Provide good searching on your e-commerce website

Written by Chris Barling
Friday, 11 November 2011 00:00

Bad search kills sales. The two problems are no results and too many or irrelevant results. Use a thesaurus to help – is it a boat or a ship, or a yacht? Use email, live chat and pop ups to try to salvage failed searches. Make sure that searching is fast and accurate, and provide searching on alternate information such as price range, colour or manufacturer.

Create a drop-down list of the common attributes of your products to supplement your normal keyword searching. If someone is looking for a four-door car on your site, they don’t want to have to guess if you called it ‘four-door’, ‘4-door’, ‘4dr’ or something else. The sales process should enable your customer to find the product most appropriate for them, and having found it, buy it. Search is an important part of this process.

 

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