With apologies to Sofia Coppola, sometimes trying to purchase an item in an unfamiliar environment can be a difficult challenge. Have you ever shopped at a new grocery store? All the items are in different aisles from your regular store. The labels over the aisles are different and may not make sense to you. And if you do find the right aisle, then there’s the problem of locating your item in an endlessly long row. The familiarity and efficiency of shopping at your “regular” store is gone and frustration settles in.

So how do you succeed in this new environment? You could browse the aisles and scan up and down looking for an item. You could ask a clerk for help (which usually results in an aisle number). But in some higher-end stores, if you ask for assistance the clerk will lead you right to the product!

Wouldn’t it be great if eCommerce shopping were like a high-end store? You ask for something and you are led right to it. Looking for ‘mountaineering jackets’ shows explorer’s jackets, not ski jackets. Add in some features, a color or a price, and you see only those items. It’s easy to buy an item when you can find it.

Online search that understands your request gives the best results. Frustration from endless category browsing or scrolling through pages of results creates customer dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied customers bounce; satisfied customers buy; which make online companies happy.

Finding those products was step one and excellent search is a key to a successful eCommerce site. But what about the casual visitor who wants to wander around the site to see what’s available? These window-shoppers need assistance often in the form of alternative paths to groups of products. Some customers browse by product type. A mountaineering jacket is outerwear, a type of clothing. Others shop by product use. Mountaineering is a challenging outdoor sport, a type of activity. Others still shop by brand, color, price, or other characteristics. It’s important to support all these paths to a product. A great online site does this and makes it easy for merchants to add new paths to support the different ways consumers browse for products.

The eCommerce company also wants to influence the customer to purchase certain products. Different types of customers, the seekers and the window-shoppers, can now effectively find your products. Now comes the task of ‘helping’ them buy the specific product you want to push. Product placement is this task. In a supermarket, it’s shelf placement; which products are at eye level and which products are on the bottom or top shelves? For eCommerce sites, product placement controls the products that appear on the first page and the order of those products.

It seems simple. For example you could rank products by popularity. But consider the following product placement challenge. A customer is looking for new ski clothes and searches for ‘women’s ski clothing’. Ski jackets, pants, hats and gloves fulfill these requirements and a website might decide to show jackets before all other items. That seems reasonable, but wouldn’t it be better to show jackets along with pants that complement them? The customer gets a view of the overall outfit and can easily purchase both.

This arrangement of products is an important merchandising task that is seen on successful sites. Website merchants need easy-to-use tools to organize products in different arrangements that maximize the purchase of those products. Rules to present products can be important, but having direct control of product placement is very effective in these situations.

eCommerce sites are most successful when customers buy effectively merchandised products. These sites must have great search for the seekers who knows exactly what they want, efficiently created multiple paths to products for the window-shoppers, and multiple merchandising methods to make sure that the customer buys the product that the company wants them to purchase. These sites have satisfied returning customers, not customers ‘lost in shopping’.

To find out more about implementing better merchandising for your eCommerce site please read ‘Smarter Merchandising Drives Significantly Higher Revenues.’

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What caused the site to lose a potential sale? It was unable to understand what the customer meant. Let’s look at an example. Consider a shopper looking for wedding flowers. The bride has chosen yellow as the theme color and checks an online site for pricing. She searches for ‘yellow flowers for a marriage’. Seems simple; the occasion is a wedding, the item is a flower and she wants them to be yellow. It seems pretty straightforward.   The site returns all the yellow wedding flowers it has. But what if the site doesn’t have exactly “what she wants”? No eCommerce site wants to return the dreaded ‘no results’ page, so most sites start to ‘relax’ or remove words from the search to return something close but still appropriate.

That’s easy, right? Well if the site search didn’t understand the meaning of the words, it might remove a critical part of the search. If the site doesn’t have ‘yellow wedding flowers’, it might return ‘wedding flowers’. Or it might return ‘yellow flowers’ for any occasion, like a funeral. If I used a site that showed me wedding flowers in a different color, I would continue shopping. Show me yellow funeral flowers and I’m off to another site.

How can you avoid these misunderstandings? One approach is to employ search software that understands the words in the search and how they relate to each other and the site’s catalog. These search engines are called ‘Contextual Search’ and employ ‘Natural Language Processing’ software. Remember diagramming sentences in elementary school and identifying the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Knowing the role of a word in a website search helps find the right products.

This advanced search software is available for eCommerce sites today. It stops treating every search word as the same and understands what the customer is looking for. Customers get the right results when they search. As Mick and Keith would say, for these customers,

“You get what you need.”

The post “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – The Realities of eCommerce Search appeared first on EasyAsk.