Read Ecommerce Search by ExpertRec for more information.
In any eCommerce website, no one tool is more important than the search bar that helps in sales. The real truth is that many eCommerce websites have been trying to get the secret sauce that drives great search experiences on Google. But hardly a few eCommerce websites (including Amazon) have been able to get their search to Google’s level. Statistics have shown a high correlation between people who search and people who buy. This gives a great reason to optimize your eCommerce search engine. To be concise, the search bar is the eye of an eCommerce website.
Why do most e-commerce websites have a below-par search engine?
- Lack of importance assigned to search- With eCommerce market competition going to astronomical levels and budgets diminishing, organizations don’t assign enough money and resources to improve their search.
- A majority of e-commerce websites around the globe use content management systems (CMS) such as Magento, Shopify, Zencart, and woo commerce, and drupal whose default search engines are pretty basic and don’t allow much scope for improvement without the use of external extensions. Since most of these CMSes focus on the entire CMS building process, very little importance is given to the search engine part of the CMS.
- A lack of importance given to user behavior- Many e-commerce websites don’t collect user behavior at the level that Google does. Even the companies that do collect user behavior, don’t use it to improve search results.
- Lesser User behavioral data- One of the main reasons why Google is better than Bing and Duckduckgo is because their user base is much more which in turn gives a feedback loop to improve the search results. Small websites have less user behavioral data which makes it difficult for them to run machine learning algorithms to improve their search performance.
- Lack of Knowledge of the best practices in search engine-There is a lot of papers out there that explain in detail all the machine learning in search. When it comes to implementation and scaling it to millions of traffic, there are very few experts who know what makes search tick.
Improving eCommerce search results is not easy on a search engine that you build from scratch. It will involve large developer costs and is best avoided. If you have a product feed, you can create your own eCommerce search engine in 5 minutes from here. This will only cost you $9 per month.
