It’s difficult to think of many more important elements of a shopping site’s design than its search features. We say ‘features’ rather than ‘feature’, because we aren’t necessarily just talking about the keyword search box – the likes of category browsing and faceted search can also be key elements.
In case you’re wondering what those latter two features are, the first should be fairly self-explanatory – it refers to when users select categories on your website and then continue working through subcategories to narrow down the items they are interested in.
Faceted search should also be very familiar to you. It’s all about the various filters – such as size, length, colour and brand – that ecommerce sites customarily use to help shoppers to get to the products that are of greatest relevance to them.
There are, though, many ways to optimise site search
You shouldn’t underestimate the complexity and sophistication of site search technology these days – but also the relative ease with which you can start improving this aspect of your ecommerce portal, as long as you know which components to focus on.
It’s worth scrutinising, to start with, how your site search currently uses synonyms and substitute terms. If your site is an online health food store, for example, people won’t necessarily look for food supplements simply by typing in the term ‘food supplements’; others could be ‘health supplements’, ‘nutritional supplements’ or perhaps something slightly more specific, like ‘digestive supplements’.
Remember, too, that there are also differences in the terminology used from one industry to the next. Your visitors may perform searches for popular acronyms, abbreviations or even slang terms that lead to a zero results page, despite the products they are seeking being available on your site.
Misspellings can easily happen too, which leaves you with a decision to make: just how tolerant should your site search be to them? You could optimise your search functionality to account for one or two letters in a search term being incorrect, which could increase the number of results produced from a user’s search, but also risks decreasing their relevancy.
Then, there are such features as predictive search and type-ahead that have become ‘in-vogue’ on ecommerce sites in recent times. These elements can be instrumental in making life easier for your prospective customers by giving them product, category and keyword suggestions as they type.
Get on the phone to Piranha Designs about a complete new ecommerce site design
Is the state of your site’s search functionality just one aspect in which you consider your brand’s present ecommerce presence to be below-par? In that case, it may be the best decision to invest in one of our comprehensive shopping site design packages, which are offered at a range of highly competitive price points and give you full Content Management System (CMS) functionality.
We can also undertake exacting bespoke designs if you prefer. So, why not enquire about the possibilities to the Piranha Designs team right now?
