Ecommerce Search Trends: Your Two Biggest Nightmares

Amazon and Google ruined it for everybody, in a good way.

Customers now expect to be able to find precisely that thing they’re looking for with just a quick search. They expect smooth, fast user interfaces that react to the first letters they type with, “I bet this is what you’re looking for! How about this?! Or this other thing?!” Consumers expect the browsing, shopping, buying, delivery, and customer service phases of the customer journey to be smooth as silk and utterly personalized to who they are, their wants, and their needs.

Customers desire a uniquely personal experience.

Surveying the industry landscape and hearing from our customers (some of the world’s biggest retailers) are the two main reasons to consider deploying a new ecommerce site search solution system (or divorcing your old one).

Terrible Search Results

If they can’t find it, they can’t buy it.

Online search functionality should feel seamless. Type what you’re looking for, and watch it appear instantly—like magic. No stumbling through category hierarchies or landing pages. Just fast, accurate search results pointing you to exactly what you want, even if you spelled it wrong or didn’t call it by the exact right words

Unfortunately, the search functionality of many ecommerce sites isn’t quite there yet.

But if they can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. Or even worse, they assume you don’t have it, but somebody else might, and they’re gone, likely to never return.

Finding what a user needs in response to a query is called relevance. Basic relevance is rooted in matching product descriptions to search keywords. This isn’t enough anymore. What humans think is relevant and the words they type in the search box don’t always match the words that product marketers use to describe the product in the catalog listings. A modern ecommerce site search system should look at what users click for the terms they’ve searched and boost those results for all users. That means that users who don’t click to the next page or even look beyond the first result will see better results based on what others clicked. This collaborative tuning requires capturing user “signals” like click-stream events and purchases to improve website search.

And on the business side, delays in turning insights into action can save valuable time. Your search and analytics team analyzes your log and finds some experiments they want to test that might increase ecommerce conversions. So you wait for engineering resources to become available to code it, they roll it live to development servers, and you test it there, then deploy it to production, and it’s live. But it’s probably weeks or months later, and the assumptions you wanted to test were based on outdated data, so you have to start all over. Another backend bugaboo is stale inventory data showing no longer available products.

Terrible Customer Experience

People standing near the giant smartphone, customer satisfaction, user review, five star rating and feedback concept, vector illustration

Going beyond the quality and relevance of search results, we also find that retailers are constantly battling to continually improve and optimize the customer experience across all channels – web, mobile app, in-store, or on the phone.

When customer and behavior data aren’t united with the customer experience, the overall feeling is inconsistent and uninformed. There’s no historical perspective of the customer to establish where they are in the customer life cycle and the customer’s potential lifetime value. Without this data, you also can’t deploy accurate personalization and effective user segmentation. Marketing campaigns and customer support efforts are clumsy, muddled, and middling. Customers experience a bland, boring, generic shopping experience, and when they go to get customer support, they get the same thing: a generic, inconsistent experience.

Ignore the quality of your site search results or the overall search experience at your peril: it could result in low brand loyalty rankings, tenuous brand loyalty, low NPS scores – and terrible conversions.

Empowering Your Ecommerce with Lucidworks Search Solutions

Navigating the complexity of ecommerce solutions doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Lucidworks offers a beacon of hope amidst the chaos. With our cutting-edge ecommerce solutions, say goodbye to the days of irrelevant search results and hello to a new era of search personalization. Our platform is designed to learn and evolve with your customers, ensuring that they find exactly what they’re looking for, even when they’re not quite sure what that is.

We deliver highly relevant search results that drive conversions and customer satisfaction by analyzing user behavior and leveraging advanced machine-learning search algorithms. Transitioning to a new ecommerce site search solution system isn’t just about keeping up with the trends; it’s about staying ahead. At Lucidworks, we’re not just keeping pace with the evolving ecommerce site search landscape, we’re setting the pace.

Ready to transform your ecommerce site search experience? Your first step towards higher conversions and ecstatic customers is a click away. Discover the unmatched benefits of a Lucidworks search solution today.

Our team of experts is ready to guide you through a seamless transition process, ensuring a smooth journey from your old website search system to a future of limitless ecommerce solutions with Lucidworks. Contact us now or learn more about our solutions.