Search needs to be user friendly

Search is a common cause of frustration for online shoppers when it returns either irrelevant results or none at all.

Therefore the search facility on an e-commerce site is a very valuable feature as it tells you exactly what people are looking for. It’s like someone going up to a salesperson in a department store and saying “I’m interested in some denim, can you show me where it is please?” Imagine how you’d feel if the salesperson simply said, “sorry, we don’t do denim”. What you’d expect is a response more like “certainly sir, you’ll find that in our jeans department which is over here. Come with me and I’ll show you.” What would be even better is if the salesperson went on to say “and we have some great specials on offer at the moment”, and so on.

There is no reason why site search can’t be the same. By having additional information such as current specials, the customer is likely to become more interested and delve further into your site. Ideally, the search function should be semi intelligent and fault tolerant. If someone spells ‘jeans’ as ‘jeens’, or searches for ‘denim’, they should still be provided with some relevant results. This can be the sole cause for someone leaving your site and visiting a competitor’s one instead.

Generally speaking, a site search that has made life easy for your web developers is likely to make it difficult for your customers and you lose sales. It goes back to one of the fundamental ideas in any business transaction: the customer is the most important thing. If shopping is made harder for them, they simply won’t do it, especially not with the company that caused them to become frustrated.

Try putting you’re site search to the test right now, it only takes a couple of minutes. Pick some of your key products, think of the ways that people could search for them and try a search with those terms. You should also try common misspellings. How do you fare?