Product findability may be the single most important function of your commerce solution. Search engine users are around 7-10 times more likely to convert than regular website visitors1, even though most online shoppers report their onsite search experience to be mediocre at best. The good news is that technology has made incredible advancements in supporting areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, cloud computing, and big data, which when combined are creating much more powerful and concise search tools for today’s online shoppers. In this whitepaper, we explore the key challenges online shoppers and organizations face and the core elements of a search solution that can meet them.
Imagine searching for “dress shoes” on a fashion retailer’s site and the search engine returned a list of dresses and athletic shoes. What would cross your mind? You would not be alone if you simply abandoned the site to find one that does a better job of respecting your time by delivering quality results. The Baymard Institute found in a 2020 study performed that 61% of sites require their users to search by the same product type jargon the site uses, e.g. failing to return all relevant products for a search such as “blow dryer” if “hairdryer” is used on the site, or “multifunction printer” vs “all-in-one printer”.
