From the look of things, UK eRetailers have bought into the idea of Site Search as a Full-Service to provide the best user experience on their sites, while removing the headaches commonly associated with set-up and maintenance over time.
In the past week we announced 2 new UK online retailers SockShop, a specialty socks and hosiery e-retailer, and Outdoor Megastore, which sells outdoor clothing and camping gear, reaping the benefits of Full-Service search. These are just a couple of the e-retail clients in the UK we’re now working with, and we’ll be announcing many more in the coming weeks (including some fairly recognizable names).
What’s apparent from our work with SockShop and Outdoor Megastore is that online shoppers in countries around the globe have the same requirements for an intuitive, streamlined experience when shopping online (or on mobile devices). And both of these companies struggled to offer that before they started working with SLI. For example, by relying on the default site search that was part of its e-commerce platform, Outdoor Megastore found its previous site search to be a major cause of site abandonment, and was a barrier to the superior online experience they aimed to deliver.
With SLI’s Full-Service Search in place, both companies now offer a range of refinement options in search results, as well as suggestions for alternate search terms and the ability to sort results by a variety of factors (price, brand, etc.). As a result, abandonment rates have dropped, and visitors who search stay on the site longer, view more pages and convert at a higher rate than those who don’t search. These results demonstrate exactly what we want our clients to see – that a more powerful site search can drive more business online and offer almost-immediate ROI benefits.
Perhaps online retailers in the UK – and their customers – are on to something.
