But failing to upgrade your eCommerce platform’s search is like upgrading your ski clothes without buying better skis – you may look and feel better, but your technical gear won’t perform well. Upgrading the core search ability of your site can lead to better overall performance and higher conversions.

While platforms do many other things well, they don’t offer specialized features that focus on making your search shine. It’s a fact that visitors who use site search are more likely to convert. So if search is so important, shouldn’t you be paying more attention to it? When you’re looking at your platform’s site search, it’s important to ask a few questions to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.

Are your search results as relevant as they could be?

Advanced site search and navigation improve the quality of search results based on customer shopping behavior and click-throughs, re-ranking products based on popularity. Can it dynamically build SEO pages that continually update to reflect the most popular searches on your site? Pages like this can work toward improving your organic Internet search results rankings.

Are there opportunities for customization?

No two sites are alike, and search features should reflect that. It’s important to implement the features that will appeal to your customers, and make their experience on your site uniquely tailored to their shopping behavior. Don’t let a lack of innovation stifle your site’s growth.

Does your platform share the latest features and best practices with you?

The eCommerce landscape changes quickly and having the best features can make your site stand out from the rest. It’s beneficial to have a partner that understands industry best practices and suggests improvements to site features.

Do you have access to reports and analytics?

The reporting data you get from site search is filled with important insights that can help you understand your users and better target their needs. Having access to the top search terms, poor results and top converting pages can help you anticipate new trends or better promote the most popular search queries.

Does your platform have A/B testing?

Can you make fact-based decisions on the value of certain features, designs, or buttons? A/B and multivariate tests can produce surprising results, because not all customers behave in the same way. In some tests, we’ve seen conversion rates increase when using grid view, while others increase with list view. Since every site is different, you shouldn’t trust a general “rule” – but test it for yourself.

Do you have a dedicated, responsive customer support team?

Having a single point of contact can mean the difference between personalized, responsive service and being continually frustrated from lack of response. Making sure you have strong support will give you time to focus on other business priorities.

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then I’d suggest taking a good look at what your current site search is really providing you. A good site search will give fairly accurate results and have a few bells and whistles. A great site search will not only deliver relevant results, it will give you crucial insights into what drives your customers and actionable ways to proceed. Additionally, it shouldn’t be so overly complex that you won’t use it.

If you’d like a hassle-free solution and a solid team behind you to help you grow your site, give us a shout at discovery@sli-systems.com. We’d love to hear from you.

My goal when I worked with VacationRentalPros.com was to take their immense wealth of data for each rental listing and make sure their users could find, sort and refine through different listings. We implemented Learning Search and Rich Auto Complete onto Vacation Rental Pros’ site.

Vacation Rental Pros’ users most frequently search by location; queries like “St Augustine” and “Palm Coast” are common. We worked with them to understand how their data was structured and how we could reference it to ensure users were served results in the correct area and given the option to refine by adjoining neighborhoods.

The results sets we serve to users are focused and relevant. If a query matches a property attribute, such as “number of bedrooms” or “pet friendly”, users are only served properties with matching criteria. An accurate result set makes it easier for a user to become qualified. It prompts customers to narrow their results by price and availability – two factors inevitably on a user’s mind while making their purchasing decision. Secondary refinement options, like property rating, are also clear and visible.

Working with the team from VacationRentalPros.com was great; they gave me useful feedback on unanticipated search queries, which helped me understand what users might be searching for but not finding. With this information, we made modifications to our search to create more accurate results.

Part of the value of SLI is that while we give a client a very strong product out of the box, we believe in tailoring the search to meet our customers’ needs. Once the main features are set, the merchandising console gives our customers the tools to continue improving their site search and merchandising to make their site really work for them.

The Vacation Rental Pros team was very clear about what was important to them and what they wanted their users to see so we could give them the best end result. Because of the collaborative work of the team, site visitors will now see a streamlined site with well-organized information that leads them to their dream destination.

At SLI we understand that, and have created many ways for online shoppers to gather information and share their experiences. We offer shoppers the ability to search non-product content, including reviews, video tutorials and video reviews, blogs, and social media mentions. Having the ability to see products from different angles, get a sense of scale or mechanics through videos, or read reviews builds credibility not only for the product, but for your site.

Making this non-product content available is important because it gives buyers access to information without having to do outside research, thus reducing risk and building confidence in their decision, all without leaving your site.

It’s not always easy to implement, however. Basic search functionality – like what we’ve seen with Google Commerce and some eCommerce platforms – may not allow for easy implementation of non-product content. More advanced site search solutions have this capability and allow you to expand your service offering.

Teaming up with a full-service site search provider can allow you to access a full range of tools to help your customers. It’s important to look for a knowledgeable support team that keeps you updated with data-driven insights about how your customers interact with your site.

I’d like to share with you a few of the ways we can help you improve your site with non-product content.

Indexing Reviews

In the age of the Internet, we’ve become accustomed to easily-available reviews. For many purchases with high dollar values, it almost seems crazy not to read reviews before making a decision. Why not make reviews searchable, so that your users can find the products that are ranked most highly? Folica has done this well, so that within a search for “hair dryer”, products can be refined to show the highest-ranked hair dryers first.

Indexing Social Media, Images and Videos

In that same vein, why not show your customers other content that will help them make decisions? This can be videos that show reviews, tutorials or other helpful content. Here are three examples of very different SLI customers who are using these tools to great effect.

Eyeslipsface.com allows all social media mentions of their makeup and beauty products to be searchable, as well as an “As Seen In” tab showing the latest fashion magazines to have featured their products. Keyword queries will also turn up blogs with those keywords in them

Motochanic.com has led the pack with indexing Instagram photos on their search results pages. Now, searches for “Rossi helmet” will not only return all available helmets of that brand, but all Instagram photos with the same tag, and related videos tagged with the same keywords. There’s also a “Like” button for each product, to share across Facebook.

BulkReefSupply.com also indexes their videos alongside product content. Customers interested in building a saltwater aquarium can find informational videos through search, thus establishing Bulk Reef Supply not only as a helpful site for buying products, but an educational resource.

Social Sharing on Search Pages

Of course, social sharing features are also important, as we’ve seen the ability to “Like”, “Pin It” and “Tweet” results on most sites. We add that same functionality to your search pages. On AntiqueJewelryMall.com, you can pin your favorite pieces on your Pinterest board. And on FTD.com, you can “Like” the bouquets and flower arrangements and give your friends (or your significant other) a clear hint about what you like.

Search on Social Media Pages

Lastly, some sites use their Facebook pages to drive customer traffic and transactions. Motorcycle Superstore is one that allows visitors to their Facebook page to search products directly, which takes them to a Facebook-specific search results page.

Videos, reviews and other non-product content are all helpful tools that can be used to help customers find what they need and get enough information to make a purchase. Finding the right balance is different for every site. To find the right balance for your site, contact your Customer Success Manager or, email us at: discovery@sli-systems.com.

Their current search indexed products on the main search page, and in another tab, they displayed all videos relevant to the keyword search. Videos are helpful when you’re trying to convey product information to users – seeing the product in action can help convey more easily the true size or fit of a product, or be a faster way to display various features. Now we would be adding Instagram photos to another tab.

I was excited to implement this new feature. I worked with our engineers and the Motochanic team to get access to their Instagram page and find the best design for the page. Now when you search a product, say Rossi helmet, for example, you’ll not only find Rossi helmets for sale and videos, you’ll also find a tab with all Instagram photos of the helmet.

Through the implementation process, we collaborated heavily on the design – originally we thought we’d mimic the Instagram layout with one large image, and have others available by scrolling down the page. However, we ultimately decided on a layout that would show many images above the fold. Adding Instagram photos is a great way for Motochanic to show their unique personality on the site, bring in product images and develop richer social interaction with their customers. On the social media front, we also added Facebook “Likes” on their search results pages, which is a great social sharing feature.

We’ve also added Quick View windows for all of our results tabs, including product, videos and Instagram images. In Quick View windows for products, we’ve built in an Add to Cart button so shoppers don’t need to click into the product detail page. By creating better efficiencies, we hope to help Motochanic increase their conversion rates. Additionally, customers can easily view videos from a Quick View window as well, reducing the number of pages they need to click before they can view helpful information.

Shopping behavior is different for everyone – if you have something specific in mind, using site search to find the exact product is the best way to go. If you don’t know what you want, you’re probably more inclined to browse. Let’s say you’re looking for a new jacket, but not sure which one – our refinements will help you shrink down your selection to the best products that match what you’re looking for. Our left navigation features allow shoppers to refine by whatever you like: category, brand, you name it! Motochanic also wanted to show current top sellers to the right of the results page and make them relevant to search terms or refinements used.

It’s been really fun working with the Motochanic team – they’re innovative, really responsive and have a deep desire to see their site full of great features to give their users a fantastic shopping experience.

Though I don’t ride motorcycles (yet), I am definitely interested in starting. What I really like about Motochanic’s site is that it’s easy to see the multiple styles and colors of helmets really quickly. Upon rolling over the various thumbnail images of available colors, the large image of the helmet changes, so you quickly see if you like it.

When I get my motorcycle, I know that Motochanic will be my first stop for finding the best gear and accessories.

Online merchandising allows retailers to adjust the display of their inventory with the click of a button. There are many different ways to create powerful merchandising, and I would like to highlight three primary steps – tuning, merchandising banners and reports – which can add significant value to your eCommerce efforts.

In SLI’s merchandising console, we have created tuning rules that are designed to help promote or demote specific products as the merchandiser sees fit. This works in conjunction with our learning search and navigation, which naturally surfaces the most popular products over time. Learning search works remarkably well in increasing conversions because it adapts to what you visitors want. However sometimes you may want to override that. For example, a product may be new or you may want to promote it because of better margins, excess stock, or to coordinate with other promotional activity. In cases like this, merchandisers can create a “tuning rule” that places certain products at the top of the search results or navigation page. They can also push certain products, such as out-of-stock or seasonal products to the bottom of, or completely off of the results set.

Another useful merchandising tool is the banner. Banners can be shown anywhere on the search or navigation page and can be triggered by a number of different rules. For example the banner could contain logos and other imagery associated with the keyword or facet. If someone searches for a TV or clicks on the TV category you could show a banner that displays a TV selection widget. Banners can be used when people search for products that you don’t carry, with the banner promoting alternative products.

Many of our customers use a combination of banners and tunings to create landing pages for advertising campaigns. They select a keyword that is unique to the campaign, write a rule to show a banner with graphics associated with campaign and then use tunings to select products to show on the page. This allows marketers to quickly and easily create arbitrary landing pages.

The screenshot below shows a simple merchandising banner promoting free shipping for all UGG boots that displays when searching for UGG boots.

The screenshot below shows a merchandising banner on a search page that advertises North Face products, with clickable links to refine search pages by gender, age and more.

But what good are these tools if you don’t even know what your customers want? Our reporting allows merchandisers to easily access key data about customers’ search behavior. The Top Searches report can give useful insights about the most popular keyword searches, showing you the language that your customers use and identifying some possible candidates for fine tuning or adding banners. Conversely, merchandisers can view reports that show search phrases with poor results to identify phrases that are being searched but have low click-through rates. This may indicate that your customers are using different language to describe your products than you do, or it could give you clues about products that you don’t carry, that your visitors expect to find.

I’ve covered a few of the major aspects of merchandising, but there are a variety of other features and techniques that can be implemented to draw more attention to your products. To learn more about the ways SLI’s features can help aid your merchandising efforts, contact your Customer Success Manger or send us an email at: discovery@sli-systems.com

Cracka Wines is making sure their customers can find, assess and purchase the right bottles as easily as possible. I worked to integrate SLI’s Learning Search, Rich Auto Complete and Learning Navigation on Cracka Wines’ website. They are a well-known wine retailer in Australia that sells wine by the bottle or case and also has an auction component that is really important to their business. Originally, a search on their site would produce a long list of wines, with no ability to narrow down the results, and customers would be left scrolling through a number of pages to find what they were looking for.

While it sounds simple enough to change, it was a complex build simply because of the sheer volume of different varieties of products being sold. For example, within red wines alone there are more than 80 varieties, such as shiraz, pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon. Within each of those varieties, there may be more than 550 different brands available for purchase. Add to that all white wines, sparkling wines, beer, cider and you’ve got a lot of products to sort and display in clear, easy-to-find segments.

Additionally, the team at Cracka Wines was excited to integrate the auction segment of their business into the search. Shoppers can now search their site for auctions by wine type – an auction search for shiraz is shown in the screen shot below. A clock in the top right corner counts down the minutes to the next deal, which builds excitement and anticipation for new auctions. It’s now also possible to refine a search by ‘Buy It Now’ if the buyer doesn’t want to wait for the auction to close. This allows them to get their hands on that sought-after wine at a discounted price straight away.

Cracka’s website now features navigation that allows customers to refine thousands of wines available by price, variety, region, vintage, brand and more. The team also built a mega dropdown menu, so when a customer rolls their mouse over different navigation categories, a dropdown menu will appear with a variety of selections. When they click on each link, they’ll be directed to our learning navigation page showing the “learned” results, which move the popular wines to the top of the search results page. Another great feature is the persistent navigation and search box. The navigation and search box float down the page as the user scrolls through the results ensuring that the customer need not scroll back to the top if they want to make another search or refinement.

The team at Cracka Wines truly values educational information and other non-product content. They don’t just want you to buy the wine but want you to know what you’re buying. They have a mountain of information available to help buyers make an informed decision; we’ve put a lot of effort into making this information easily available. As you can see in the screen shot below there’s not just one, but five tabs providing buyers with expert information on the wine, the wineries where they’re made and the regions where they are grown. We’ve also displayed information about what varieties are available, reviews from buyers and experts, and articles from Cracka’s blog.

The team at Cracka has a great eye for detail and added little extras that makes a big difference in site search. So you’ll see everything from the additional hybrid view, sort by Cracka rating, a “recent searches” function and color changes when hovering over the “make an offer” or “buy now” buttons.

I have really enjoyed working with the Cracka Wines team during the integration because they know what they want and are very innovative. They are dedicated to producing the best user journey on their site and helping ensure that it’s going to look great and operate smoothly. We’ve got a couple more exciting features in the pipeline for these guys, which will continue to give customers the best possible experience.

In the New Year we’re sure to see a continuation of some of the same trends and a few new ones. From our work with clients and our recent survey of more than 450 online retailers, here are some of the areas we think will see more growth in the coming year.

Site Search and SEO are top priorities
Enhancements to site search and SEO top retailers’ list of priorities in 2013, beyond improving their eCommerce platform strategy. We believe that site search and SEO are two of the most important considerations when building or improving your eCommerce site. If customers can’t find your site, or can’t find a product on your site, you’ve just lost out on a potential sale. It’s important to make sure that your site search is returning the best results and SEO referral traffic is as high as it can possibly be, otherwise all the other bells and whistles you’re adding are essentially irrelevant.

More mobile
If there was anything that this holiday shopping season proved, it’s that more shoppers than ever before are using mobile devices to search for and purchase goods. We expect there will be continued momentum from retailers in building out their mobile sites. Our survey showed that more than 40 percent will be investing in a mobile strategy next year. But mobile isn’t limited to smartphones, and we expect that retailers will not only look at building dedicated mobile sites or mobile apps, but also creating sites built with responsive design templates, which allow webpages to be resized based on the screen of the device on which it’s being viewed. This provides more flexibility in viewing pages on tablets and smartphones of all sizes.

Accountability through analytics
As the online retail industry matures, better tools are needed to improve decision making and accountability. A/B testing, analytics and reporting are features we believe eCommerce sites will focus on as better understanding of ROI becomes the norm. These metrics can prove the success or failure of merchandising, campaigns, and the overall user experience and give retailers more than just clues to improve poorly-performing areas. Additionally, accessing these data in real time gives merchandisers more information quickly, allowing for increased agility and accountability.

Merchandising and navigation for easier browsing (and buying!)
Our survey also showed that retailers are interested in creating more appealing and easily-navigable sites for their customers by improving their merchandising and refinements. More than 39 percent of online retailers said they’d add merchandising to their site next year. Features such as how-to information, videos and blogs comprise just a few of additions. Other “sticky” elements like floating search boxes, which remain in view of the customer, may also be interesting additions to eCommerce pages that help ease the customer search experience and drive conversions.

Greater differentiation between companies, not based solely on price
Previously, retailers drove product sales by offering the best price available. However, price alone isn’t driving traffic to sites – or encouraging repeat purchases – anymore. Building a great customer journey through a site, implementing strong merchandising features and offering great customer service are some of the ways we’ve seen some retailers work to differentiate themselves from competitors. We expect to see more of the same in the New Year as online retailers become more savvy about meeting their customers’ needs.

We at SLI Systems will always work with you to build customized solutions that fit your company’s needs. Our core belief is that the best customer experience is one that is intuitive and that takes users to their destination as easily as possible. Highly-relevant site search, navigation, merchandising, analytics and SEO referrals are the core of our business and we continue to create new features to make the shopping journey that much easier. We have a variety of enhancements slated for the New Year that we’re looking forward to introducing you to, and would love to hear from you about what improvements you’ll be making. We’d like to wish you the best of luck in the New Year!

Luckily, I was working with Sam Sarullo, their VP of eCommerce who is very experienced, has clear business priorities and knows what he wants, so we got right to work. Additionally, he had a cross-functional team of developers, merchandisers and marketers to keep the process running smoothly. We had a firm goal to get the project completed before the holiday shopping rush.

Lakeshore Learning sells a variety of educational toys, games and materials. Their two main customer segments are teachers and parents. While teachers shop in summer and beginning of the school year, this time of year is when parents shop for holiday presents.

They came to us because they wanted to increase their conversions, and felt that the best way to start was to better organize and display their products and strengthen the site’s search. Lakeshore Learning has done a lot of testing and knows what works well with their target client segments, all of whom want a straightforward user interface, but tend to search the site in different ways.

We created refinements that targeted both sets of customers based on their preferred search methods – teachers can search by grade level, while parents can search by age range. We are building out a very rich set of features for their Learning Navigation and refinements, which are unique and are raising the bar for industry standards. This is very exciting!

Within our learning navigation and learning search pages, we customized two features specifically for Lakeshore Learning – the first was to have two columns of refinements side by side, which helped shorten the length of the navigation bar. Second, we modified the refinement options so if a product isn’t available within the remaining refinements, the price, age or grade refinement remains visible but cannot be selected. This informs visitors that the refinement is available but there are no products that match that specification.

Although we had a lot to do during our integration, working with Lakeshore Learning was great because their team is very responsive – when you ask for something, they respond right away. They also have someone in-house that maintains their data feed, which is one of the best I’ve seen – it’s well-organized and very clean. The core of our search starts with the data feed, and their attention to detail helps us return better search results.

I’ve enjoyed working with their team throughout the integration; they think outside the box in how they get users to view the product, drive traffic to the site and market specific search pages for maximum value. We all pulled together and were able to get the site launched in advance of the holidays, and they’ve already started to see increased organic search referrals from our Site Champion product and very good initial search results. As a CSM, I take pride in ensuring our clients have a good experience and see great results.

We work with eCommerce companies in a lot of different countries. We also see many of our existing customers are selling beyond the borders of their native country and often creating websites tailored to the markets they’re selling to. That means we’re working with more and more languages and need to make sure our site search and navigation features work just as well in every language. To do that, we’ve licensed technology to enable us to index all the major languages and we’ve integrated that into our platform.

For example we recently integrated our site search onto HealthPost’s Japanese site, which contains a mixture of English and Japanese. Japanese has to be one of the hardest languages in the world for text processing. Like Chinese, there are no spaces, so you need to break a continuous stream of characters into words. Also, Japanese uses many different character sets – kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana, Katakana, and Latin characters. Some people write and search using Kanji, while others use one of the two phonetic scripts.

A search on HealthPost’s Japanese site in either language will return results. Though the Japanese language is written in a very different series of characters than an English-language alphabet, users will still see the same learning-based results. Our learning algorithms operate on top of the index, improving the relevance based on how people interact with the results, generating related searches in either language and automatically creating pages optimized for popular keywords with good results.

Our analytics engine has been designed with different character sets in mind – so the reports will show popular searches, searches with poor results, facet labels, etc. correctly, regardless of the language used. In addition the console has been designed so we can easily add instructions and help in different languages, so non-English speakers can use it easily. As businesses all over the world move squarely into online commerce, we see the continued importance of offering a set of tools that can be used across languages. For the business tracking the most popular site search terms in a different language or for the customer searching for a product in their native language, a tailored experience is becoming the new norm.

With the indexing, learning and back-end console all working in multiple languages we can build you a relevant search that follows the industry best practices regardless of the languages. There are enough challenges building multi-lingual sites, without the need to worry about the complexities of site search.

As eCommerce becomes truly global, it’s absolutely necessary to cater to all clients, and making products easier to find and searchable in local native languages is one of the most important steps to do that.

HealthPost is a New Zealand-based natural health and beauty website that carries a variety of vitamins and supplements, natural beauty and personal care products. It was founded by Abel Butler when he had a hard time finding discount options for natural health products. The original English-language site was growing well, and when they found an opportunity to enter the Japanese market they took the leap. I worked with them to implement our Learning Search product, and we are exploring other products to add in the future.

While our integrations are usually pretty straightforward, mostly dealing with the technical details of the specific products we are integrating, we were faced with a different challenge  – providing site search for characters in a different language. We wanted to make sure that our search results were just as relevant and complete when dealing with Japanese characters. I really wanted to make sure that our searches were providing exceptional results and that the characters were being handled appropriately. I also made some adjustments to our refinements to adjust for Japanese characters and to our popular searches page, which was pretty easy thanks to the flexibility of SLI.

It’s been fantastic to see the search on the site go live. Eco and Abel from HealthPost were very friendly and easy to work with and I’m happy that we could work to build a great site search solution for them. Knowing that our team has the expertise to work with other languages and characters means that we have the ability to be innovative and respond to new challenges in the future. It’s a great opportunity for us and a real indicator that there is huge potential for SLI Systems in the Asia market for site search.

From this implementation I learned that there are almost limitless possibilities going forward. It’s an exciting time to work at SLI, and I look forward to many more integrations with international companies!

If you would like to learn more about how we can integrate our site search into your eCommerce site, feel free to drop me an email at: Discovery@sli-systems.com.