If you’ve been following our series of site search tips, you know that each week we reveal a few tips from our latest “Big Book of Site Search Tips” whitepaper (available for free download at usblogsli.wpengine.com/whitepaper/bigbook) in various categories like General, Refinements, Relevance, Reporting, and others. This week we offer a couple tips below related to Merchandising, and one tip from the Search Page Format & Lay-out category. As always, if you have any tips to share or feedback on what’s worked well on your site, please post a comment on our blog – we’d love to hear from you.
- Consider overriding search results to place relevant promotional items at the top of the list – Search provides a powerful venue for showcasing products that you would like to highlight, such as sale or seasonal items. Online shoppers pay the most attention to the first several results, or those on the first page.
- Don’t present unrelated cross-sell or up-sell products at the top of the search results if they are not connected to the site visitor’s search term – Shoppers expect to see relevant results, and will distrust the value of your search function if it habitually returns search results that are promotional and irrelevant.
- Offer grid and list view options, if applicable – A grid view is typically suitable for a product search. Depending on the size of the images you can display three, four or five across the page, and as a result, you’re able to show many more products above the fold. In a list view, you can provide a more in-depth description of the product along with other information such as category, shipping, ratings, number of reviews, etc. Conduct testing on your site to determine which view generates the best return, but it’s always good to offer your visitors the option to see results in both formats. Some people simply respond better to a list format, whereas others might like to see things in a grid. Let your customers choose how they want to see the results, and you have a better likelihood of converting them.
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