When you are in a niche market and your customers are looking for very specific products or information, it’s really important to have a website that can deliver highly-relevant results fast. That’s particularly true in the case of Bulk Reef Supply, whom I had the opportunity to work with recently.
The folks at Bulk Reef Supply know their business inside and out. Their website is not only a great place to find a wide variety of equipment and products for saltwater aquariums; it’s also a hub for all sorts of information related to reefing. They were looking to improve the ease of use for their customers by optimizing their website’s search functionality.
I was excited to work with them to provide search results pages that would give valuable content to their customers. We provided them with SLI’s Learning Search, which returns continually-improved results over time, and Rich Auto Complete, which enables the search bar with predictive text – every time a visitor searches for a product, the most popular search terms are shown, as well as visuals showing the most popular products. It’s a great feature that allows visitors to click directly from the search box to a product detail page.
We also found a number of ways to integrate features onto their search pages to optimize the usability of the site, including adding ratings and reviews, add-to-cart functionality, rewards points, and add-to-wish-list functionality. All of these added features cut down on the number of clicks a customer needs to make a purchase. We also added their quick look feature onto the search results page, which is an effective way to display a larger snapshot of image, plus price and detailed product information.
To solve the issue of showing relevant informational content, we added a cool tabs feature at the top of the search pages that indexes non-product content, such as how-to videos and instruction manuals. Through this, Bulk Reef Supply has created a full-service offering to their customers. It’s not only a great site to shop, but a great place to find information about building reefs.
It was a pleasure to work with a client who knew what they wanted, and were also open to our recommendations about best-practices so that together, we could deliver the best website experience for their customers. I also enjoyed learning about saltwater aquariums, and am thinking of building one for myself. With the help of Bulk Reef Supply, I think that I have a good shot at it.
To learn more about my work with Bulk Reef Supply, you can email me at discovery@sli-systems.com or call 1 (866) 240-2812.
