According to Forrester, online shoppers consider easy access to an ecommerce store catalog the most important part of their online shopping journey. What ensures this access is excellent Search and Discovery tools, which are as critical to customer engagement as a fast, easy checkout process.

Businesses invest considerable resources in technology to obtain optimal user engagement and ecommerce conversion metrics. All the best-in-class technologies offer the means to achieve high-quality numbers. Yet as many as 46% of digital commerce practitioners say their company has underinvested in ecommerce website search.

How to increase your average ecommerce conversion rate

In our experience serving more than 12,000 customers, we’ve discovered how to accurately estimate key ecommerce conversion metrics based on time-tested benchmarks and customer testimonials. Our customers report that, on average, a powerful search solution increases user sessions per month by 10% and conversion by 2.77%, which results in monthly ecommerce revenue increasing by more than 27%. And this can happen fast, even a month after the go-live date.

Your Search and Discovery solution must align with the other technologies that run your online business if you want to improve your key ecommerce conversion metrics/KPIs, such as sessions per month, conversion rates, and monthly revenue. 

Want a good conversion rate and ecommerce revenue? We’ve created a profit calculator that can help by allowing you to estimate your online conversion KPIs.

Profit Calculator

Measure your ecommerce revenue and KPIs

How Search and Discovery increase conversion and revenue in ecommerce

We tell our customers to start simple, get up and running quickly; that higher profit is possible on the first day. We explain how our out-of-the-box Search and Discovery technology makes quick success possible with features like instant search results, relevance, faceting, synonyms, typo tolerance, merchandising, and prebuilt search UI components. These can all immediately boost user interaction and lead to higher conversion rates (from shoppers adding items to the shopping cart or buying), and, ultimately, revenue.

Fast full-text search, geo search, and filtering with custom result ranking was exactly what we needed. We had it up and running within a week.

—Ian Pedersen, co-founder, Heart and Soul Care

An out-of-the-box search solution that drives ecommerce profits starts with speed and relevance. Shoppers do their thinking with their fingertips. Every letter they type in a search box instantly updates their results with maximum relevance. This practice alone increases conversion because shoppers instantly discover what’s in your catalog, easily browsing and learning about your products. Then their search results take them to what they want, and then they convert.

Algolia InstantSearch is extremely valuable because we have been able to quickly implement a redesigned experience for customers to quickly find their tire size.

—Dave Christy, chief information officer, Jack Williams Tire

On the other hand, any delay or difficulty for online shoppers can take them elsewhere. In the digital world, shoppers either convert or they bounce. Some of our clients have reduced their bounce rate by as much as 88% by implementing better search. 

Here’s how online retailers measure the success of their search functionality, according to our survey of 900 companies:

The Amazon experience

Compare your site’s search experience with what happens on Amazon. 

Shoppers on Amazon type a query in the search bar and scan their results, but they do more than that: they browse the product images and product descriptions, view personalized search results, product reviews, and recommendations, navigate branded and category-based shopping sections, and interact with engaging A/B-tested features and search results. 

The groundbreaking Amazon experience is impressive, and as a result, Amazon’s conversion rate is enormous. According to one study, the average conversion rate for Amazon shoppers is 10–15%, while the rate for Amazon Prime members is even higher: about 74%. 

If you’re tired of your potential customers going to Amazon, consider what a site Search and Discovery tool like Algolia can do for your business. You can offer your site visitors and potential customers an Amazon-quality experience.

Time to implement, time to convert: calculate your ecommerce value

Fast search reduces time to conversion. If you combine that with fast implementation, you can reduce time to conversion even further, creating a higher return on investment.

Our profit calculator can help you evaluate your overall ROI.

We built an ecommerce profit calculator using industry benchmark and customer data to help our prospects visualize the actual impact of search on their business. It has been so successful that we are happy we can share it online to help not only our prospects but every ecommerce business manager.

—Justin Barth, senior account manager, Algolia

When we saw the results of easy implementation of our Search and Discovery solutions, we decided to give our prospective customers recommendations on how they could improve their ecommerce ROI and KPIs. To do this, our team built a tool to estimate the impact of Algolia search on ecommerce KPIs, allowing businesses to identify potential ecommerce revenue that could be hiding in their online store.

The scenario above shows how a company with monthly revenue of $800,000 could increase that number to more than $1 million by implementing a quick out-of-the-box Search and Discovery solution. It also shows how a 3% ecommerce conversion rate could increase to 3.3%.

Increasing conversion and revenue: start simple but plan to scale up

While starting simple can be immediately profitable, you can do much more. Given the explosion of online buying in the past few years, enhancing your out-of-the-box search solution can double, or even triple, your KPIs. This graph of data from Turkey shows how ecommerce revenue has risen steadily compared with conventional commerce revenue:

To meet this growing need — and respond to the growing sophistication of your users and competitors — your Search and Discovery solution must include advanced features and engaging search UI patterns. The place to start is with our ecommerce analytics engine, which you receive with our product out of the box. Analytics provides reports on popular searches and no results, and enables A/B testing and key AI features like personalization and recommendations.

With Algolia, we now build complex search features in months instead of years.

—Anton Halim, engineer, Everlane 

Here are the ways you can enhance your search user experience to improve your KPIs and increase your profit:

• Advanced UI and website design
• More advanced browsing and navigation techniques, including federated search and query suggestions
• Relevance enhancements
• Additional merchandising strategies and visual editing and content curation
• AI/ML dynamic re-ranking and relevance
• Personalization
• Recommendations 
• A/B testing

Get ideas for conversion rate optimization

Doubling your KPIs: that’s the target for your investment. See what’s possible with our profit calculator. 

If you like, we can also give you a free audit of your ecommerce site search functionality, plus personalized recommendations on how you can improve your KPIs and achieve your profit goals with conversion optimization.

Profit Calculator

Measure your ecommerce revenue and KPIs