Evan Schuman mentioned the idea of being able to search within an individual store – so you can see if your local store has the product you’re looking for. I like this idea and I would use it. There are a few ways it could be implemented.  It could be presented as a refinement in the search and navigation – so you could select a store from a drop down box. If there are many stores then this could be a little cumbersome so it may be nice to remember your local store – or use the visitor’s IP address to guess their location and show some local stores at the top of the drop down.

If you do allow people to select their local store (and you store this in a cookie for example) then when they do a normal search you could show the availability of the each product at their local store. This is one example of how you can personalize site search results.

One problem with this idea is often the people who are running the ecommerce store struggle to get recognition for the contribution they make to off line sales. A search within the store feature is only going encourage off line sales. If this applies to you then you’ll probably be reluctant to implement this type of feature – even though it may be better for your customers.

I know we’ve discussed this with some of our customers in the past – but I don’t think we’ve ever implemented it.

I saw an excellent write up about winning strategies for no results pages by Greg Nudelman. Greg includes plenty of examples of what does and doesn’t work.  I recommend reading it. Here is a list of some of the things that we do around the no results page.

First of all we try to reduce the number of times that the no results page is shown through the following techniques:

• The auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have results.
• We report on the search terms that have no results. Often this is caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. This can be remedied by either using that language on your site or adding synonyms. It can also indicate products/information that your visitors expect you to have that you don’t carry. You can use this information to help expand your product lines – based on what your visitors are asking for. Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty talks about doing this in this interview
• Similar to the Amazon example that Greg gives, we fail over if there are no results that contain all of the words in the query – we will show results that contain some of the words, with a message describing what we are doing. Note: Not everyone reads the message so in some cases this causes confusion.
  

On the no results page we will:

• show spelling suggestions using the Did you mean language. These suggestions are drawn from the language on the site
• show popular searches – I’m a fan of this
• show popular products – this can also cause confusion – visitors may not read the message that you have no results for their search term and assume that the popular products are the search results.
• show keyword specific banners – for example if there is a search term for a product that you no longer stock then a banner may be a good way of saying “we no longer carry this product range – here are some alternatives.”

As an aside – one of Greg’s examples that highlighted the “Did you mean” functionality was a Google search for asdasdasdasdasdasddfgh. If you do that search – his page is the top result (undoubtedly this page will be in the results set shortly as well).

I read an article in the Ecommerce Guide recommending that online stores should blog. The article covers some of the basics of blogging and its benefits – including helping to engage your customers and getting more visibility in the search engines. As I often do, I started thinking about what this meant from a site search point of view.

First of all your main site search should index all of your content, including your blog articles – not just your products. Understandably, you may feel a little reluctant to do this – showing blog or other content from your site may distract your visitors from the purchasing process and so could reduce your conversion rate.  However your blog articles should be informing and engaging your customers so it would seem to be a shame to not make them easy to find.

There are a variety of approaches you can take:

1. Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – eg on the left or below the search.  Doing this ensures that the products have prime position on the results page. One problem with this is that if the blog content is the most relevant content for the search then it may end up being shown below the fold – by showing products first you may be missing out on engaging the visitor which may mean you end up missing out on a sale.
2. Have refinement options so people can restrict the results to just the blog articles or products.
3. Allow product and blog content to surface in your search – showing the most relevant first. You could adjust your ranking settings to place more weight on the products – so products generally show higher. If you do this I would recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them so if they are the most relevant for a particular keyword then they will end up at the top of the search results.

In addition, I recommend you have a blog search so people can search just your blog articles. For this search the blog articles should be the most prominent – but I think you should show products in your blog search for example – down the side.

You put a lot of effort into producing content for you blog. It is a fantastic opportunity for you to engage your customers with your unique perspective. This content should be accessible through your site search. If you’re unsure how to present your blog content in your search – ask your customers (maybe through a blog post), try some options and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Contact us if you would like our opinion.

I spotted a post by Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow listing the top 10 online retailers by conversion rate. First of all – I was pleased to see three SLI customers in the list – FTD, Blair.com and Drs Foster and Smith.  Before you start comparing your conversion rate to these sites and trying to work out why you can’t achieve anything like this you need to look at the types of online retailer that have made the podium here.

Schwan’s – an online grocery store will have a lot of loyal customers who buy their groceries every week. These people will have a conversion rate of close to 100% and so will skew the numbers. Similarly Drs Foster and Smith will have many loyal customers who regularly buy pet supplies.

On the other hand catalogers like Blair will have visitors who have already decided to buy based on the information in the catalog. In this case the website is functioning as an order taking system. It doesn’t have to do a great job of attracting people to the site and compelling them to purchase. The catalog has already done that. One small site search tip here – if people type a catalog number into the search box then you should navigate directly to the product page. This can help conversions because it saves a step (you don’t have to view the search results page and click on the product).

Of course the retailer you should be paying close attention is Amazon. In the ecommerce podcast I usually ask retailers for an example of a site they particularly admire. Amazon is by far and away the most common answer. They are undoubtedly the gold standard by which to measure yourselves.