While Google and other major search engine providers have largely perfected the art of finding exactly what users are looking for in a matter of seconds, the experience of seeking out specific products on e-commerce sites themselves leaves a lot to be desired.
Retailers are losing 32% of potential customers due to bad search results. Read this and all the other marketing stats from this week.
Site search matters, yet many ecommerce sites are actually deterring customers through poor experiences. Indeed, a fifth of UK shoppers are not satisfied with retailers’ search results.
RichRelevance has surveyed consumers about their attitudes to site search on retailers’ websites, finding that some retailers have room for improvement.
Across the vast expanses of the Internet, drawing customers to your site is half the battle. The other half is helping them out once they get there.
Many, if not all, e-commerce sites have a function allowing consumers to quickly search for (and hopefully find) the products they want. And consumers are happy to use them. RichRelevance reports 83% of consumers say the search box on a Web site is important or extremely important when shopping online, and three-quarters of them say they always or often use the search box when shopping on a retailer’s site.
Some 48% of shoppers participating in a study released Tuesday say the ability to easily search and find products on a retailer’s Web site can make or break a deal. For 37% the stakes rise during the gift-giving season, according to those participating in the study.
Advertising Week seems to signal the beginning of the holiday shopping season, when retailers put a stronger emphasis on fine-tuning search and seem to pay more attention on Web site design.
OK, so when U.S. consumers are searching for gifts online, they apparently are most concerned about the ability to search for and find products on a retailer’s site, according to a recent report.
Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit survey said that more than one-third of shoppers ranked the ease (or lack thereof) of finding and searching for products on a retailer’s or brand’s site their top priority when shopping online for gifts.