Contributed by: Steve Warren, Vice President of Business Development, Fifth Gear

Every retail transaction has a lifecycle. In ecommerce, that lifecycle includes four distinct stages, each representing an opportunity to impress or disappoint your customers. The quality of this four stage process determines a shopper’s opinion of your brand, and it means the difference between a one-time buyer and a repeat customer.

Stage 1: Identify Need and Search

We all understand what it means to identify a need. Whether the washing machine goes on the fritz, or you see an ad for those shoes you didn’t know you wanted, this is where the shopping process begins.

For up to 95% of ecommerce shoppers, the next step is an internet search. This is why search engine visibility is utterly crucial for online retailers. Unless shoppers have a prior positive experience with your brand, they’ll turn to Google to find the product they’re seeking. Your site must rank in that search or your site will be overlooked entirely. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts have real bottom line impact. We all know that SEO is a complex, nuanced and resource intensive process, so retailers should work with a reputable search firm to gain visibility. A solid SEO strategy is the best way to start a great experience with your shoppers.

Stage 2: Compare Solutions and Make the Purchase

Once customers arrive at your ecommerce site, they won’t want to wade through pages of tabs and links. For immediate engagement with your potential buyer, provide a prominent search box in the universal header of your site. The ease and convenience of on-site search gives you an advantage over competing sites, allowing for relevant product comparisons. When an advanced search tool is used, your shopper is three times more likely to make a purchase.

Next, be sure you’ve removed all roadblocks between the purchase decision and payment. Online retailers must make the purchase process simple, painless and intuitive. Ecommerce checkout design is the last interaction a customer has with your site. Make it a pleasurable experience.

Stage 3: Receive Your Order

Throughout the ordering process, you’ve communicated a brand promise: “We provide convenience and quality. We care about you.” The actual delivery of your product to a customer’s front door is the fulfillment of your brand promise.

The delivery must be timely, accurate and attractively packaged – meeting or exceeding every expectation of the product’s anticipated arrival. If the customer has questions before or after delivery, your contact center agents must be well informed, and in tune with the voice of your brand. Order fulfillment and customer support require costly infrastructure including facilities, staff, technology and vendor relationships. To ensure brand integrity while maintaining efficiencies, consider working with experienced order fulfillment providers who can deliver that brand promise on your behalf.

Stage 4: Form an Opinion

Satisfaction with the overall experience will determine whether or not there is a next-time purchase. Your company’s ability to form a positive opinion in the mind of the shopper is the final determining factor that will either bring them back again or send them looking somewhere else. Ensure satisfaction with a clear brand promise that matches your product delivery. Remove roadblocks from discovery to purchase, and fulfill that promise with a quality product.

In order to provide a great shopping experience to every ecommerce buyer and win them over for another purchase, retailers must craft each stage of the order lifecycle. Analyze these stages in your business, and you’ll find new ways to increase your percentage of repeat customers.

1. You will see results and ads in the suggestions, along with the keyword suggestions (it looks like only one result and ad at any time)
2. The suggestion feature will be rolled out to the standard search results page – at the moment it is only on Google’s home page & toolbar. (I guessed they would do this in my post about Google Suggest last August)
3. The suggestions shown will incorporate your search history

I haven’t seen the new features live yet – but I wonder what impact this will have on the referrals you see in your web logs. If someone searches from Google’s homepage – and clicks on a result from the Google suggest list – then the referrer will presumably be google.com. This will mean that the referral URL won’t contain the search term. I recently saw google.com in our own web logs but didn’t think anything of it at the time. I wonder if was a referral from Google Suggest?

If someone searches from an existing search page then the referrer will be that page and won’t contain search term they were actually using. That means the referral URL will contain a different keyword – possibly completely irrelevant. For example if I search for Microsoft then type in Apple and choose the Apple.com homepage from Google Suggest then the referral URL in Apple’s web logs would be something like: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft and analytics software may mistakenly assume that they were ranking for the term microsoft.

There may be similar problems with the reporting for paid search. Presumably the folks at Google have thought of this and have some sort of solution.

Has anyone seen evidence of this happening?  Is there anything Google could do to help us accurately see the search term that was actually used (for example sending people through a redirect that contained the keyword in the URL)?

Yesterday we released a podcast interview with our customer Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty. During this interview Ian talks about how he started off as a stock boy while he was at school and is now General Manager.

Century Novelty started with a physical store in 1951 but is now is exclusively online. Focusing solely on their online store has given them some valuable experience. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Ian share some of the secrets he has discovered from this experience.

Also see our press release which summarises the ROI Century Novelty achieved from using SLI’s Learning Search and Site Champion services.

With more than 150,000 products in their e-commerce inventory, the lighting retailer needed a robust, intelligent search solution that would give visitors an easy way to find what they’re looking for and not deliver items with little or no relevance in the search results. The company also needed something that returned results lightning quick and that could help customers further refine their searches. Their previous site search from Google just didn’t cut it. (Don’t get us wrong, we like Google and think their Internet search engine is a powerful tool (as does practically everyone else!), but site search is not their sweet spot. It IS ours, as Lighting by Gregory’s results show.)

Lighting by Gregory initially underwent a 30-day free trial, a standard offer for any new customer, and saw how quickly SLI went to work for them. They signed up immediately after the trial ended and have continued to see positive results.

As Lighting by Gregory learned, site search users usually bring in more revenue on average per visitor than those who opt to simply navigate the site. If your site search isn’t delivering the results it should, we’d love to go to work for you too.

Some points worth noting:

• Analyzing internal site search terms was one of the most popular keyword research techniques identified for search marketing.

• One survey greatly emphasised the importance of site search – over 50% of people who have decided what they are going to do when they visit a retailer site have decided to use the site search. We’ve seen this data before – about 50% of people are search focused – but it’s great to have it reinforced. This is why over 95% of retail sites now have search boxes.
• Even though it is universally recognized that site search is extremely important and that people who use site search are more likely to buy, over half the retailers rated their site search as being poor! What’s more retailers rated their site search higher than non-retailers – so the non retail sites have even worse site search.

This highlights the opportunity that site search vendors like SLI have – to help these sites improve their search.

The section on site search finishes with a summary of a case study and quotes our customer Shirely Tan, from American Bridal.

I recommend reading the report.