Evan Schuman mentioned the idea of being able to search within an individual store – so you can see if your local store has the product you’re looking for. I like this idea and I would use it. There are a few ways it could be implemented. It could be presented as a refinement in the search and navigation – so you could select a store from a drop down box. If there are many stores then this could be a little cumbersome so it may be nice to remember your local store – or use the visitor’s IP address to guess their location and show some local stores at the top of the drop down.
If you do allow people to select their local store (and you store this in a cookie for example) then when they do a normal search you could show the availability of the each product at their local store. This is one example of how you can personalize site search results.
One problem with this idea is often the people who are running the ecommerce store struggle to get recognition for the contribution they make to off line sales. A search within the store feature is only going encourage off line sales. If this applies to you then you’ll probably be reluctant to implement this type of feature – even though it may be better for your customers.
I know we’ve discussed this with some of our customers in the past – but I don’t think we’ve ever implemented it.
3 thoughts to “Searching within a store”
You make an excellent point, but there’s an alternative interpretation. You said “One problem with this idea is often the people who are running the ecommerce store struggle to get recognition for the contribution they make to off line sales.” That’s absolutely true, but you then conclude that offering a search within store function would undermine E-Commerce efforts.
To the contrary, it would be a gift to E-Commerce directors for precisely the reason you cite. BECAUSE E-Commerce often having a problem getting credit for helping in-store revenue, such a feature would generate concrete evidence of how the site was facilitating in-store revenue.
The real fear among E-Commerce execs is simply that the CFO, COO and CEO will not be sophisticated enough to understand such stats and that they’ll look at nothing beyond offline versus online revenue. That’s what will cause E-Commerce directors to avoid in-store searches.
Thanks for the comment – I agree with you Evan. Search within a store should help get credit with offline sales – especially if you can generate some stats showing how many people have searched within a store. In fact this functionality would make it easy to set up in store kiosks that allow you to search the contents of the physical store in which they’re located.
This functionality may have another benefit – it may encourage the owners of the physical stores to drive their customers to the website. Oddly enough a number of people who operate the bricks and mortar stores believe the website may be cannibalizing their sales. With this functionality they may feel more confident that the website is going to drive people to the store.
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