If you place banner ads and promotional notices all over your website, but skip the search results, you’re missing a lucrative showcase for your holiday marketing efforts. Many online shoppers don’t browse retail sites using navigation – their shopping expeditions start with site search. So they’ll never see your promos if they’re only placed on product pages, unless you also add them to search results.

This “searchandising” strategy should be a key part of your holiday marketing efforts. Here’s how to make the most of searchandising to promote popular and best-selling products.

• Keyword-specific banners: Link banner ads to popular keywords so that the banners are displayed on the same page as relevant search results. This way, shoppers see your special offers or promotions at the same time they are searching for relevant products.

• Include promotions in search results: Encourage shoppers to click through on results by including relevant promotions right inside of search results themselves. For instance, highlight sales and discounts within results – and if makes sense, place these results at the top of the list.

• Promote similar products: Connect the most popular search terms with similar top sellers, broadening the range of products a shopper can view. This improves the chances that customers will find the product they need, even if they haven’t entered the exact search term.
• Cross-sell: While you have a shopper’s attention on the search results page, take the opportunity to suggest other products that they may like, in a similar vein to the product they have searched for. Your search results could include a “you might like this also” section. For example, if someone searches for flannel sheets, your search results can include flannel robes or bed pillows.

Imagine the holiday-shopping customers who show up at your website to buy piles of gifts, only to discover that your online storefront doesn’t have the red sweater/popular new toolset/cute baby toy they’ve been searching for. They’ll quickly leave your site, taking the potential sales with them – and you’ll never know they were there.

That is, you won’t know that they came to your site, searched, and left unless you scan your search data for clues to shoppers’ wants and needs. Your site search information contains a gold mine of information about holiday shoppers’ gift-buying habits, and a little sleuthing can help you determine which products to add or promote, and how to ensure that gift-givers find what they need on your site.

Look for products, or variations on products, that you don’t currently carry. Granted, given the demands of inventory and ordering, it may not be possible this late in the season to add to stock. However, you may discover that customers are searching for a product that you already carry, but in a different size or color – and it may be easy for you to simply order this variation from a supplier. Additionally, they may be using a search term you hadn’t thought of, so they may not be finding something that’s available on your site. Make sure your product descriptions match the search terms of your customers.

Look for spelling variations for products you already carry. If your customers spell it “ifone case” and what you sell is an “iPhone case,” their searches may not yield the desired products. You’ll find these common misspellings by checking your site search data. Make sure to optimize your site search so that misspelled queries still turn up the correct results. (And consider adding Auto Complete to your site search, which will suggest search terms as customers type – this is a big help for hard-to-spell items.)

Look for popular searches that may not result in high sales. If customers repeatedly search for certain items, but your sales figures don’t show a corresponding uptick in sales, you may need to promote these items more aggressively.

Improve SEO campaigns to bring shoppers to your site. Keyword research is critical to any SEO effort, and your customers’ search terms provide one of the best sources of SEO terms. Using data from site search can save time and provide additional targeted keywords – not merely educated guesses about what customers are searching for – in order to drive traffic to your site.

By taking a few minutes to analyze search data, you can uncover valuable information about holiday shoppers’ buying habits. If you have any questions about these tips, please email us at info@sli-systems.com.

The busy holiday shopping season is already underway – but it’s not too late to make small improvements that will make it easier for shoppers to find their way around on your site, as well as see critical shipping and promotional messages that can impact their purchasing decisions. Below are some tips for ways you can help visitors find the items they seek more quickly and easily on your site – whether through your search box or by navigating their way around. With some minor tweaks here and there, and showing necessary information in site search results, you can capture higher conversions during the holidays and beyond.

• Offer a gift finder – a gift finder is really a fancy way to provide a refinement option and helps customers shop for people on their lists by inputting various criteria (gender, price range, brand preferences, etc.) to narrow results to fit those specifications. Creating a gift finder on your home page – or on site search results pages – is fairly easy to do, as long as you know what refinement options you want to offer. Contact us if you need any guidance with this.
• Be sure to include pricing and inventory levels in site search results (along with “add to cart”, video icons, reviews, etc.) – when people find an item they want to buy, it can be frustrating to put it in their shopping cart only to find out later in the purchasing process that the item is not available. Likewise, including the price in the site search results saves shoppers an extra click if the cost is not in their range. Offer as much detail in the site search results as possible – like an “add to cart” button (which can save shoppers an extra click), as well as icons to show the availability of a product video, and customer ratings and reviews. You can also offer ratings as a search results refinement option if people only want to see items with four stars or more, for example.
• Make sure you don’t return “no results” pages – even if there are zero results for a particular term, showing “no results” can frustrate customers. Instead, offer alternate search terms, popular sellers or items that you’re promoting. They may not find exactly what they’re looking for but they may just find something else they’re equally interested in.
• Show information about purchasing a gift card online in the search results – many retailers overlook this option but it’s a great way to give visitors another way to purchase from your site if they don’t see exactly what they seek. People don’t always think of purchasing a gift card online – and gift cards can actually be preferable to potentially duplicate gifts, items in the wrong size or gifts the recipient simply doesn’t want. Showing gift cards as an option in the site search results makes it really easy for people to make a purchase.
• Got products that won’t ship/arrive to the recipient by Dec. 25? Be sure to make that clear in search results - Again, provide as much detail in search results as possible, without requiring customers to click through to the product page. Most likely if it’s not going to arrive by Dec. 25 they won’t be interested, so save them a step and let them know that important detail right away. Chances are they’ll appreciate the information and make a repeat visit to your site.

These are just a few fairly easy steps you can take to provide a better experience for your customers on your web site. If you have any questions about these or other recommendations, please email us at info@sli-systems.com.

This week we posted an interview with Jason Miller from Motorcycle Superstore. Jason discusses a bunch of interesting projects they’re working on, including expanding internationally, a new customer loyalty program and a personal shopping assistant.

One of the of the aspects of the business Jason discussed was their non-product content. They have a web and print magazine called Motorcycle USA which has a loyal following. This content keeps their customers coming back and then when they need something, they know the store is there.

Sasha Deri from the Alternative Energy Store (the previous podcast) also emphasized their non product content. For them it consists of educational content – educating about the benefits of renewable energy and instructional videos and articles for installation and maintenance of the products they sell.

This non-product content is a fantastic way of attracting and engaging customers when they’re not ready to buy. If it’s done right it can also have fantastic SEO benefits. It normally takes a lot of effort to produce but once you have it you have a considerable advantage over your competitors who are merely shifting product.

What type of non product content do you have on your site?

Today we issued a press release about Hard Rock Cafe and the work we are doing with them.

The press release explains why you need ecommerce specific features in a site search solution for a site that has both an online store and significant non-product content.

I don’t normally mention our press releases on the blog but thought Hard Rock deserved a special mention.

Rock On!

I see that the Google Store is provided as an example of their commerce search in action so I thought I would check it out. I found a few issues and thought I would share a few friendly tips with the folks at Google on how they can improve their offering.

Tip #1: Add Synonyms for commonly mistyped terms

My first search term was “tshirt“. You can see that they had no results because I typed this as one word. This is very common on apparel sites. If someone was looking at their site search analytics they would have noticed this and added a synonym so you would see results for “t-shirts” without having to click on the spelling suggestion. You can see an example of this if you search for tshirts on hottopic.

Google commerce search - tshirts

Tip # 2: Don’t show refinement options on no results

One of the new features that Google offers is the ability to filter results. This is a standard feature on ecommerce sites and it’s not surprising to see that Google is offering this.  I found it strange that there are filtering options on the page above when there are no results. For example you can see that under Shop by Category there is the option to filter by Eco (14). The (14) normally means that there are 14 results in the current result set which fall into the Eco category. Something strange is happening here – when you click on that option you still get no results.

Tip #3: Refinement numbers should be accurate

I also noticed that when you search for “google” the “Shop By Price” facet shows that there are 35 products in the $0-10 range. When you click on “Show All” you don’t see any more price ranges but that number changes to 34. When you click on the price range it returns 61 products. I’m sure there is an explanation for this but something seems broken with their filtering.

Tip #4: Put the most relevant results first

Let’s try another search. Here are the results for bag:

There are bags here – but the top result is for a bean bag. It looks like Google’s legendry relevance algorithms for web search don’t necessarily translate to relevant results for site search. Our approach here is to watch what people click on for each keyword and promote the results that are clicked on most. This would bring the most popular bags to the top of the results.

In their datasheet Google claims that if you use the Google Commerce Search it “removes the need to plan for variable capacity around increases in traffic”.  That probably needs to be adjusted a little because Google is only providing the search feature. Retailers are still hosting the rest of their site (product and navigation pages, shopping carts etc) and they will need to plan for variable capacity. That said, having your search hosted by someone else can help significantly with your capacity planning. We saw this with one of our early ecommerce customers, Etronics, in Christmas 2002.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Birkenstock USA is an early user, reporting speedier searches, more relevant result and better customer satisfaction. However I can’t see a search box anywhere on their site. Hmmmm….

My feeling is that Google may have announced this product a little prematurely. It doesn’t quite look ready for prime time. However, I’m sure they’ll improve it and in doing so will keep us on our toes. We will continue to innovate in site search.

We are confident that we have many features that Google doesn’t offer, however the one thing that I hear from our customers repeatedly that they love about us most is the level of service they receive from SLI. This is one of the factors that made Armando Roggio at Practical Ecommerce state “I believe that SLI’s search solution constitutes one of the best products I’ve ever reviewed” in his recent review of SLI’s site search. I’ll be interested to see whether Google can change their traditional, hands off approach to customer service with the Google Commerce Search.

Welcome to the ecommerce site search market Google. It is great to have Google validate what we have been saying for some time, which is that site search is important and it deserves focus from owners of high value sites, including online retailers.

SLI Systems is exhibiting at the Ecommerce Expo taking place at Earls Court, London on October 20 – 21, 2009. Ecommerce Expo is in its third year and is the largest ecommerce event in the UK. Entry to the expo is FREE of charge so it’s a fantastic opportunity to catch up with the latest thinking and developments in online retailing and meet the companies who can provide the solutions you’re looking for without spending a penny.

If you’re visiting the expo, stop by SLI’s stand, #514, we have an Acer Netbook (Windows XP, 160GB HDD, 10.1 inch) up for grabs so leave us your business card to go in the draw to win. We’ll also be performing FREE site search reviews at our stand so if you’d like someone on our team to review your site search please click here and we’ll arrange a time.

Osric Powell, Business Development, SLI Systems & Rob McNair, Ecommerce Manager, Tiso UK will be presenting at the Customer Conversion & Retention theatre between 2:45pm – 3:15pm, Wednesday, Oct 21. Please come along to this case study based presentation and learn how Tiso improved their revenues using advanced on-site search.

For more information about this event, visit www.ecommerceexpo.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you there expo!!

Today we posted an interview with Lee Brown from Online Golf on the ecommerce podcast. One of the really interesting pieces of data that Lee shares during the interview is that people who view a video on their site are 85% more likely to buy than people who don’t. This is one of the strongest endorsements for online video I’ve ever seen. Online golf use the videos as a sales pitch, providing more information about a particular product.

As part of our proactive outreach (that we do for all of our customers) we suggested that their videos be incorporated into their site search. The products that have a related video now have a link that allows the videos to be played directly from the search results page. Over half the videos that are watched are now viewed from the search results page.