How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Search

Site search is a crucial part of any ecommerce store. This is a feature many customers come to rely upon, especially if they know what they want or need assistance navigating a large catalog.

In this video you’ll learn why search is so important for your store. You’ll also get A/B test ideas and examples from other stores to get inspiration.

Video: How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Search

Hi, there. I’m Lauren. I’m a conversion specialist here at Command C. And today, we are going to talk about ecommerce search.

What are you going to learn in this video? You will find out why search matters, test ideas and best practices, and examples of search implementing that can give you inspiration for your site.

Search matters because it helps people find things. That’s the easy way to put it. Searchers often convert at least two times, and even up to 10x, non-searchers. That’s typically because people that search know what they want, or have a general idea, and it gets them to the product faster. It also helps people navigate large catalogs, helps expedite the shopping journey, and you can also use this search data to learn what users are interested in.

When it comes to best practices, there are a few things you want to make sure your search functionality does. That includes supporting non-product search queries, letting people search for warranty or returns. The search bar should also be easy to find on all pages and devices. You should include a remove button, when somebody enters text, they should be able to easily remove it. You should also definitely provide relevant results because people don’t want to search and be confused by the results. And make sure that your search functionality offers autosuggestion and fixes typos.

When it comes to search ideas, there are a few here. These definitely aren’t all of them. You can do a sticky search bar. As somebody is scrolling up and down the page, the search bar is always visible. Make your search bar more prominent. That might trigger people to use it. Change your default search text. Here, in this gray, changing that can often trigger people and motivate them to want to search for certain things. And in your dropdown, as people type, consider including thumbnails.

Here for Patch, this is an example of search functionality. You click the magnifying glass here, and then you get this element that pops up here. There’s a nice large search bar, and it tells you can search plant name, plant type, or space in your home. That gives you an idea of what you can search for, and then it tells you what are some popular things to search for.

For this site, on mobile, you see they have a nice large search bar here. And when you click into it, then you see the screen gets taken up by top suggestions, products. They also have a nice clear button here, and then an X if you want to get out of the search functionality, and then you can view all of the results.

For Beauty Pie, they have, on mobile, just a search icon. You click it and you get the search functionality here. You can click the back button to get back to where you were. You get suggested keywords. Then you don’t even have to type everything out. And then you start getting matching products that you can scroll through. And it has a nice amount of information here. It shows the name and the product, the coloring, reviews, and you can even add to cart right from the search.

And for Pair, in this GIF here, you can see when you click the magnifying glass, then the search bar appears nicely here in this animation. And then you can see popular searches and then you can start searching. That’s a way you can show a search bar on mobile.

And lastly, here for Marie Oliver, on their search results page, it’s quite nice that they offer the ability to filter. They have these sticky filter buttons right here, and also sticky sorting option, and you can change the number of products that show per page. When you think about search, don’t just think about the search bar and the results, also consider the search results page and how you can optimize that as well.

Hopefully, you got some good ideas from these examples here, and you got some test ideas that you can try out on your store. And I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.