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Wouldn’t it be nice if you could jump-start your Shopify-powered online store or app and end up with some amazing KPIs?
The good news is that you can; all it takes is adding some search features and a little content discovery technology to your ecommerce site. Whether your Shopify-powered store is small and just starting out or large and well established, you can enhance your shoppers’ online searching, browsing, and buying experiences with API-based solutions from Algolia, a Shopify Plus Certified Partner.
What about built-in Shopify search — isn’t that good enough?
Well, no. It’s a start, but only a rudimentary one.
You can do much more to help your shoppers love the experience they enjoy on your Shopify or Shopify Plus site. You can do it by taking your search functionality seriously and extending its reach. With specialized plugins that enhance searching, you can drive your conversion up, increase your average order value, and vastly improve your bottom line, not to mention delight your customers and keep them regularly coming back long after they complete their first checkout.
So what, then, does creating a compelling Shopify search experience entail?
There are 7 key areas that, when done right, make for great Shopify search:
High search relevance naturally correlates with a great online shopping experience. The better you are at determining your customers’ search intent and serving them relevant search results pages in your Shopify or Shopify Plus store, the better their user experiences will be, with the added benefits for you of higher conversion and lower bounce rates.
Textual relevance refers to how well search results match the text of someone’s query. You can provide more-relevant results for visitors to your Shopify store by improving these aspects of your textual relevance:
Business relevance means using your site metrics — like click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, and popularity — to refine your search relevance and ensure that shoppers are shown their most appropriate content. For example, you can track conversion on items and then, in search, show those with the highest conversion rates first.
Because shopper preferences and search patterns continually change, it’s smart to regularly assess where you have opportunities to fine-tune and optimize your search relevance. You can also schedule a quick tune-up whenever there are changes in your Shopify store content or product catalog.
If you want to grow your Shopify business KPIs, it pays to carefully calibrate your search. You can do that with search analytics by monitoring your users’ experiences and online behaviors. For instance, look at the results your searchers get or don’t get (empty results), your popular searches, click positions, number of “no results” searches, and filter usage. Having these key details on hand then lets you make data-driven decisions about your Shopify search experience. For example, you can proactively identify searches that aren’t performing well and adjust their relevance.
Giving your users the ability to find what they want fast — and intuitively refining what they’re shown — is imperative for getting the most out of your Shopify search functionality. Put these UX- and UI-improving tips to work on your site or in your app:
Mobile users account for more than half of the traffic on the Web. Mobile shoppers are time constrained and easily distracted, so as you build and improve your Shopify or Shopify Plus search, it pays to make your site’s mobile experience as easy as possible.
Mobile devices pose challenges because of their small screen sizes, so it helps to:
The massive impact of personalization is hardly a novelty, but what’s often overlooked is how personalization strategies are often different for each ecommerce business and its unique customer preferences.
To succeed with personalization, you must first thoroughly understand your users and their needs. Sometimes what matters is their purchase history, sometimes it’s their brand affinity.
Only then can you define your search strategy. You might choose to personalize by focusing on a brand, a color, a type of product, a size, or a mix of various product attributes. The same goes for user actions: you have to determine whether someone clicking “Add to cart” is more meaningful than opening a product page.
One more important tip: do A/B testing of your search scenarios and continually iterate on your strategies.
You can use merchandising to amplify your Shopify search strategy by aligning it with your catalog, revenue targets, promotional campaigns, and marketing strategies. Best practices for merchandising include:
You can also use visual drag-and-drop tools to manually reorganize items as needed. You can:
One element of both personalization and smart merchandising is making appropriate product recommendations to shoppers based on their behavior on your site. This can make your customer experience truly stand out, as according to a survey we did of online retailers about how they use search, only 20% of these companies personalize their searches and recommendations to appeal specifically to each shopper.
With product recommendations, you can automatically show people items and content that complement or offer a refinement of what they’re searching for or viewing. Providing “thoughtful” recommendations like this maximizes conversion, as well as catalog exposure for online vendors.
How much can you increase engagement, conversion, and customer loyalty by plugging Algolia into your Shopify or Shopify Plus online store?
Polish toy retailer Noski Noski is one impressive example. The team implemented Algolia Recommend on its website so that if a customer reached a page and wasn’t interested in what they saw, they’d see a recommendation for something truly relevant. “The journey on the website is much richer,” says the company co-founder Piotr Tuszewicki. “We conducted A/B testing and we saw after two or three weeks that the results [were] definitely better.”
Algolia provides full integration with Shopify and is a Shopify Plus Certified Partner. You get access to a full range of advanced search and discovery capabilities through a plugin, plus full documentation and 24×7 support.
To see how easy it would be to improve your business KPIs with advanced search from Algolia, request a demo today!
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