Author: Elza Abraham

Magento Category and Product Listing Pages – Top 3 Challenges

Posted on March 3, 2018 by Elza Abraham

Product listing pages are the heart of every e-commerce store. Also known as category pages, this is where the list of products is displayed. In Magento, creating these pages is a manual task that needs to be done regularly to keep the pages afresh. While Magento provides a strong platform to conduct commerce, we often hear that one of the main challenges here is that the platform is geared for marketers and merchandisers who are tech-savvy. Some of the basic challenges faced are

Manual efforts to create product listing or category pages:

Assigning a product to a category or subcategory is done by retailers by manually accessing the ‘Manage Categories’ or ‘Manage Products” menu. This means each time a new product has been added to your store, someone has to manually add them to all the relevant category pages or else they are unlikely to get displayed on the front end.

Adding products to Magento categories from the Manage products section

Static pages that do not update dynamically:

By assigning products to the categories using the manual method we previously talked about, Magento depends on the user to update the catalog and each category with newly added products. This means you need to manually edit the relevant categories so that the new products are displayed at your store. For example, a page for New Arrivals or Sale, requires the team to manually add/delete every product to this page based on the date of arrival or the discount.

Adding products to categories from manage categories section

Lack of visual aids to promote or remove products:

As a marketer or a merchandiser, images speak louder than text. The current Magento UI used to create any of these pages is neither intuitive nor is it flexible. Tagalys gives you a visual user interface designed for marketers or merchandisers to make this task as easy as 1-2-3.

Category & Product Listing pages Curation

Solving all of these issues and much more, Tagalys allows you to create dynamic product listing or category pages in less than 60 seconds, in a marketer-friendly user interface. Tagalys also allows you to promote and remove products instantly to meet your business needs. Tagalys allows you to focus on the art of merchandising and not get bogged down by the manual efforts to create a page. Watch this 2-minute video to see Tagalys in action

Watch our demo site to learn more or schedule a 1:1 demo with us at your convenience. What are you waiting for? Contact us now or start your 28-day free trial immediately.

Posted in e-Commerce General, e-Commerce Product Listing pages
Tagged in e-commerce, magento

Shopping cart abandonment in e-commerce – Top Reasons & Tools to improve

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Elza Abraham

Shopping cart abandonment is a recurring challenge at every online store. Data suggests this varies between 60% to 95%, depending on the country, device, category, and brand. The good thing about realizing this challenge in your business is that you are not alone, it happens at every retailer including the greats of Amazon. If you are not sure whether you face this challenge, look at the total number of unique products added to cart and the final number of products sold. If you have a delta, you are facing the same challenge as everyone else.

So why do visitors add products to their cart and not become customers? There are many reasons, such as

Simply forgot
Got busy
Distracted by a mobile notification from another app
Waiting for a discount
Bookmarking
Others

Statista has done surveys to break this down quantitatively to give you some more insights

So, we now know this is a worldwide, industry-wide phenomenon. What can you do to fix it? There are a couple of simple things you can do right away to reduce this by a few percentage points – install a notification service, that will send an “add to cart” reminder email or notification. These notification services will reduce the abandonment rates and companies offering these services will be the experts to tell you by how much.

The question to you as a retailer is

Do you know what your overall shopping cart abandonment rate is?
Which funnel contributes the most to shopping cart abandonment rate – Search, Browse, Product listing pages, Recommendations?
Which source of traffic is the biggest influencer in shopping cart abandonment rate – Facebook, Organic, Google Adwords, email etc.,?
Does device type (Mobile or desktop) influence shopping cart abandonment rate?
Are there visitors from a specific location that influence shopping cart abandonment rate?

Finding answers to these questions can help tweak your marketing campaigns to continue improving who you target via marketing channels. While Tagalys can assist you to gather insights into these questions, we do not provide any email or notification service that can alleviate the cart abandonment rates. We do know a couple of really awesome products companies out there that do this for a living. We would be happy to recommend a few names if it can help you. Contact us (cs@tagalys.com) and we will make the connection based on your needs.

Posted in e-Commerce General, e-Commerce Product Listing pages, e-Commerce Product Recommendations, eCommerce Site Search

Omnichannel retailers use e-commerce to drive offline sales

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Elza Abraham

We are seeing more traditional retailers also starting their digital stores to give their customers another channel to engage with their brand. A recent study by Price Water Coopers, also confirms the same strategy that omni-channel retailers will soon overtake pure-play online retailers. But let’s start by defining “Omni Channel”

Hubspot says “You need to deliver a seamless experience across channels and factor in different devices in these channels to ensure interactions with your brand are consistent”
Google from a marketing angle suggests your strategies should allow you to convert shoppers from any channel
At Tagalys, we believe its the ability for retailers to provide the same shopping experience in a 2D or 3D environment, giving consumers to power to decide when & where they want to purchase

How are retailers today, leveraging their online & offline presence in unison? At Tagalys, most of our customers use Magento Commerce for their online platforms and have a strong retail presence across the country. They understand that competing on price is a poor strategy as retailers like Amazon have bargaining powers to lower price. Omnichannel retailers compete by giving their customers convenience and trust. The biggest advantage an omnichannel retailer has is the physical presence of stores. Physical stores invoke trust in consumers and hence conversion is easier at a physical location that the online world. But the online world is where you can instantly reach out to your customers, geo-target them using social media or search engine marketing and drive them to your online store to give them a flavor of what you carry in your physical store that is a drive away if they are interested.

We are seeing more of our clients using Intelligent Product Listing pages and adding store location via Google Maps, to help consumers easily walk into the store, if they need more convincing than what they see online.

How do they execute this activity?

Create a product listing page using Tagalys (The data for what products to display can also be extracted from Tagalys reports)
Using Magento attributes of “Store availability” and “Product Type”, they instantly create a page for e.g., “Diamond rings at our 5th Avenue Store”
Using the HTML editor in the page variables, they hyperlink a Google Maps address of the store
Determine the best time to start the marketing campaign during the day
Use Digital Marketing to target an audience in and around 5th avenue
Launch the campaign
Start analyzing the LIVE engagement reports on Tagalys for the page performance.
- Hits or page views do not matter, but how many products did the audience engage/view, during this campaign
- This is the only metric that directly correlates to offline or online sales
- Unless you measure it, you will never improve
Work with the physical store to also analyze the uptick in store walks after the campaign was launched

A key requirement for this strategy to work is to ensure the digital marketing budgets are not measured by only online sales. They key is to understand that online is a channel and omnichannel is the strategy, hence digital marketing is a part of the larger marketing budget that is used to drive total sales.

There is another buzzword for this activity – ROBO – Research Online Buy Offline

Have you tried any of these strategies? Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn and share your stories. If you want to try Tagalys for a 28-day free trial, you can signup here

Posted in e-Commerce General, e-Commerce Personalization, e-Commerce Product Listing pages, e-Commerce Product Recommendations, eCommerce Site Search

Spell check, Auto Correct, Error Tolerance – How important is it for Site Search at your Magento store?

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Elza Abraham

Any Search product for e-commerce at a bare minimum will provide an autocorrect or spell check feature, even though they do not provide analytics to determine what is trending at your store. Is it because Spelling correction is more important that data analytics of your search data? Absolutely not.

Purpose of Spell check

Like a human, a spell check feature is enabled to ensure that when a visitor types/asks for an erroneous search term (Chrestmas, Skerts, Phenes) or a correct search term (Chrestmas, Skirts, Phones), the search engine shows them the same results.

Hygiene factors

Like any product you purchase, there are certain bare minimum requirements for a Search product to qualify as one. Spelling correction is one of them, along with features like keyword stemming, Dynamic Filters and Live Catalog Updates. We call them hygiene factors, cause as retailers you would have thought about these requirements and would have integrated the same if your time permitted at the least amount of time & cost. You should not pay extra, just for these features in a Search product.

Development effort

If you are a small e-commerce store, you can integrate an open source spell check library readily available online, to meet these hygiene factors. At Tagalys we do not boast about our spell check feature, cause it is very subjective to determine how much of revenue increased at our customers, because of a spelling correction. We also feel that with the predictive suggestions, we provide in our search product, it leaves little room for error, as visitors tend to choose from suggestions than type a full search term. We also feel that customers who want to use Tagalys ONLY for our spell check feature, are probably early in their journey as online retailers, not understanding that spell check will not change their bottom line.

Business Impact

We have read from sources on how spell check has to potential to increase revenue up to $3M. This might be a bit stretched. This is because of a few reasons,

Less than 2% of overall search terms require a spell check
Many “No results” pages happen as visitors search for compounded words as separate words e.g., Mens Wear, Polka Dot, Strap Less etc., No spell check library in the world including that of Amazon.com, can detect and convert search results for compounded & uncompounded words into the same search results. There are other ways to address this and spell check is not one of them.
In order for a Spell check engine to add $3M in revenue, you have to assume the visitors who made the spelling mistake will not buy or search again for the same term in the correct spelling. Then, you need to have around 600K searches with typos a month, converting at 5% with $100 per transaction, to hit this mark. This also means that assuming 2% of your search terms are erroneous, you will need to have close to 30M searches a month for this benefit to be worth $3M.

Verdict

Spell check is a hygiene factor for the search product at your e-commerce store. It should NOT be a show stopper or a key decision influencer, If you are anywhere near the 1m searches a month, your decision on a good search product should be around how it analyzes data & how the analysis of search data can improve search conversion.

You can learn more about Search from Tagalys at https://www.tagalys.com/products/e-commerce-site-search/

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in search, site search

eCommerce Site Search – Relevant, Trending or Personalized – Whats right for you?

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Elza Abraham

Site search is a cash generation engine when done right for your ecommerce business. But assuming you do have an engine in place, what should it do for you? Search engines are aplenty and at Tagalys we offer 3 versions for retailers to choose from that will best suit their business needs. If we equate Tagalys to a Mercedes Sedan (a bias I have over the BMW), we can rank the technology behind our search engines as Relevant = A class, Trending = C class and Personalized = S class. The technology that drives the order of the search results is the biggest differentiator across these three versions, besides a few minor aesthetic differences. So let’s dig in deeper. Please note that the search results are universally accurate across all 3 versions, the stand out difference here is how product sorting is impacted in the search results. Interested already – SIGNUP NOW

Relevant search results = Mercedes A class

This is an entry level search engine, most suitable for retailers with less than 10,000 monthly visits. Tagalys also offers a free plan for this engine. This version of the engine will still show you accurate search results for any simple or complex search query, but it does not have the ability to personalize results (visitor analytics) or sort results by what is trending (site analytics). You might still consider opting for the C class or S class models, but based on our data analysis across existing clientele we have some average user engagement metrics that point out that this engine is most likely to give you better ROI that the other two. But if your average cart size ($50) or percentage of visitors who search (5% – 10%) far exceeds industry benchmarks, you might want to consider the other engines. We also acknowledge that if you are smaller business you will be starting out with low mobile traffic, acquiring analytics data and visitors are getting to know more about your online store. This a great starter engine to help you tread the waters of online commerce.

Trending search results = Mercedes C class

This mid-segment engine is ideally suited for retailers above 10,000 visitors a month. Retailers at this size start showing patterns of in data as the volume of data show patterns on what products have the best engagement. With this engine, besides showing accurate search results regardless of search query complexity e.g., dress, maxi dress, Zara maxi dress, Zara cotton maxi dress, Zara cotton floral maxi dress, the engine considers historical engagement analytics across the site to determine the best sort order for search results that increases the probability of conversion. This engine should be used as a bare minimum to sort search results which are most likely to sell based on engagement data from the entire site. These results will appeal to your larger audience but not everyone because individual preferences are not considered in product sorting. Hence while this engine may cost more than the A class, it is more likely to convert more visitors to customers. Hence ROI for this engine starts to make sense when you have high traffic leading to high search volume.

Personalized search results = Mercedes S class

The top line of our engines is ideally suited for retailers who attract over 50% of traffic coming in via mobile devices and where this traffic is mainly composed of return visitors. Why? Return visitors have shown interest in your retail business. They will share hard and soft data on their intent and as a smart retailer, you can make sense of this data. If your return visitors are primarily engaging with your commerce store via a mobile device, there is a good chance almost 55% may bounce after the first 30 seconds (Refer Hubspot). These visitors get to engage with 2 to 4 products per page screen in a mobile device and in order to find products that are personally relevant to them, they are then expected to filter, sort, scroll and invest their time in product discovery, when you already know what their intent is. How do you keep them engaged in the first 30 seconds?

Return mobile visitors is the key driver for search personalization, cause menus, filters and sort options are typically hidden from the mobile interface to reduce clutter. This user interface leads most visitors to scroll through the results and prefer frictionless experiences. And the longer a visitor scrolls to find a product of interest, increase the probability of bounce. So to keep these visitors engaged, the personalized search results from Tagalys, considers visitor specific engagement data to showcase results that are personally relevant to each shoppers persona. Objective is to generate visitor interest to click on a product, to engage. Please note that there is a direct correlation to product views and customer conversion rate. Our analysis with personalized search shows almost 68% of the clicks to a product page happen within the first 4 pages of search results. Hence showing the most relevant personally products, on top per unique visitor increases engagement. Increased product engagement from search results leads to higher search revenue.

There are many more fine details that differentiate the workings of each engine and there are a few cases not outlined here, where a mid sized retailer might still want to use a personalized search engine.

Interested already – SIGNUP NOW and see your visitor engagement improve.

Posted in e-Commerce Personalization, eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in e-commerce, machine learning, Mobile, personalization

Site Search for eCommerce – Why you need it?

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Elza Abraham

Site search for e-commerce store – A few of our readers asked us to share more details on the basics of why they need to have it. They were a multitude of reasons ranging from we have very few sku’s, to our visitor traffic is less than 50K per month, hence they feel it may not be important. So in the interest of these readers, let’s get back to the basics. Interested and want to skip reading – SIGNUP NOW and see your visitor engagement improve.

What is site search for e-commerce?

When you visit a physical store and have intent to buy something, there is a good chance you talk to the store assistant. You share your intent (Search query) and he/she replies with whats available (Search results) with options (Filters) to drill down. This is the basic real-world experience that a site search engine is expected to provide an online visitor

No matter how many skus your store has in stock, there will be always visitors who have no time and want to ask/search for what they seek to buy. Our data across all clients suggests that between 5% to 15% of your visitors will prefer to search Vs. browsing listing pages to discover products. Now while the numbers maybe small, these visitors contribute to almost 20% to 40% of the overall revenue. More details about these benefits can be found here. What is also interesting from our data is that if you break your traffic into mobile and desktop, we noticed that in the 5% to 15% who search, almost 60% of that data came from visitors on a mobile device. Makes sense, cause in a mobile phone when you can see 2 to 4 products per scroll, menus are mostly hidden, Search is the fastest, most easiest way to discover products.

How I wish you could see the raw data to be fascinated at how online visitors engage in retailer stores in todays mobile world. But if Search was not a critical path to revenue, why do the leading ecommerce store globally place an emphasis on it? Why do they clearly provide a call to action on their header across all pages, inviting visitors to search? This ancillary data should make you think on the same needs for your business. Interested already – SIGNUP NOW and see your visitor engagement improve.

And the why behind this push to make visitors search are the benefits. We have spoken earlier on the benefits of good site search, but thought we back our claims with some masked data to validate these claims.

Client A (Fashion retailer)

Client B (Food retailer)

Client C (Jewelry retailer)

As you can see from the data, no matter size of the retailer, there are always visitors that want to search and when delivered with great search experience become customers. Search conversion is always 2x or more than conversion across other listing pages. This not only helps improve overall conversion rate, but also improves cart value, revenue per visitor, time to transact therefore overall revenues. Do not wait until its late and forego revenue. Start with a free plan from Tagalys if you have less than 5000 searches a month and deliver the best search experience and improve your business metrics almost instantaneously. Increase profitability.

We will soon be talking about the different types of site search engines and what may be most applicable to you. one size does not fit all and we at Tagalys have an engine that is best suited for your business.

Interested – SIGNUP NOW and see your visitor engagement improve.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in e-commerce, site search

Semantic search for ecommerce site search – do you need it?

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Elza Abraham

Semantic search as per Wikipedia seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable database, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.

Some of the examples of how this may translate in ecommerce site search for a fashion retailer are, search queries that read like “Dresses for spring” or “Best selling moccasins in 2016 April” or ” Trendiest shirt for a cocktail party”. You get the drift. So will it make an impact on your conversion rate, if your search engine has the potential to show accurate search results to these search queries

Data: In our cumulative analysis of search query data across clients across verticals, less than 0.07%, meaning 7 out of 10000 search queries, were semantic in nature. Semantic search becomes relevant if the revenue generated from the x% who convert from the 0.07% is considered as significant to your business and also offsets the increase in cost for this added ability . Even sites like Amazon, Walmart and Target where 1% of their search volume could lead to millions of search queries, do not place a heavy emphasis on Semantic search for many reasons. Some of which could be ROI, customer experience or latency in the display of search results, that could increase search bounce rate. Convinced and want to SIGNUP NOW?
Frictionless experience: As suggested in our article best practises in site search, consumers expect to be fed. They are spoilt and prefer to have predictive suggestions that match intent, hence almost 99.07% of your audience is more likely to click on a suggestion or type a short query, vs. a fully type a semantic query. If you notice a trend on certain contextual search queries or terms (e.g., cheap, under, newest etc.,) from the database, that can be managed without a semantic system, but creating a rule set or synonyms libraries to tell your search index what products are potentially relevant for that query.
Consumer search behaviour: When it comes to visitors who choose the search funnel, most of them already show intent or interest in purchase. Hence search queries are typically tied to products (dresses, shoes, beds etc.,) or combinations of products and tags (Maxi dress, Nike Shoes, Single beds etc.,).
Vertical: Semantic search is usually more common in a contextual database vs. a product database. Most visitors who visit your online store are looking to buy products. And unless you are selling something that is not easily understood to the end customer, most of your visitors know what to search for
Performance vs Price: Lets say that over 1% of your search volume consists of queries that are semantic in nature and you need a site search engine to deliver results. As a product manager this leads to leveraging an NLP system than can process or cache results for a semantic query in less than 50 ms. Anything longer than that, is going to slow your results page and that can lead to bad search experience. Secondly, there is an increase in cost to build an maintain a system that can not only process these queries with accurate results, but also show these results to your visitors like any other search query. Is that increase in overall cost, going to be offset an increase in revenue driven by semantic searches?

SIGNUP NOW, join a free plan or a free trial to know whats best for you.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in e-commerce, search, semantic, site search

e-Commerce Site Search – Quantitative benefits

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Elza Abraham

One of the services we offer at Tagalys is a Personalized search for e-commerce. Interested already – SIGNUP NOW, join a free plan or a free trial to know whats best for you.

This is the ability to showcase unique, relevant and accurate search results for each visitor that are personally relevant. The reason we stress on personalized search is because of its impact on business metrics. All our clients ask us how much of an upliftment in buy conversion can be expected from Tagalys search. Truth is we do not control that directly, but we do control conversion to product discovery, that leads to uplift in buy conversion rate. So what metrics do we directly or indirectly influence?

Bounce: Tagalys will reduce the bounce rate for visitors who search due to the quality of search results
Product views: There will be an increase in product views as product thumbnails shown in results are personally relevant to each user and not standardized for the entire site.
Listing page to View Conversion rate: Our goal is to ensure more visitors view products. There is a direct correlation to product views and conversion rate, especially for visitors who search. More the product views per visitor, higher the buy conversion rate. Our primary goal at Tagalys is to improve this conversion rate as that is what our engine has control over.
Order value: We have noticed a 20% to 40% improvement in order value or basket value, with personalized search.
Frequency of visits: As results are identifiable by visitors and user experience has improved, we have noticed a 10% to 20% rise in frequency of visits before purchase. Our hypothesis here is that this segment is probably undecided visitors who revisit the site and continue shopping. There is an increased probability that this segment could have been lost after the second visit.
Reducing time to transact: While the frequency of visit has increased for a small subset of the search audience, there is overall decrease in the time to transact by over 40%. Our hypothesis here is that these visitors are more decided, who find products faster, convinced by details on the product page and trust the retailer. Improved product discovery, helped reduce time thus time to transact.
Visitors who search: Across most of our clients, search volume is between 6% to 15% of overall traffic, there has been a 50% jump in the overall percentage of search. While returning visitors will continue to search, our hypothesis of this increase is due to increase in new visitors who search. This behavioral shift is driven by UI changes, the addition of a clear call to action and best practices of site search for ecommerce
Revenue: We cannot directly take credit for all the increase in revenue. It has also be tied with the trust a retailer has created with its audience, the details (images, specs etc.,) in the product page to make the decision easy, the design of the product page, internet connectivity and payment gateway reliability. But, due to the increase in metrics 1-7, there is a direct correlation to increase in revenue.

SIGNUP NOW, speak with us and help us help you.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in analytics, e-commerce, site search

eCommerce site search best practises

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Elza Abraham

In the last 5 years of building various companies and products in the eCommerce vertical, great Site Search experience has been a driving force to build engagement, conversion and revenues. But this is not always the case when done incorrectly. In a time when leading retailers push Site Search as a primary call to action on the home page, there are others who have hidden their search bar or made it almost invisible due to bad experience that negatively impacted engagement, conversion and revenues. So what factors help deliver great search experience? Here are some of the basic requirements you need to consider when building or buying a product aimed to deliver the best site search experience. Interested already – Sign up now.

If you intend to have a Search solution that does not rely of visitor engagement analytics, our recommendation is that you should probably use an open source solution like SOLR, Elastic search etc, and configure it properly. An intelligent search product is expected to not only show relevant results (SOLR can do that), but also use analytics to sort it based on what may convert best for the entire site, for a certain region or for a certain individual. If all you need is to show relevant results, please do not waste money on buying a product, Sign up now and ask for FREE search from Tagalys. You will love it.

THE SITE SEARCH JOURNEY

1. POPULAR SEARCHES

A great start to the site search experience is to load the popular searches that were conducted in period X for that retailer when a visitor clicks on the search bar. This is scheduled to load before the visitor starts to type something, cause predictive suggestions are expected to be generated from the point of query entry.

Popular searches are a good engagement feature as they are indicative of what searches have been trending in the site. This can be client configurable to decide the variables that decide what popular searches to show the visitors, as each client is unique from the other. It is imperative to ensure that clicking on a popular search does not lead to a page with no results, hence the assumptions that lead to determining that should be collected from the retailer. This requires search analytics to be installed and running and frequency Y to generate the searches. Interested – Sign up now.

2. RECENT SEARCHES

Recent searches is a simple feature that eases search experience for online visitors. Most visitors take more than one visit to complete their purchase. Search queries are repeated by visitors to continue finding what they seek to buy. Recent searches feature, saves visitors time and lowers friction as all they need to do is click on what was recently searched vs. having to type the same query each time they visit. This feature does not require analytics and is actively used in all leading ecommerce sites as its saves visitors a lot of effort especially in mobile devices. Interested – Sign up now.

recent searches

3. SEARCH SUGGESTIONS

Search suggestions are expected to be predictive (fill as you type), to help visitors quickly find the relevant suggestion, without having the type the complete search query. Find more details on the requirements in another article we wrote targeting Magento, but the same principle works here. Interested – Sign up now.

4.SEARCH RESULTS

The result of the Site Search journey is to find relevant, trending or personally relevant results to help visitors quickly find what they seek. Incorrect search results are blasphemy in the world of search experience, hence we will assume results shown are accurate. Interested – Sign up now.

The disadvantage of using open source search like SOLR is that analytics are not considered in results. Hence your visitors may not find the most relevant results in the top pages. Now how often do you visit page 2, 3 or 4 on search results in Google? Probably never. This coupled with the fact that mobile devices show 2 or 4 product per page scroll, make it important for the retailer to show what is relevant to each user right on top. If not, this will definitely lower your conversion rate. While you may cost by using open source, you will lose far more in revenue by not using intelligent or personalized search. Interested – Sign up now.

5. FILTERS

Now that you have your visitors engaged with the right search results, you need to help them drill down. Most of them do not have time to keep scrolling and if they do, there is a high probability they will get distracted and stop the process. YOU LOSE A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER.

Make sure you have the right filters or facets for the search results displayed. Showing all available filters for all search queries is amateur and makes your business look very unprofessional. E.g., Having “Shoe type” shown as a filter when ‘Dresses” have been selected from the filters.

Make sure tags displayed within the filters are dynamic, to only show tags that have minimum results. You do not want your visitors running into dead ends, they will leave your site and shop elsewhere. Interested – Sign up now.

6. SORT OPTIONS

Decide upfront what are the various sort options required for your visitor profile. Having too many might confuse them and too little gives them minimal options to choose from. Some of the options are sort by

Relevance (Simple or personalized)
Price – Ascending
Price – Descending
Name – Ascending
Discount – Descending
New Arrivals
Popularity
Best Sellers
Most Viewed
Highest rated
Trending

7. SEARCH BAR

A well defined search bar is critical to get your visitors to want to search. You may have invested in search technology, but without a clear call to action for search, NONE of the above intended actions from your visitors will ever materialize. There is enough data to prove that search is a low cost high revenue driver. If search experience is not delivering a higher conversion rate vs. regular listing pages, it is not because your visitors do not want search, it is because the above features have NOT been configured properly in your search experience that is being delivered to your visitors. Interested – Sign up now.

SIGNUP NOW, join a free plan or a free trial to know whats best for you.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in analytics, site search

Predictive Site Search suggestions for Magento e-Commerce

Posted on December 28, 2016 by Elza Abraham

The starting point of any eCommerce Site Search experience, are search suggestions. There are a few shortcomings on the existing suggestions available at Magento, that make this an unwelcome experience for your visitors.

Predictive search suggestions

As most humans have experienced search with google, they invariably would be pleased with Google like suggestions. In other words, suggestions that autocomplete themselves with the user entered search query forming a subset of each suggestion. Interested – Sign up now.

Prioritized Search suggestions

Online visitors have high expectations as many of them might have also engaged with retail sites like Walmart, Amazon, Asos etc.,. Getting search suggestions wrong makes a retailer looks amateurish as visitors expect this as a bare minimum. A well-designed search suggestions product limits the suggestions between 5 and10 suggestions but this could vary by category. Here are a few examples

Ensure search suggestions have results

As simple as it sounds we have encountered many online stores that auto-generate suggestions but do not keep tabs on the potential results it will display or how inventory changes in time. This is the first epic fail.

Ensure search suggestions have accurate results

Showing 5 to 10 search suggestions and leading visitors to a page where the search results have no connection with the suggestions that were clicked on, is 100% going to lead to bounce or a lost customer. We have encountered this issue at many brands that use the default suggestions on Magento, that generate suggestions but results are not accurate. Interested – Sign up now.

Spell check

Visitors are humans and bound to make mistakes. Autocorrect what your visitors type into correct suggestions that ease the search experience and guide them into correct results. Interested – Sign up now.

Consider historical searches

In addition to generating search suggestions from available attribute and tag data within the product database, leveraging historical search data and also showcasing them in suggestions is likely to increase conversion rate. This is because historical search data is representative of what your visitors are asking from you and considering them in the right suggestions, is likely to convert visitors into customers.

Configurable or customizable

With all of the above working for you, having the ability to configure what suggestions to show and disable certain suggestions, give the retailer a chance to control consumer experience and promote business interests alongside customer needs.

Support currencies and languages

When your online store supports multiple languages and currencies, make sure suggestions support the same. Showing a visitor from Hong Kong suggestions and pricing based in USD, is bound to decrease visitor engagement. Tagalys ensures suggestions follow the same language and format enabled in your Magento store to support your global business.

At Tagalys we serve all of the above needs to further enhance visitor shopping experience at your Mageno powered eCommerce store. We love Magento and proud to associated with one of the fastest and largest platforms for eCommerce. While Magento focuses on their core competency, it allows products like Tagalys to add to their ecosystem to continue enhancing visitor experiences at Magento powered eCommerce sites.

SIGNUP NOW, join a free plan or a free trial to know whats best for you.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search
Tagged in autocomplete, e-commerce, magento, Popular searches