product in RichRelevance’s product suite. Built on the Relevance Cloud™, Find uses powerful real-time personalization to elevate the site search experience – on every device – by instantly connecting shoppers with the products they intend to buy. Find focuses on the customer, providing highly relevant search results based on real shopping behavior, while also delivering the full range of tools that retailers need to innovate the search experience without reliance on IT resources.
“Find elevates site search to meet customer expectations for relevant and personal interactions at every touchpoint, especially in this mobile-first world,” said Eduardo Sanchez, President and CEO of RichRelevance. “For the past 18 months, our customers have told us they wanted us to build a comprehensive and personalized search solution because it was a critically important function. They’ve told us how they struggle with solutions that are archaic and unable to keep up with new data and devices. Find is our answer to delivering the kind of search experience that consumers want – and that we know is possible.”
Site Search is Broken
Site search technology has stagnated for nearly a decade, and currently almost 50% of all e-commerce site searches end in failure. A bad search experience is amplified on mobile devices, where the smaller form factor leaves a tiny margin for error. This has significant consequences for retailers: research from RichRelevance shows that 73% of U.S. shoppers are extremely likely or likely to leave a retail site that doesn’t provide good search results, and 37% are not at all likely to return.
According to Brendan Witcher, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research: “Site search often falls short in its core responsibility: creating an exceptional online experience by delivering the most relevant, contextually-driven answer from a customer query. Traditional site search simply wasn’t designed years ago to properly handle today’s dynamic online and mobile engagements. Search is limited in its ability to effectively serve today’s customer.”
Find: Personal, Real-Time & Friendly
With Find, RichRelevance has launched the first comprehensive personalized site search solution available in the market in the last decade. Through the Relevance Cloud, Find leverages omnichannel data on current and past behaviors, as well as brand affinities and price preferences to algorithmically surface the most relevant products for a given query, context and device. Find also introduces Findability, a real-time metric that measures the success or failure of a search query at scale to help retailers understand if their shoppers are locating the items they wish to buy.
With Find, for the first time ever, site search is personal, real-time and friendly:
- Personal: Find uses real-time shopper behavior to match individualized results to user intent, increasing Findability across all devices. Find predicts and suggests products and keywords with every tap or keystroke, continuously refining the product assortment displayed on screen as the shopper completes their search.
- Real-Time: Find erases indexing delays, allowing results to be based on signals received less than one second earlier. Global pattern & trend alert notifications allow merchandisers to respond is real-time to changes in search behavior, improving sales.
- Friendly: Find’s intuitive dashboard and reporting empowers business users to execute changes and manage the site search function without relying on IT resource. For shoppers, Find delivers a wholly unique search experience that is dynamic and engaging.
Find: Key Features
Find integrates state-of-the-art search technology into the Relevance Cloud platform to debut the most innovative technology architecture for site-wide search personalization. The key features of Find include:
- Personalized Search & Browse: Attribute Sort Options; Algorithmic Sorting; Contextual Considerations; Real-time Affinities; Multi-language; Assortment Equalizer; Predictive faceting; Wisdom of the crowds
- Shopper Experience: Interactive search results dynamically change as shopper applies filters or additional keywords; Visual feedback with explanation of why shopper is seeing particular results
- Merchandising Controls: Conditional Boosting; Conditional Burying; Filtering; Linking
- Testing & Reporting: Personalization MVT; Wisdom of Crowds MVT; Catalog fields MVT; Findability Monitor; Query Alerting
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554