In contrast to the brick and mortar stores where we all grew up shopping, online shopping offers a variety of ways to put the right items in front of your customers. Instead of sorting through racks or shelves of products that we don’t want in order to find the few items we do want, merchandising on an eCommerce site allows you to easily put front and center the items your customers want most.
Like a personal shopper, let your customers lead you to their favorite items and then suggest other similar pieces, tell them about special promotions and don’t lead them away from their desired item. With successful eCommerce merchandising, you can automate these various incentives to drive your customers to the shopping cart.
Here are a couple tips to improve your merchandising; you’ll find the complete list and more in our Big Book of Site Search Tips. Download it today to learn the most innovative, yet practical ways to improve your site’s usability.
1. Override Search Results
Online shoppers pay the most attention to the first several results “above the fold”, or rather, what is shown initially on screen without scrolling. If you have relevant promotional, sale or seasonal items you’d like to showcase, you might consider overriding search results to place them at the top of the list.
2. Don’t Present Unrelated Cross-sell or Up-sell Products
When your customer enters a search term, it’s a clear signal about what they are looking to find. Keep the products that you recommend focused on the initial search keyword. Shoppers will distrust the value of your search function if it habitually returns irrelevant promotional results.
3. Show Search Results on Product Pages
When someone searches a specific keyword on the web and clicks an organic listing that leads to one of your product detail pages, you can increase conversions and reduce bounce rates of those visits by including other search results for that keyword. In our Big Book of Site Search Tips, we show an example from Motorcycle Superstore.
For instance, if a customer searches Google for “Bell Helmet Rally” and clicks a link to Motorcycle Superstore’s detail page they’ll see a banner on the page containing other Bell motorcycle helmets. This surfaces a broader range of products than they would have otherwise seen, which is useful if the original product is out of stock or is not a best seller.
These are just a few tips for increasing clicks and reducing bounce rates on your eCommerce site with effective merchandising. You’ll find even more strategies in our Big Book of Site Search Tips. It’s full of useful guidelines to help make site-wide enhancements on your eCommerce site to create an intuitive site that leads customers to the most relevant and popular items they desire.
