Search abandonment is pervasive so how do you close the leak?

Wondering why you should pay more attention to your online store site search? According to a 2021 survey, 94% of U.S. shoppers abandoned their sessions because they received zero or irrelevant search results. Search abandonment costs eCommerce brands more than $300 billion annually. That is a huge amount of money and shows you why brands need to implement a site search checklist. Before the holiday season, brands need to step up their site search capabilities and close the gap with site search experiences that convert.

Before we jump into the checklist, it’s worth noting that the most overlooked component brands have to master is how to deliver a well-constructed site search that works on both mobile and desktop platforms. Interestingly enough, 46% of shoppers use their mobile devices to make purchases but spend 30% less time than those accessing it through their desktop browsers.

Our checklist is based on how shoppers move through the process starting with browsing and through buying. Our checklist assumes half of the holiday shoppers already have a product in mind that they want to buy for their friends and family, which means the first step will be entering what they’re looking for into the site search bar.

How to Turn Site Search Queries Into Conversions?

The mechanics of how a search bar works may sound boring, but you would be surprised how incremental search bar experiences positively affect your customers’ shopping experiences. A site search box functions by letting buyers explore their interests, with what they input representing a tiny amount of information in understanding what they’re looking for.

Here are 10 unique ways to help shoppers discover products and convert.

• • Product Names – Including the capability to look for partial product names is a basic necessity for customers in helping them find the products they’re after.

• • Product Descriptions – Retailers have a tendency to write fancy product names that don’t match with how shoppers think.  Here’s a good example: a health and beauty retailer I recently visited sells Vegan Lip Oil, however, the search query I entered into their site search referenced Lip Balm.  The retailer referred to why Lip Oil is better than Lip Balm in several product descriptions so my search successfully returned several results to consider, making the likelihood of converting higher.

• • Product Specifications – Today’s consumers who have an affinity for local, eco-friendly materials, or low-maintenance care products will include descriptors such as “Organic T-Shirt” or “Egyptian Cloth Robes” in their site search terms. Having a search engine that detects these words in the specifications of your products will benefit your business.

• • Search Box Autocomplete – Autocomplete assists shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for quickly, revealing alternatives to what they might be looking for, or even additional items they hadn’t previously considered.

• • Search Box Displays Related Products – Consumers are visual. Lean on your most valuable sales asset – product images, to enhance your customer’s shopping experience.

• • Reviews – Most sites do not tune their onsite site search to surface ratings and/or reviews. This is unfortunate, as reviews instill trust. A Shopify study revealed that 70% of consumers consider customer ratings and reviews as valuable information in helping them decide what to purchase.

• • FAQs & Articles – FAQs and articles are opportunities to show visitors that you’ve already anticipated their burning questions and offer answers and other information that will reinforce their purchasing decisions.

• • Product Tags – Visitors’ site search experiences vary due to the keywords and phrases they type to describe what they’re interested in buying.  This is an area of improvement for most eCommerce stores.  When an intent buyer searches for shoes but specifically types “flats” as their keyword, a product tag expands the retailer’s ability to provide relevant search results.

• • Trending Categories – Within your site search bar dropdown consider including a “Trending Now” section that lists categories. Here’s an example of a Lowes search bar dropdown that lists eight categories. This is a clever way to prompt shoppers with products they were not thinking about purchasing, and it can lead shoppers to a curated set of best sellers within a given category.

• • Product Image Attribution – Image attribution automatically detects attributes from images and turns this intelligence into product tags. This technology allows retailers to easily scale their product data. When intent buyers do a site search for a “powder blue hat” that doesn’t match a product name or description, they’ll still get search results based on product images already having been analyzed by artificial intelligence in identifying what they are.

🛍️ Free Site Search Evaluation

We know that doing your own site search evaluation can be tricky if you don’t know the best practices, what criteria to evaluate, or the measurements you should consider. We’d like to offer you a free 10-page site search assessment that covers 10 search elements for eCommerce and compare it to your top competitor. The report includes actionable takeaways to convert intent buyers.

The Benefits of Product Image Attribution Tags

Despite all the advancements in technology in eCommerce, there are plenty of brands that fail to deliver a reasonable site search experience. Image attribution enables retailers to serve up the most relevant results to intent shoppers, not only improving the customer experience but also driving significantly more search-generated revenue. The best part is it can be done automatically for you!

Digitile’s image attribution model is trained and constantly tuned to detect attributions within an image with human-like accuracy. Our image attribution automatically breaks down each element within a given product image, categorizes them, and tags them with additional product metadata. For example, let’s say a contemporary leather couch has the meta tags of love seat, leather cowhide, compact build, and high-legged design that have been manually entered. Image attribution would be able to generate additional new tags such as wood legs, 5 cushions, and brush nickel hardware resulting in a better-detailed description of the item to match shoppers’ search queries.

• • Scale & Automation – Product images showcase numerous attributes that make a single item unique. AI-powered image attribution easily scans thousands of product images in seconds to identify the details within them, creating new paths for efficient product tagging.

• • Consistency – A manual process of consistently adding meta tags at scale with a high volume of SKUs by product line, vendor, or by product variant, is nearly impossible.
    When products are incorrectly or inconsistently tagged, synonyms and thematic terms may result in serving shoppers with misaligned products based on their site search queries.
    

• • Better personalized experiences – With the additional product data provided by image attribution, retailers can create even more accurate recommendations, having a deeper understanding of the information that draws shoppers to particular items.

• • Improved efficiency – Automating the tagging process frees up time and resources while reducing human error.

The Cost of a Poor Site Search Experience

This is a quantifiable metric for every retailer that can be calculated through analysis. All the major eCommerce platforms offer out-of-the-box reports for top online store searches as well as showing what queries generated zero results.

In this example, we’ve exported the data and included five new columns with the following:

• • Existing products that match keywords
  • Related products that match keywords
  • Do not sell
  • Price
  • Lost Revenue

Start with simple data to unlock revenue opportunities by identifying existing products that should have surfaced with specific keyword searches and calculating the lost revenue.  At a minimum, add product tags to eliminate the lost revenue leaks.

Search that Converts

Econsultancy found that due to the higher level of intent, site search bar users convert at a rate of five to six times higher than their counterparts not using the onsite search. This represents a huge amount.

Your strategy should be to engineer the outcome for every interaction.  

Create a roadmap for how your site search experience will evolve with your website. Strategize how your search solution capabilities can continually enhance your user experience.  It’s a shame when an otherwise beautifully designed website contains a bland, text-only search user interface. Invest time in making your search result pages visual by including small previews and images.  Don’t let users get to a “dead end” of zero results in your online store.

👉 Digitile Can Help You With Better Site Search Results

It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but utilizing Digitile’s image attribution functionality to scale and automate the tagging process makes it possible to provide an enhanced site search experience. Give prospective customers this holiday season a better way to search, with laser-focused product results, getting them to the checkout button even faster.

We know that doing your own site search evaluation can be tricky if you don’t know the best practices, what criteria to evaluate, or the measurements you should consider. We’d like to offer you a free 10-page site search assessment that covers 10 on-site search elements for eCommerce. The report includes actionable takeaways to convert intent buyers.