Perfecting Your Search Functionality Can Lead to Faster ROI
Plug-ins like Adobe Magento ElasticSuite Online can help brands optimize the site search and discovery process on their e-commerce platforms.
With a huge increase in online consumer traffic coming out of COVID-19, search functionality is more important than ever in creating a successful e-commerce strategy. The right search functionality on an e-commerce platform shortens the customer journey to checkout and provides faster ROI for businesses. Understanding customers and designing the best search implementation around their needs improves the overall user experience and customer satisfaction.
Amazon and Google have both set a high bar for consumer expectations when it comes to search algorithms. Businesses need to be showing search results in 0.25 seconds to match the standard set by Google. Customers often come to a site with a product in mind, and the faster businesses can help them find it, the higher the chance of a sale. Plus, a well-implemented search solution and discovery process can provide immediate profits through larger average order prices and increased conversions.
The Right Search Solution for Adobe Magento
Nearly half of the people who use an eCommerce platform’s site search end up buying something on the site.
Your e-Commerce store may have a well-designed UI interface or a wide variety of products in its catalog, but if shoppers aren’t able to find what they want, your store is leaving money on the table. If your store is built on Adobe Magento, the ElasticSuite module provides a robust solution to help capture search driven revenue.
Elasticsearch, Magento’s recommended search engine, is native to Magento 2. Elasticsearch provides decent functionality for sites that do not have a huge product catalog, but there are limitations to its search engine, which is where ElasticSuite comes in. ElasticSuite is an open-source module that provides businesses with what they’re missing from the native Elasticsearch. The more robust ElasticSuite extension offers the kind of features, speed, and precision customers have come to expect. While other solutions only use full-text relevance, ElasticSuite for Magento combines four methods to optimize search relevance and to improve e-commerce conversion, including merchandising principles, use behavior tracking, full-text relevance, and customer environment.
Some of the key features of ElasticSuite include:
● Lightweight and easy integration for optimal performance
● Full-text search improvement
● Rich autocomplete
● Highly tunable scoring features
● Relevance tuning
● Custom thesaurus building
● Custom optimizers using rules engine with value-boosting
● Easy to scale solution
● Cost effective
Product Discovery and Related Products
While site-search needs to be optimized to help customers find the right product as fast as possible, it also needs to show potentially related products they may like. Websites like Amazon have mastered the product discovery algorithm and have spoiled the average online customer who now expects this. Now, search results need to be precise and also broad enough to include related products that increase AOP and customer satisfaction. Not all shoppers on an e-commerce website come looking for a product they have already thought of. The search solution needs to understand the way the shoppers think, their affinity to a brand or a category, and their shopping behavior in order to correctly predict what they are most likely to buy.
Magento 2 offers a few out-of-the box modules for product recommenders and related products. Ensuring they are actively managed, configured for performance, and part of your search results page as well as PLP and PDP, provides easy up-sell and cross-sell opportunities to your motivated search-driven buyers.
Improving the search functionality and product discovery solution on a site helps push the right product in front of the right user based not only on search criteria, but on related products and content that meets their needs. Well-tuned search reduces clicks to purchase and boosts overall website conversions. Plus, a strong combination of site search and product discovery will ensure that the shopper comes back to the site next time they are planning on online shopping.
Design and Implementation
Before implementing a search function, businesses should start by analyzing their user experience online, including analytics that show what their customers are looking for and how efficiently they are finding it. The search requirements should focus on their customer needs as well as your specific business needs and product catalog. Research best practices and industry trends but always remember that what works for some may not work for others and ultimately understanding your specific users is most critical.
User experience and design for your search experience should look at the end-to-end customer journey. Oftentimes there are steps in product discovery that can be optimized through slight changes but have a big impact.
Luckily, the implementation and configuration of ElasticSuite is not a heavy lift technically if businesses approach it the right way. Each search solution is different, but at Melon, every implementation for Magento starts with the assumption of Elasticsearch and ElasticSuite. The combination of the two provides our clients with a search engine that is easy to implement an overall great user experience. Once deployed, search should be continuously monitored, measured, and optimized to continue responding to your customer behavior.
If businesses have not yet optimized the on-site search experience as a part of their digital commerce strategy, they should do so now. It is important to factor in specific business requirements and needs when determining the right search engine, but the combination of Elasticsearch and ElasticSuite delivers immediate ROI.