Finders Keepers. Fix Site Search, Fix Sales.

August 17, 2024

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8 min read

TL;42*

Optimize site search and watch your sales soar. With 72% of site searches failing expectations, improving search is a massive opportunity. Turn user frustration into satisfaction, outshine competitors, and enhance your bottom line. Even if you're not Walmart, you can do this.

Some things never change

In our new normal world of changes, uncertainty and weirdness, it’s reassuring to know that some things will always stay the same.

Wile E. Coyote never catches the Road Runner.
The Simpsons will never not predict the future.
And site search will always be neglected.

It’s not an irony, just the sugar rush feeling of finding low hanging fruit. This is a competitive advantage that’s there for the taking. Evidence indicates your competitors are probably doing it wrong. Let’s see the numbers:

A look at the leading 250 ecommerce brands shows an astonishing 72% fail site search customer expectations (Baymard). Numbers go much higher for the rest of us.
21% exit the website after two failed attempts (Econsultancy)
68% of customers consider the frustration of poor search sufficient to abandon (Forrester)

And if that’s not enough to see how big search is, check this out:

64% go directly to search when they have an “I want to buy” moment (Google)
Consumers who use search are 2.4 times more likely to buy (Demandware)
Conversions nearly double when visitors actually find what they are looking for (Moz)
69% of online shoppers go straight to the search bar when visiting ecommerce sites, but 80% leave due to a poor experience (No s to)

The evidence is overwhelming. If you want to geek out on this, check this overwhelming and succinct list of site search stats from Algolia.

And yet it remains one of the most neglected areas of investment.

It’s not about size, either

Baymard ran a thorough benchmark on the top 250 leading US and European eCommerce sites, measuring effectiveness against their 40 recommended UX guidelines.

The findings per category:

“Exact” search queries (42% of sites have issues)
“Product Type” search queries (71% of sites have issues)
“Symptom” search queries (52% of sites have issues)
“Non-Product” search queries (39% of sites have issues)
“Feature” search queries (22% of sites have issues)
“Thematic” search queries (36% of sites have issues)
“Compatibility” search queries (30% of sites have issues)
“Slang, Abbreviation, and Symbol” search queries (49% of sites have issues)

In their words:

The current overall lacking state of e-commerce search shouldn’t be understood as “users cannot use search on the benchmarked sites.” However, it is a clear indication that e-commerce search isn’t as easy to use as it should be and that users’ search success rates can be improved dramatically on many sites. [...] Furthermore, as the poor overall state of search is present within all industries, most sites will have an opportunity to create a true competitive advantage by offering a vastly superior search experience compared to that of their competitors.

This must be hard to fix though. And expensive. Right?

Wrong. It’s easier than it looks.

A guy walks out of a bar and finds his neighbor crouching under the streetlamp, frantically searching for something.

– What are you looking for, Ned?

– My glasses

– How on earth did you lose them here?

– I didn’t, but here’s where the light is!

Good experience is about shining a light in all the right places, making it easy for customers to do what they came to do.

Luckily, this is getting easier by the minute. Technology is pushing certain areas exponentially.

If you follow our agency, you know we’re skeptical about the Hype AI-Train. However, we’re happy to admit that site search is an area where natural language processing and artificial intelligence actually comes in handy and can move the needle. We’re all inclined to trigger behavior based on our availability bias. Tailored, fast and accurate results strike our love for automatic decision making. It’s useful and feels better.

There are big advances in tools that, despite having been in the market for a long time, are now supercharged, available to anyone, with reduced complexity and a price point within reach. Let’s see a few.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue

Brilliant search should allow our customers to be free to look for what they actually want, instead of just a product name, SKU or specific string of content. With AI stepping up to the plate, we're seeing a shift from mere keyword searches to understanding user intent. This evolution isn't just about finding things quicker —which is not bad at all— but about making things more intuitive so you can search like you think and like you talk.

In a nutshell, you can move beyond searching for what you want, and into what you want it for. From “Nike red shoes” to “I want comfy red shoes to run in wet cold weather”. We’re moving from simple keyword matching to context understanding. And it will keep evolving as the context includes our past purchases, activity, support requests or complaints, marketing interactions and more first-party data.

“The thing we’re most excited about that’s already happened is the way search has improved, and the way generative AI helped us really improve a solution-oriented search experience for customers and members. And it happened pretty quickly.”
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon

I know. None of us has Walmart’s budget, size or resources. Fortunately, we don’t need to. Check out the much more down to earth Rodo.com. Their brilliant AI-powered car recommendations are not only enjoyable for customers, but also a good media move that got them press exposure.

Made for me

Imagine search is fixed. Your customers now have a blazing fast autocomplete, search by picture, intent aware searches and suggestions. What’s next?

A website made just for you.

Advanced Commerce, Algolia, Bloomreach, Searchspring or Coveo, just to name some of the leading brands, are companies that make this possible with little dev or maintenance effort. By mixing real-time customer data, behavior and product information, these tools take care of traditionally annoying problems like prioritization in search results, categories, listing pages of any kind or “featured products” sections.

AI-powered merchandising will rearrange your products for each visitor based on patterns spotted during navigation. Every customer interaction helps these applications become a little bit smarter and accurate. On top of that, you have the ability to fine-tune the process depending on your business specific needs or priorities. Push overstock products, promote top sellers for easy wins, or give more relevance to underperforming products you’d like to sell more. You have control over huge sets of parameters that, when mixed with your customer preferences and habits, create a perfectly balanced layout that favors product discovery and engagement.

Findability at its best. Tailored, smooth ux that makes users go 'Wow, this platform really gets me,' in a good, not at all Black Mirror-y kind of way.

Conversational shopping is coming, too. We’ll see highly enjoyable, on-brand bots asking you four or five questions and returning a tailored, unique version of the website along with perfect recommendations from an expert virtual assistant.

The hard (but doable) part is feeding the machine

Artificial Intelligence is entirely artificial and not very intelligent.

You are what you eat, and so is the AI. Feeding it requires consistent and quality data. The more you feed it, the more accurate and useful it will be.

So the more information you give them about your product, the better the AI will be at responding, finding patterns, and getting results.

Depending on what platforms you choose and how well equipped your team is, this path will be more or less challenging. Ideally, a deep integration with your ERP can feed enough content into the product indexing.

Dream Thing

The ideal setup is to mix and match MACH software. API-first, composable ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Commercetools or Vtex have a flexible architecture that can connect you to anything, in every possible way. Add a PIM to the mix and you have a perfect feeding loop.

PIMs (Product Inventory Management platforms) are extraordinary. They detach the product data – specs, copy, digital assets, storytelling pieces, everything – from the ERP or ecommerce platform. This has many advantages:

Product data is centralized, including translations, bringing consistency to everything you publish and allowing you to edit once and update everywhere.
You can easily swap your ecommerce in the future without losing a single bit of content. You finally own the quality content that’s so hard to build over the years.
PIMs give your marketing and product teams independence without involving them in bloated ERPs with endless features and so many things to break.
PIMs play nicely with automations and multiple channels. So, from a single source of product truth, you can push your content tailored to your website, marketplaces, distributors or anywhere you want.
And of course, you can tailor channels to feed the machine.

Making a mental note to write more about PIMs in the coming weeks. Bottomline: with flexible, AI-powered search, smart automatic merchandising and solid product data you can completely transform your customer’s buying journey.

Yes we can

I’d like to debunk the idea that solving this is too expensive or complex. I’m pretty sure search sucks for other reasons:

We’re too busy fixing other tech and UX problems because everything breaks all the time. The urgent stuff gets in the way of what’s important.
Without proper tools, search features are harder to experiment and attribute failure or success.
Efforts go to sales, marketing, or managing products.
Or perhaps we simply haven’t paid any attention to search, yet.

Also, very rarely do we get customers calling support to say search sucks. They just leave in silence. If we’re reactive and prioritize fixing only the louder problems, this is one that might fall through the cracks.

I know. We just have other priorities. There’s a lot to do. Yet, I’m positive that delivering world class search is doable with a small budget, some effort, and solid teamwork.