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In general, retailers still seem to underestimate the importance of site search, but the topic is gaining momentum. Much of the attention is due to ongoing developments in the field – in various directions. Site-search is also getting some attention in the context of holiday shopping, which is trending in the eCommerce industry right now for obvious reasons.
The Value of the E-Commerce Search Box Still Underestimated
A new study from the personalisation company RichRelevance really highlights the importance of site search from the consumer perspective. Out of approximately 1,000 American shoppers surveyed, 83% responded that the search box is either important or very important when shopping. Additionally, 76%, or more than 3 out of 4 shoppers “always” or “often” use the search box on eCommerce websites.
“This is an important wake-up call for the retail industry […] Site-search is tremendously important to shoppers, but under-delivers when it comes to all the channels where consumers shop today. The reality is that there hasn’t been major advances in site search in a decade, and it’s hurting retailers’ bottom lines,” says Diane Kegley, CMO of RichRelevance.
Of course, there have been major advances in site-search, but they haven’t necessarily been communicated to retailers. Most small to medium-sized eCommerce websites (as well as some of the large ones) continue to rely on simple text-matching search engines with added synonyms.
A few reasons why site-search is often neglected
Most eCommerce retailers don't know how poor their site-search is. A good rule of thumb to judge if your site-search needs improvement is if the exit rate on search result pages is close to or on par with your website's average bounce rate. Your search result pages should have some of the lowest exit rates on your site, since those searching have intent and often only exit search pages if results are irrelevant or no results were actually presented.
Another measure is your null-result rate (i.e. the percentage of total searches executed that return zero results). If that rate is above 5%, there is likely room for improvement.
Site-Search is Even More Important for Holiday Shoppers
Along with the approaching holiday season comes lots of tips and how-tos on how to optimise your eCommerce website ahead of the (gift-)shopping spree. An interesting piece by Internet Retailer elaborates on the above-mentioned study to explain why site-search is likely even more important when shopping for gifts. The quite plausible theory is that shoppers are more likely to use the search box when looking for products that they wouldn’t normally purchase.
NLP, Semantic Search and Deep Learning
Approaches such as natural language processing (NLP) and semantic search continue to generate some buzz. Natural language processing is essentially just what it sounds like – a major challenge related to software that correctly interprets natural human language.
Meanwhile, Deep Learning, the language-agnostic model utilised by Loop54, is a very hot topic when looking at Google Trends. Although the trend cannot be attributed to Deep Learning in eCommerce alone, it looks quite remarkable.
Needless to say, there is a lot of movement in the area of eCommerce product search.
