Magento Catalog Search for e-Commerce: Pros and cons

April 4, 2017

tagalys

Site Search within your eCommerce store is a way for your visitors to tell you what they want. If you show them the right products, it increases the likelihood they will become customers. You can Signup Now or continue reading.

Site Search can be configured in Magento, but there are some serious limitations. This depends upon how serious you are about converting visitors who search into customers.

Product Sorting in Search Results:

This is the holy grail of search results. What top products do you show for a search query within that site/segment/visitor? Your visitors will NOT scroll more than 2/3 pages to find a product of interest. In Magento Search, which works purely on relevance does NOT consider the engagement analytics within your site. It cannot determine the best order of your search results. This means, you as a business owner have no control over what products are displayed to visitors, your best-sellers could be on page 6, new products that have a higher probability of sale may never show on top and you have no influence to influence with your visitors.

Tagalys Site Search for Magento, on the other hand, considers visitor engagement analytics that ensures the products  (new or old) shown for any search query have the highest probability of conversion and also gives you as a business the ability to modify those results based on internal business needs like a promotion, event, etc., by using Search Merchandising and Pinned Searches.

Easy Configuration:

If you visit System > Configuration > Catalog, you can easily choose various Search settings like "Like", Full text" or "Combined", Enable Popular searches & Search Suggestions. This is probably the only real advantage with the inbuilt Search from Magento.

The Tagalys extension for Magento search can take about 1/2 hour on average to install and is auto-setup. Not bad, but still about 20 minutes more than Magento.

Search Suggestions:

While easy to set up, it is not configured to how consumers are used to shopping on an Amazon/Walmart or leading eCommerce companies. Suggestions run from historical searches, but they are not grouped or prioritized for visitors click through and also lead to pages with no results. Tagalys is geared for predictive suggestions that will never lead to a "No Results" page and have the best engagement. Below is a Tagalys example

Suggestions - dresses

Popular Searches:

While easy to set up, it is also not prioritized and calculated on a periodic basis to show the top N searches for the site. Searches are not grouped, hence you can find suggestions like "Dress" & "Dresses" one after the other as the queries and not processed internally and cleaned. These suggestions are also not validated to see if the resulting search page has results or not. Tagalys is geared for prioritized Popular Searches, which will never lead to a "No Results" page and have the best engagement, with added capabilities to modify these Popular Searches and promote your own to address business needs. Tagalys example below

tagalys popular searches

Spell Check:

Not something to write home about, but this is also not available in Magento Catalog Search. Tagalys offers this be default in FREE and PAID plans. Example below:

auto correct in eCommerce site search

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.

Trusted by retailers worldwide

Vanja S

Sheike

"Tagalys makes merchandising effortless. Their data driven sequencing and sorting drastically improves our effectiveness. Tagalys takes the guesswork out of merchandising and product recommendations."

Ryan R.

Camilla

"I love that Tagalys listens to customer needs and has an innovative + agile team around them which can support addressing those needs and adding improvements to the roadmap."

Rafaelle C.

Blue Bungalow

"Tagalys is the powerful and reliable data-driven solution that we were looking for when it came to search & merchandising for our Shopify Plus store. There is no limit as to how custom you can get with your merchandising, which is exactly what we were after!"

Tiarne Warren

Meshki

"The dedication of Tagalys team is evident from the feature developments. I appreciate their effort in understanding our business needs and feedback. We have saved numerous working hours and achieved great performances."