While Henry Ford was great at making cars, he clearly missed a key opportunity to delight his customers when he said, “People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.” Fortunately, today’s consumers have an endless array of color options when they shop for everything from cars to handbags.  And, being able to find a product in just the right color has become an important part of the shopping experience and I would suspect something customers except to do more often than not.

Since customers often begin to shop using your site’s search, you’ll want to make sure your products are accurately tagged with the appropriate color or colors.  This way, when a customer conducts a search including the color they want, they will get relevant results.  In the example below, you can see how a search for “red dress” on the children’s clothing retailer Chasing Fireflies produces a fantastic assortment of red dresses.

Products such as shirts or handbags often come in a variety of colors.  Shoppers for these items will often want to consider the style and color at the same time.  A great example of this can be seen in the site search of handbag producer and retailer Dooney & Bourke.  As their customers search for handbags, they are presented with circular color swatches below each item that represent the colors and patterns available for that item.  To make shopping even more fun, Dooney & Bourke made these swatches interactive by dynamically changing out the product image to display the related item as you mouse over the color swatches.  As you can see from the screen shot below, some of these handbags come in a wide assortment of colors.  This functionality really enhances the aspect of exploration and discovery to the shopping experience and makes it much more fun.

For many customers, finding the right color product is more than just something to browse, it’s a must have.  For instance, they may be looking for a specific color handbag to match exactly with their new outfit or they may need to find orange colored candy to complement the decorations at their child’s birthday party.

To help customers shop by color, some retailers have included color in their search refinements.  For bead supplier Artbeads.com, color is so important to the purchase process that they have placed it at the top of their search refinements.

To make shopping by color more visual and fun, they have created custom color icons to display as search refinements. A couple of other examples of this can be seen below from two candy retailers A Candy Store and Jelly Belly.

Now, before you race off to incorporate color into your site search, I do want to refer you to another blog from Shaun Ryan entitled “Refining search results by color/colour,” in which Shaun points out some of the challenges color filtering can present and showcases some clever solutions you can use to overcome these challenges.

The busy holiday shopping season is already underway – but it’s not too late to make small improvements that will make it easier for shoppers to find their way around on your site, as well as see critical shipping and promotional messages that can impact their purchasing decisions. Below are some tips for ways you can help visitors find the items they seek more quickly and easily on your site – whether through your search box or by navigating their way around. With some minor tweaks here and there, and showing necessary information in site search results, you can capture higher conversions during the holidays and beyond.

• Offer a gift finder – a gift finder is really a fancy way to provide a refinement option and helps customers shop for people on their lists by inputting various criteria (gender, price range, brand preferences, etc.) to narrow results to fit those specifications. Creating a gift finder on your home page – or on site search results pages – is fairly easy to do, as long as you know what refinement options you want to offer. Contact us if you need any guidance with this.
• Be sure to include pricing and inventory levels in site search results (along with “add to cart”, video icons, reviews, etc.) – when people find an item they want to buy, it can be frustrating to put it in their shopping cart only to find out later in the purchasing process that the item is not available. Likewise, including the price in the site search results saves shoppers an extra click if the cost is not in their range. Offer as much detail in the site search results as possible – like an “add to cart” button (which can save shoppers an extra click), as well as icons to show the availability of a product video, and customer ratings and reviews. You can also offer ratings as a search results refinement option if people only want to see items with four stars or more, for example.
• Make sure you don’t return “no results” pages – even if there are zero results for a particular term, showing “no results” can frustrate customers. Instead, offer alternate search terms, popular sellers or items that you’re promoting. They may not find exactly what they’re looking for but they may just find something else they’re equally interested in.
• Show information about purchasing a gift card online in the search results – many retailers overlook this option but it’s a great way to give visitors another way to purchase from your site if they don’t see exactly what they seek. People don’t always think of purchasing a gift card online – and gift cards can actually be preferable to potentially duplicate gifts, items in the wrong size or gifts the recipient simply doesn’t want. Showing gift cards as an option in the site search results makes it really easy for people to make a purchase.
• Got products that won’t ship/arrive to the recipient by Dec. 25? Be sure to make that clear in search results – Again, provide as much detail in search results as possible, without requiring customers to click through to the product page. Most likely if it’s not going to arrive by Dec. 25 they won’t be interested, so save them a step and let them know that important detail right away. Chances are they’ll appreciate the information and make a repeat visit to your site.

These are just a few fairly easy steps you can take to provide a better experience for your customers on your web site. If you have any questions about these or other recommendations, please email us at info@sli-systems.com.