Author: Elza Abraham

Benefits of Online Merchandising in Magento and Shopify e-Commerce stores

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Elza Abraham

As retail is advancing by leaps and bounds, merchandising is now more important than ever and this more critical in online retail, cause your visitors can leave your store for another in a click. As per Wikipedia, Merchandising is any practice that contributes to the sale of products to a retail consumer. It refers to the variety of products available for sale and the display of those products in such a way that it stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase.

This includes strategies like 1) discounting 2) physical presentation of products (UIUX), and 3) the decisions about which products should be presented to which customers at what time. Tagalys helps online retailers with the 3rd point using online store data to dynamically determine sort orders in Search & Listing pages.

So, what are the key benefits of determining which products should be presented to which customers

Increase top of the funnel engagement

Retailers spend aggressively on SEM, Social Media, and other sources to increase online traffic to their store. The objective is to increase the top of the funnel, but these visitors are not necessarily engaged. Without engagement, visitors are more likely to leave in an instant, increase your cost of customer acquisition and reducing profitability. To get engaged, it all starts with allowing them to find something of interest fast and viewing the product. This is the beginning of nurturing your online visitor towards the end sale. Increasing product views is the most important goal of online merchandising and is done by placing the right products in the right positions at your site e.g., Search & Listing Pages. This improves the click-through from impressions on your page to the product view, increasing the probability of end conversions.

Increase Visitor Retention

You might have read in several blogs about how online stores have less than 30 seconds to grab visitor’s attention. You are competing with other retailers and every other mobile app, that wants the time of your consumers. Chances are your visitors might not buy something during the first visit, hence they are unlikely to return without being engaged the first time. Data-driven merchandising helps increase the number of product views per visitor. Each additional product viewed by visitors gets them more committed to your online store increasing the probability they will return. Let’s face it, with digital information overload, even remembering what you did 24 hours back is hard, hence unless you have grabbed the attention of your visitor, they are unlikely to return to their journey at your store. Online shopping is convenient, but retails are conveniently forgotten if you have not grabbed the mindshare of your visitors.

Increase Store Conversions

Online merchandising is not done to only improve visitor experience, its performed so the end of the day it increases your sale. The effort is minimal when you use a data-driven automated solution like Tagalys and can become inefficient & unproductive if done manually. Your online store could be an extension of your offline version. Akin to the sales folks, who showcase your products to your prospects, Online merchandising could help automate the sales processes in your e-commerce store and enhance your ROI based on data. With analytics, you can instantly understand your shopper’s patterns and show them what they want. Unlike the offline world, where you have to rely on a human, if you analyze and predict using your store’s data, it will improve the probability of increasing your store conversion.

Increasing engagement top of the funnel, leads to a similar improvement at the bottom of the funnel, even if you have no change at the bottom of the funnel. And unlike improving the bottom of the funnel metrics like “Abandoned cart”, which involves multiple touchpoints off-site, merchandising improves engagement on your site, when the visitor is present and when you have the best shot at making that impression. Because first impressions are the best impressions

	Visitors		Product Views		Add to Carts		Buy
Without Merchandising	25000	45%	11250	25%	2813	4%	113
Without Merchandising	25000	50%	12500	25%	3125	4%	125
Improvements		11%			11%		11%

Tagalys maximizes conversion rate & gives merchants visual control of products displayed in Site Search & Category pages at their online store. To know more about our solutions and features, get in touch with us now.

Posted in e-Commerce Product Listing pages eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce magento online merchandising shopify visual merchandising

Visual Merchandising in Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Elza Abraham

Visual Merchandising is the science of driving sales by enticing visitors, engaging them and making them your customers. This has been conventionally in practice in physical retail where select products are placed in the select locations. This is done in such a way to visually appeal the visitors of the region intrigue their interest and make them customers. Adding decorations, banners, display signs, and layout of space, etc are included in this. The ultimate purpose of visual merchandising is to get visitors to view the products and make the purchase. Visual Merchandising is turning more important in eCommerce than ever, especially with the rise of mobile-first commerce.

Why do you need Visual merchandising in Magento & Shopify eCommerce?

Running a successful online store is very challenging and tough these days. It is like having a brick and mortar store, but with your hands almost tied. Mobile devices contribute to over 70% of the total online store visitors. They are quick and do not have time to scroll pages after pages. Your competition is not just limited to other eCommerce stores but also with Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and many other mobile applications. They all want a piece of the audience time to increase their engagement metrics. So how to keep your visitors interested in your online store and not leave at the ping of a notification?

Visual Merchandising has helped all leading online retailers, to ensure the right products are displayed across their home, category & search results pages to trigger visitor interest as soon as possible. In order to improve your eCommerce conversion rate, you first need to have more visitors view products of interest to them. If that number increases, even if you have the same visitor traffic, you are likely to make more revenue, by virtue of more visitors converting to the customer.

Common activities between online & offline Merchandising

Decorations & Display

Offline:

You might have noticed standees, pamphlets, etc., displayed at prominent spots. This is to communicate to visitors and attract walk-ins at the store.

Online:

Page banners and popups are used to communicate the same information to visitors when they visit the online store.

Product Positioning

Offline:

A merchandiser uses data to source the right products to the right stores. He also ensures it appeals to the audience of that location.

Online:

Your visitors can be from multiple locations and there are three ways you would get product positioning right

Location Wide Trending: Analyze data across the entire store by top locations. Assign a trending score for each product at the store by location. Now, when visitors arrive from various locations, the trending sort order of products of that location is applied. This is likely to increase visitor engagement to your store at that location.

StoreWide Trending: This is the common Trending algorithm of all the 3 types. Analyze data across the entire online store to assign a trending score for each product at the store. This ensures no matter which part of the store you visit, this trending sort order of products is applied. This is likely to increase engagement with visitors at your store.

Visitor Specific (Personalization): Analyze data across the entire store particulr to each visitor and assign a trending score for each product type for that visitor at the store. This ensures when that specific visitor arrives at the store and views that product type, products for that type (e.g., tees) are applied for the visitor.

Layout

Offline:

Physical location has to be designed to ensure the seamless movement of traffic within the store, while also ensuring communication and enticing visitor interest to view products.

Online:

Your store can be accessed via desktop or mobile phone. Various visitors across locations, demographics & interest levels access your store. Hence using 3rd party tools to analyze the heatmaps, movement and click-throughs need to be constantly used to ensure any in-store communication and sparking visitor interest to view products.

There may be other common activities, but these are the top 3 challenges or requirements of a merchandiser – online & offline.

Visual Merchandising objectives

The ultimate goal of visual merchandising is to get visitors to come into the store and convert them to customers. This journey starts with the visitor viewing products of interest, and that is the number 1 goal for merchandiser. In the eCommerce world, this would translate to reducing the bounce rate, increasing the number of product views per visitor & percentage of products viewed for the impressions by the visitor.

What are your goals as a visual merchandiser?

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

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce ecommerce addons magento merchandising online merchandising shopify shopify addons visual merchandising

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. 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, 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

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Product Listing pages

Tagged in category pages e-commerce ecommerce 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 the shopping cart abandonment rate?
Are there visitors from a specific location that influence the 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@www.tagalys.com) and we will make the connection based on your needs.

Tagalys maximizes conversion rate & gives merchants visual control of products displayed in Site Search, Category Pages & Product Recommendations at their online store. To know more about our solutions and features, get in touch with us now.

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

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce magento shopify user experience

Omnichannel retailers use e-commerce to drive offline sales

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Elza Abraham

We are seeing more traditional retailers to also start their digital stores. They like to give their customers an additional channel to engage with their brand. A recent study by Price Water Coopers, also confirms the same strategy that omnichannel 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.

Omnichannel retailers

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 locations 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. The 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

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

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce

Spell Check, Auto Correct, Error Tolerance – How important is it for Site Search at your Magento or Shopify 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 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., Men’s 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 ecommerce addons ecommerce plugins magento search shopify site search

eCommerce Site Search – Relevant, Trending or Personalized – Whats right for your Magento or Shopify store?

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. Retailers can choose the best version that suits 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. They are like, 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. There are a few minor aesthetic differences as well. So let’s dig in deeper. Please note that the search results are universally accurate across all 3 versions. The impact of product sorting in search results is the standout difference here. 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 than 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 a 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 in data as the volume of data shows 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 that are most likely to sell. This is done 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. 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. 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

This is the key driver for search personalization. Because 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, consider visitor specific engagement data to showcase results that are personally relevant to each shoppers persona. The 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 rates.

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 topper 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 ecommerce addons ecommerce plugins machine learning magento Mobile personalization

Site Search for eCommerce – Why you need it?

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Elza Abraham

A few of our readers asked us to share more details on the basics of why they need to have Site Search. They have a multitude of reasons ranging from fewer SKUs to less monthly visitor traffic. 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 with the 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 suggest between 5% to 15% of your visitors will prefer to search Vs. browsing listing pages to discover products. Now while the numbers may be small, these visitors contribute to almost 20% to 40% of the overall revenue. More details about these benefits can be found here. Interestingly, we noticed that in the 5% to 15% who search, almost 60% of that data came from visitors on a mobile device. On a mobile phone, only 2 to 4 products are visible per scroll. Menus are also mostly hidden. Hence Search is the fastest, 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 today’s 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 about 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.

Fashion retailer – Client A

Food retailer – Client B

Jewelry retailer – Client C

As you can see from the data, no matter the 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.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce ecommerce addons magento search shopify shopify addons shopify plugins 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 the eCommerce site search for a fashion retailer are search queries that read like “Dresses for spring” or “Bestselling 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 practices in site search, consumers expect to be fed. They are spoilt and prefer to have predictive suggestions that match the 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 behavior: 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: Let’s 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 the 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 by an increase in revenue driven by semantic searches?

Posted in eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce ecommerce addons ecommerce plugins magento search semantic shopify 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 what’s best for you.

‘Personalized search results’ is the ability to showcase unique, relevant and accurate search results for each visitor that is 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 upliftment in buy conversion can be expected from the Tagalys search. The truth is we do not control that directly, but we do control conversion to product discovery. This leads to an uplift to 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 if the product thumbnails shown in the results are personally relevant to each visitor.

Listing page to View Conversion rate:

Our goal is to ensure more visitors to 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 the 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 an overall decrease in the time to transact by over 40%. Our hypothesis here is that these visitors are more decided. They 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 the 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.,) on the product page would make the decision easy. The design of the product page, internet connectivity, and payment gateway reliability could be other determinants. But, due to the increase in metrics 1-7, there is a direct correlation to the increase in revenue.

Posted in eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in analytics e-commerce ecommerce search site search