Author: Syrah

Best Practices for Search & Category Page Filters in your Magento and Shopify Online Store

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Syrah

The sooner your visitor lands on a product page, the faster they are likely to become your customers.

Almost 90% of your visitors (who have not bounced) are likely to visit a search or product listing page at your online store. Almost 60% of online visitors are engaging mobile-first which limits the number of products displayed per page.

Search & Listing page filters are the fastest way for online visitors to drill down and find that product to start their engagement journey at your online store. And while you might already have filters today, this post is to make sure you have considered some the best practices that allow you to maximize conversion

Identify the right filters

Recently we had a quarterly business review with a leading fashion retailer who is also a customer of Tagalys. While the retailer had 7 filters displayed on their search and listing pages, these filters were not the most relevant filters to the end visitor.

Irrelevant filters will increase the bounce rate of your search or listing pages.

If yours was a physical store, what are the questions a visitor will ask your store associate about a product before purchase? E.g., Do you have a dress on sale for less than $199 without sleeves and a V-Neck preferably in black or white?

So if this was an online store, you need to have the product type, price, discount, sleeve type, neck type, and color as must-have filters on search or listing pages for the product type of dresses.

Prioritize the filters

Now that you have identified the top X filters that your visitors deem important, make sure you display them in the right order.

For example, if your selling dresses, almost every visitor will only want to see products that match their size. So you want to ensure your visitors choose a size before they continue.

What would be the most common order of filters that visitors would drill down to find products? Do not overwhelm your visitors with everything, but display what is most important and dynamically open up other filters as your visitors drill down.

Ensure dynamic user experience

One of the worst experiences is clicking on a filter to find no products. Make sure the search results & the tags within each filter are updated as soon as you make a selection. Only display tags that have more than a product tied to it and hide or deactivate other tags from being clickable if they have no products upon the previous selection.

User Interface for your filters

We have seen our customers populating the filters on the left or on top of the listing pages. While we are not opposed to either, we are probably a bit biased to displaying the filters left of the results, because it gives you more surface area to play around with how you can show the tags within the filters.

If you display the filters on top of the results, you are limited by the screen width to display the filters and it will run to more than 1 row making the experience a bit cluttered if you have many tags within the filter.

Track Filter interaction

All of the above is subjective to your vertical and the audience you are serving. It is imperative to track how your visitors interact with the filters to keep fine-tuning the filters. This can be done using tools like Mix Panel or requesting the same from Tagalys, where we will display reports showing how visitors have interacted with each of the filters displayed in the Tagalys search or Listing pages.

Learn more or schedule a 1:1 demo with us at your convenience. What are you waiting for? Visit our demo site here.

Magento Category Pages: Must have UI elements to improve engagement

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Syrah

Category pages are used to display products available at the online store or in digital marketing campaigns. To ensure maximum engagement and conversion, retailers need to display the right UI elements for the page to perform well. What are the must-have UI elements for Product Listing and Category Pages?

Page Heading & Title

While it may be obvious to you the retailer, it is not always clear to the online visitors what the listing page is about. Clearly displaying the page title and heading is critical for visitors. This will also help search engines to know upfront what the page is about.

Filters or Facets

Every product listing or category page has a variety of products that contain different attributes & tags. Online visitors are used to applying filters to quickly find products that meet their intent. For this, having an expanded filter and facets on the left side of the listing page is the ideal user experience expected by online visitors. Sometimes retailers show filters on top of the page, which is not the ideal location.

Product Details on Thumbnails

While images are great, details are better. As an online visitor at your store, they expect minimum critical information of the product that is displayed on the page. While what is critical will vary from store to store. It is based on some of your core value propositions offered to your customers, some details are must-haves required across all stores. The product name, price & discounted price are always displayed upfront across every mature online retailer. In addition to these details they may add, details like shopping, colors, ratings, etc.,

Product Thumbnails per Row

As a retailer, you want to display the best image that clearly showcases details of the product. Hence a large image is selected, but that will limit the number of thumbnails displayed to less than 3 per row. The idea of the listing page is to create interest to improve CTR to the product detail page. This is where you get to display all details with options to zoom into the image.

The resulting impact of reducing the thumbnails per row is that the visitor has to scroll more pages to see all products displayed on the page. This increased the bounce rate as page scrolls per visitor increases. The leading retailers show between 3 to 5 thumbnails per row.

Page Sort Options

You need to have the basic sort options of price and date. Everything else is optional and should be tested with your audience to verify if it improves the click-through rate from the listing page to the product page. Some other sort options used are rating, introduction date,

Share your comments if we have not covered any other important aspect that you have seen to make a significant impact on your product listing or category pages. We follow all the above in the product listing pages powered by Tagalys. You can create simple automated new arrivals or sale pages in seconds and complex pages as seen on our demo site

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

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce ecommerce addons ecommerce plugins shopify shopify addons shopify plugins user interface

Automate Magento Discounts or Sale Category Pages

Posted on March 3, 2018 by Syrah

Every online retailer has a Sale or Clearance page, that contains products where sale price (field) on the product is lower than the actual price (field). This product is legible to fall into a sale page.

But in Magento, retailers have to create a static sale page and manually add products when they meet this condition and remember to remove products from this page when this condition is no longer met.

Challenges faced by retailers when creating a sale category page on Magento

This is a manual task that is most often overlooked as there are many products whose prices change that require the sale page to be constantly updated.

Your sale page is most likely one of the most visited pages. So its imperative to ensure this page is always accurate always ensuring you display the comprehensive list of products on sale and only those whose sale price is lower than the price.

Fortunately, Visual Merchandising from Tagalys does this for you in a few clicks and what’s even more awesome is that you no longer have to ever manually update the page ever again.

How can a Magento sale or discounts page be created using Tagalys

1) Login to your Tagalys dashboard. If you do not have one, you can signup at Next.Tagalys.com

2) Create a new page with the right name that will help your visitors easily identify the page e.g., Store-Wide Sale, Discounts on Rings, etc.

3) If required edit the URL if you think organic traffic might also be interested in products available on this page

4) Choose the Tagalys conditions ” Discount Percentage” and set it where the discount percentage is greater than 1.

5) Choose a sort order that you think is best suited. Tagalys will sort the products by the historical performance at your store, but you can also sort the discounted/sale products by their respective discount amount or percentage – Ascending or descending.

6) If you are promoting this page on an advertisement that shows a product and you want that to be the first product on the page, use the “Curate” option and drag & drop that product as the first product on the page.

7) Click save and you are done.

You can also make a page for “New Arrivals” in a few clicks and never have to come back to update it again.

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 category pages e-commerce ecommerce magento

Similar products recommendations in Magento and Shopify eCommerce stores – Why UI matters

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Syrah

The first step to trying to improve your e-commerce conversion rate is to get your visitor to the product page. A lot of retailers, have a lot of jazz on their home page, forgetting that this is the online world. If there is anything different about it, its the ease of walking out of your store. Retailers have to get the attention of their visitors ASAP and that is by making sure they land on a product page (that meets that interest of course).

Product views at an online stite

Once a visitor lands on the product page, chances are that they will not get satisfied with the first product they view. Most verticals call for what is called subjective buying, where the decision to buy is based on an array of attributes that make the product and not the product itself. A few instances where the product itself is key to the purchase is called objective buying, where the consumer is interested in an iPhone X. There is no other brand/attribute alternative, but maybe a choice of RAM, color, etc.,

They want choices like they would in an offline store. Given most of your visitors are engaging with your store in a mobile interface, helping them know that they are more products to view is critical and also showing products that are in context with what they are currently viewing keeps them engaged. For example, viewing wedding bands priced at $500, means they are not interested in solitaire rings priced at $1000 or gemstone rings priced at $250. They are interested in the attributes that define the product, not the product itself.

At Tagalys, we study how visitors interact with products at your store to understand what attributes are important in the buying decision of the visitor, thus creating product personas to help us better define our recommendations. This can be static (defined by the retailer) or dynamic (changes with how visitors interact with your store.)

Once you get this right, it is key to show these choices to the visitor when they visit the product page. We have noticed many retailers pushing up product specifications above the similar product recommendations, thus giving the visitor minimal opportunity to engage with product recommendations. We have noticed this by observing the Click-through rates (CTR) of the widgets we display and identified that low CTR of recommendation widgets, leads to a lower conversion rate. Hence to increase CTR, your visitors need to see the recommendation widgets, (UI matters) and once they see it only then does the intelligence of knowing what to recommend comes to question.

Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn to evaluate your UI or start your 28 days free trial of Tagalys Product Recommendations.

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Product Recommendations

Tagged in e-commerce ecommerce magento shopify user interface

Klevu Site Search alternative for Magento & Shopify

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Syrah

As we speak to new customers, we often hear questions on how we are different from Klevu Search and why customers should choose Tagalys over Klevu.

Product Discovery vs. Site Search

Klevu provides Search as a service only, whereas Tagalys powers Search, Recommendations & Intelligent Product listing pages. The Site Search funnel is a high-value funnel. Tagalys has recorded conversion rates 3X – 4X higher than other funnels within the same site. The search funnel also contributed to 20%-30% of the total revenue. We have been successful with these conversion rates because we collect data from the other funnels, to gather incremental insights. This accelerates conversion rates for customers using the Tagalys search. In the world of Tagalys, each funnel has a different intent of shopping and understanding that intent, helps us better understand the customer.

Personalized Search Results vs. Self-learning search

Klevu has a learning search and Tagalys provides trending/intelligent search. Both showcase search results that change over time as we learn from engagement data. Trending search results from Klevu are based on product analytics & Tagalys relies on visitor engagement analytics. It will show the best results across the entire site and will increase conversion. Unless we do an A/B test, it is hard to quantify how much of an improvement in conversion with either solution has over the other.

But Tagalys also provides personalized search results, showcasing the best search results, based on each visitor’s individual shopping persona. This has proven to reduce the time to transact, increase engagement and increase conversions higher than trending results. Personalized search is a must if you have high mobile traffic with return visitors. Ensure visitors quickly find products when engaging via mobile devices as they are more likely to get distracted and leave your retail site.

Pinned Searches

This gives the ability to retailers to modify the popular searches and showcases other searches, to promote business needs. This gives retailers more control over the search funnel. We do not offer this across all plans, because if done incorrectly it can reduce your conversion rate.

Pricing

While the pricing in each tier is similar across Tagalys & Klevu, Tagalys offers more features in each tier, thereby working towards increasing the conversion of our customers, thus providing higher value to the same price point. This leads to customers getting more value delivered for each pricing tier.

Reporting

Klevu reports are primarily tied to Search as that is the only product offered. Since Tagalys offers multiple product discovery solutions including search, we offer detailed reporting across all funnels that are powered by Tagalys, along with segmented product & attribute reporting.

URL redirect Or Category directed search

We do not redirect visitors for search queries to any Platform (Magento, Shopify, etc.,) powered pages. We are confident the product sorting generated by Tagalys for any listing page, including search is far more likely to convert that the sort order on the platform listing pages. Typical sort orders in a platform like Magento is a manually updated and relies on the retailer to decide the product positions. This is also static, which relies on the retailer to update these sort order.

But since our integration, has the data of products across every category or promotion page, we show the products from the same page but dynamically sorted by Tagalys. Thus if you search for “Holiday” and there is a promotion for a “Holiday” page, that page will show in search suggestions and the search results will include only products from that page, sorted by what Tagalys does best, increase the probability of conversion.

Content Search

Not available at Tagalys. Our core competency is engagement analytics to drive personalized or trending results across search, listing pages & recommendations to drive conversion.

Responsive & mobile-first, Trending/Popular Searches, Search Merchandising, Synonyms, Instant faceted search layout, Rich autocomplete Suggestions, Dynamic filters, UIUX Customization

Available at Tagalys & Klevu

So Klevu or Tagalys?

Tagalys along with other product discovery channels gives retailers complete control of managing visitor engagement & revenues across multiple product discovery channels to increase engagement. Tagalys also offers personalization of product discovery that is critical in today’s world on mobile-first engagement. While Tagalys search by itself can guarantee a 30%-100% minimum increase in search conversion, we do better when we utilize engagement data across multiple discovery channels, as each channel serves a different intent of the visitor. Klevu no doubt is a good product, but improving Search by itself is not going to increase your topline manifold as your business expects.

Posted in e-Commerce General e-Commerce Personalization eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in analytics e-commerce ecommerce magento personalization site search

Image Search vs. Text Search in eCommerce

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Syrah

At Tagalys, we extract text data from the product catalog to start data enrichment. Hence we are biased towards text-based tagging 🙂

But let us also share some of the advantages and disadvantages of image search in eCommerce vs text search so that you can evaluate the same for yourself.

VERTICAL AGNOSTIC:

Tagalys can start working with an eCommerce company across any vertical and start showing improvements from day one. That is why we never hesitated to take on clients that sell:

apparel
shoes
accessories
jewelry
food and building material

As long as they meet certain minimum requirements of scale.

This is because our engine relies on text data that is usually available in various parts of the product catalog. Unlike image recognition we do not need any training data (vast sums), to reach a 90% accuracy in auto-generating tags.

DATA AVAILABILITY:

Image recognition products that are vertical focused extract tags from the image.

The advantages are that if the engine is trained properly, it has the ability to extract fine detail tags at scale with over 90% accuracy. Hence an image of a dress can lead to the extraction of externally visible tags tied to color, length, sleeve, neck, design, etc.

Text tagging engines like Tagalys rely on the content, hence if such details are missing they will not be considered in the analytics of visitor-product engagement.

But this also means if Tagalys cannot find such tags, nor can your online visitors or search engines like Google that rely on text data to understand the product better.

Hence it is in every retailer’s best interest to ensure all details about the product are clearly outlined in the product catalog to promote improved product discovery both on the website and also in search engines.

The second question is how much of an added benefit will the retailer have in terms of engagement/conversion/revenues by auto extracting tags from images? As mentioned below, costs for such a high accuracy image extraction engine are higher than text tagging, leading to higher prices for the customer.

COSTS:

As text-based tagging does not require vast sums of training data to get started, but on available data, our cost is much lower than image recognition companies.

The costs for an image recognition company are not only acquiring vast volumes of images to build a database but also the time it takes them to create this database as that impacts the NPV of cash on hand. As our costs are lower, these savings are passed on to you, the customer.

CORE COMPETENCY:

If a retailer’s problem statement is to improve personalization or showing the right products/content to the right visitors, then you need a personalization engine like Tagalys, whose focus is to create data models that simulate the shopping persona of visitors.

But if your problem statement is to auto-extract tags from images as there is no content, then a visual recognition engine is what you need, provided it has been previously trained with millions of images in the same vertical.

APPLICATIONS:

A personalization engine like Tagalys can be applied to any channel where a visitor is likely to discover products. This could be a listing page, search results or recommendations widgets.

Visual or image recognition engines, whose core competency is to identify the image and the metadata (tags) from the image is best applied in the Similar products recommendation widget.

That being said, we recently worked with a jewelry retailer who switched from an Image Recognition to Tagalys recommendations and realized cost savings in monthly fees and higher revenues driven by better conversion from our recommendation engine.

Image recognition is also confined to verticals where there is enough data to improve the auto tag accuracy levels. If they need to be applied to any other features of eCommerce, then a personalization engine has to be built on top of the existing visual/image recognition engine.

ERROR TOLERANCE:

A combination of image recognition to extract the tags and human tagging might help reduce error tolerance.

Product catalog data that is a must-have for an e-commerce platform and is usually entered by humans. This task sometimes has errors or incomplete submissions, that can impact the pattern recognition algorithms in Tagalys.

In over 90% of the cases, we find the data to be complete with some minute details missing by the data entry operator, but very seldom incorrect.

This is also because incorrect data can negatively impact SERP score, as the content displayed on any listing page is based on the text data behind the product. Hence while we have seen good data from the catalog itself, adding an image-based system to identify tags in verticals like fashion, can extract additional data that can be leveraged by Tagalys.

Posted in e-Commerce General eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in ecommerce ecommerce addons ecommerce plugins machine learning magento roi search engine optimisation SEO shopify shopify addons shopify plugins site search visual search

The need for personalized search in your Magento or Shopify eCommerce store

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Syrah

eCommerce Search, Site Search or Product Search are a few of the terms that refer the experience of allowing a visitor quickly find a set of products that match a search query entered in the search bar within an eCommerce store. Search is the key revenue driver at the lowest operational cost for leading retailers across the world. Data recorded by Tagalys across clients shows that less than 10% of visitors use Search. But they drive anywhere between 30% to 40% of the store’s revenue. This is evident as leading retailers display a prominent search bar with a clear call to action, that drives visitors to search for products. Interested – Sign up now.

Site Search

Site Search is a product discovery channel that can deliver conversion rates almost 2X higher than regular listing pages. These numbers hold water only if you have the right engine and not based purely on keyword relevance (Search 1.0). Some of the other benefits of Site Search are reduced time to checkout, higher product views per visit and increased order value per customer. But there are many instances of online retailers giving little or no importance to the Search experience within their store. If you already know this, Sign up now and improve your visitor engagement.

Let’s take a step back and consider offline retail, cause online commerce is only an extension of offline retail. Hypothetically, you own this fabulous brand and open two stores in the same city. They have the same inventory (Product catalog), physical store format (UI) and display Merchandising (UX). But one has a shopping assistant and the other does not. The store with an assistant will deliver more sales and the amount by which it improves will depend on the aptitude of the shopping assistant. Most visitors with an intent of purchase will interact with the salesperson – “Do you have shoes?”, that leads to relevant questions “What brand, size, color?”, resulting in products that best suit the query. This is what Search 1.0 for eCommerce is expected to do. Understand what your visitors seek (Search query), ask relevant questions about that query (Filters) and show products (Search results) that match the query (No usage of data analytics).

Personalization in Site Search

Then came along a smarter shopping assistant (Search 2.0) who started to consider what was sold, what products were viewed and visited the dressing room. With this intelligence, products shown not only match the query but also consider store analytics to support the increase in sales probability. But today, a salesperson remembers you, knows what you like or what someone with your shopping persona may like. He will show you products for the same query based on individual persona data. Ensuring products shown are not pushed based on store data, but personally relevant to you as it is based on individual shopping persona data. This is Search 3.0. Interested – Sign up now.

The rise of Search 3.0 or personalized search is driven by the “Attention Economy” and the rise in mobile-first discovery. Almost 60% of visitors engage with an eCommerce store via a mobile device, they are on the move, pressed to time and prone to distractions. Personalization of Search improves visitor engagement as it makes Search a personally relevant experience.

So if you think intelligent or personalized search will boost sales for your eCommerce business, start considering the following

Make vs. Buy
- What will be the lost revenue over 8 to 10 months by not installing intelligent or personalized search
- What will be increasing in operating costs when internal resources are deployed to build the same inhouse?
- What will be monthly recurring cost (hardware, software and human resources) to build, maintain and continue keeping abreast of the best in technology?
- What should I budget every month to gain access to reliable intelligent or personalized search almost instantly?
- What uplift in sales will a 3rd party Search solution offer my eCommerce business
What will be increased in visitors who search, if I make the search bar more prominent with a clear call to action and resulting increase in revenue if my search conversion were to improve by a minimum of 50%?
What will be the increase in cash flow if visitors become customers faster?

Posted in eCommerce Site Search

Tagged in ecommerce magento Marketing Mobile personalization Recommendations search shopify shopify addons shopify optimization shopify plugins Shopping personalization site search