Recently I’ve been working on an eCommerce site with lots of products. Most of the customers know what type of products we sell.
So, when we realized our inventory was around 8000 products, we decided to improve the search feature.
The Benefits of Internal Search for User Experience
Usually, the criteria needed to invest in a better internal search engine is:
- Have enough sales to afford it (search is not cheap)
- Have knowledgable customers
- Have an extensive inventory
In exchange, you can expect better customer feedback and increased conversion rates.
Half of the e-commerce users immediately click the search bar, according to Forrester.. It is not hard to know why search users usually already know what they want to buy.
There are two leaders in the internal search space:
We were looking at implementing the first one as it is currently the leader. I don’t know all the differences between the products, but what Algolia has that instantly caught my eye is the ability to customize search results, combining user and business goals.
It was a low-hanging way of improving the overall user experience. The user feels more confident, and user satisfaction is bound to increase.
The Drawbacks of Internal Search for User Experience
I’ll be honest.
I was convinced this was the best way forward. That is until I looked at our Analytics.
We did a 14-day trial run.
Even if our inventory is quite extensive, 82% of visitors land on the same 20 products. Our store ranks those 20 products as the default search bar’s first option.
Other visitors land on our blog posts, static pages, etc.
A small percentage is looking for parts and accessories. This is the main target that would benefit from adding an internal search tool. However, looking closer at the analytics, it may not have been a good ROI.
Is it better to ignore UX?
This is where the problem becomes interesting.
Algolia was a crutch. It was the solution to the problem without looking deeper.
It is important to remember that improving the user experience does not necessarily means purchasing a tool. We should not ignore UX because a tool may become unprofitable or not worth the investment.
Instead, we should be looking into other methods. Asking a few questions like:
- What do our users search for?
- How can we make those searches easier?
Search is a way to improve user experience, but it is not the only way to do it. Not only that, but in our case, it was the easy way out.
Adding a search widget allowed us to ignore our navigation and lack of signaling. Search should work with navigation, not instead of navigation.
Instead, the focus should be on improving user experience, from the website’s structure to the content, and improving signals, categorization, and design.
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