Searchandising — what is it and how you can use it

The term searchandising emerged not so long ago with the prompt development of e-commerce site search engines. As you could have guessed, it’s two words combined: search and merchandising.

In traditional stores, retailers use various techniques to encourage customers to buy products. These techniques can’t just be transferred to the online store, but other tools exist that help to drive online sales. We can adapt merchandising strategies to create search experiences that increase users’ conversions. A good e-commerce site search allows placing relevant products in front of the user. But with searchandising tools, e-merchants can also promote products such as seasonal or sales offers, trending items, etc. The most common of the tools are:

• Boosting and Burying Rules;
• Curated Search Results;
• Promotional Banners;
• Personalized Results Re-ranking;
• Recommended Products;
• Redirects.

Boost and Bury Rules

The order of the products in search results is always defined by several factors so that customers get to the desired items sooner. The boosting rules place first the products that have the highest product ratings, semantic relevance, popularity (number of clicks, favorites, and sales), profit margin, inventory count, and were added recently.

Sometimes, store owners might want to add custom rules based on other attributes (e.g. brand or type of product) that also affect the order of the items. For instance, e-merchant sells his own manufactured products and items from other brands. In the case of our client WeGotLites, Joshua Marshal products are their exclusive, so these designer lighting fixtures appear first in the search results; this way, online retailers get two for one special — can promote certain products and respond to customer demand at the same time.

Burying rules move particular products to the end of the search results list. Usually, it’s the items that have no images and are out of stock. But there might be other reasons to put products at the end of the results page. For instance, the customer runs a query “rug” in an online store with rugs and décor items, and the catalog contains rugs and rugs pads. Actual rugs will be at the top of the results, as it is what the customer is looking for. And we apply burying rules on rug pads so that they occupy a lower position in the search results.

Curated Search Results

This feature allows e-commerce owners to pre-define the position of products the way they want or think is better for specific queries or categories. They adjust the order of the search results for certain keywords.

For instance, retailers, for some reason, do not want or can’t integrate sales data into the search engine. But he or she knows from the experience what customer hopes to find first while using particular queries. So, the placement of products for these queries is fixed accordingly.

Promotional Banners

Banners can pop up for selected queries, filter options, or some other factors. By displaying banners on the search results page, you can promote product-related offers and also guide your visitors to other important pages and drive interest to specific promotions that run on your website.

Wayfair has more than one banner to appear on the page; one is right before the search results and the other one is after the first product row. As banners stand out among sold items, they catch users’ attention. Even if shoppers don’t have a strong purchasing goal in mind, it can pique their interest and lead them to meaningful next steps.

Redirects

Let’s say the jewelry online store has a special page to promote engagement rings from the new collection. It would be really helpful if every time users search with the words “wedding” or “engagement” they will be redirected to this page, right?

So, that is how redirects work. Retailers set rules for exact-match queries, and every time users type one of them, the search engine redirects customers to a specific page instead of showing the results. Redirects can be used to promote various types of contact on the website: special products or categories, pages with information on rules & regulations, company’s events, delivery conditions, etc.

Personalized Results Re-ranking

The more visitors use your website, the better we can predict and understand what they are like. The search engine analyses previous customers’ behavior and provides results based on users’ preferences.

Imagine a customer is shopping in a store like B&H Photo, where he bought or searched for a Canon camera before. It makes sense that now what he sees first in the search results are similar cameras and memory cards, spare batteries, and lenses that are compatible with that camera; and products for Nikon or Fuji camera engine put at the bottom of the results or hidden entirely.

When we know users’ preferences and provide them with personally relevant search results, they are usually more inclined to purchase.

Recommended Products

By guiding and providing relevant suggestions, retailers can convert different types of customers: those who hesitate to buy something, those who don’t know what they want, and those just browsing. So, product recommendations became a must-have feature for e-commerce websites. The engine analyzes users’ behavior and search history, and suggest relative items. We have an article on how recommendation systems work if you’d like to learn more.

This feature is especially useful for online stores with a large product catalog. As it’s a quick and easy way to view similar products, customers can get a sudden discovery in recommendations, instead of spending time for browsing items.

Product recommendations widget can be placed in different parts of the website: on the product page, above the fold of the page, or on the right-hand side. Store owners decide how often and where it should be displayed.

Work doesn’t stop after the setup

Search merchandising tools work great when adjusted to one’s e-commerce website needs. So, after you install them, the time of trial and error with calibration starts. There are different ways to track how effective one or another feature; e.g., using promo tags on the links and analyzing performance in Google Analytics. No matter what marketing analytics system you use, its data will be needed to tune the search so you get most of its features.

In comparison with our competitors, merchandising features are available for every Convermax search plan and can be installed on all e-commerce platforms.

Test searchandising tools and see how it improves the user interface inside your e-commerce website. If there are questions left and you want to learn more about merchandising inside the search, you can always contact our team.

Originally published at https://convermax.com on October 7, 2020.