More than a third of shoppers rank the search box as more important when gift shopping compared with everyday shopping, according to a new study.
Consumers shopping for gifts on an e-retail site rank the ease of searching for and finding products as the No. 1 site priority, according to a survey released today at Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit.
Interactive search experience adapts and learns throughout each shopper’s journey to surface products they want to purchase
Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit — Dallas, TX — September 27, 2016 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today launched Find™, the newest product in RichRelevance’s product suite. Built on the Relevance Cloud™, Find uses powerful real-time personalization to elevate the site search experience – on every device – by instantly connecting shoppers with the products they intend to buy. Find focuses on the customer, providing highly relevant search results based on real shopping behavior, while also delivering the full range of tools that retailers need to innovate the search experience without reliance on IT resources.
“Find elevates site search to meet customer expectations for relevant and personal interactions at every touchpoint, especially in this mobile-first world,” said Eduardo Sanchez, President and CEO of RichRelevance. “For the past 18 months, our customers have told us they wanted us to build a comprehensive and personalized search solution because it was a critically important function. They’ve told us how they struggle with solutions that are archaic and unable to keep up with new data and devices. Find is our answer to delivering the kind of search experience that consumers want – and that we know is possible.”
Site Search is Broken
Site search technology has stagnated for nearly a decade, and currently almost 50% of all e-commerce site searches end in failure. A bad search experience is amplified on mobile devices, where the smaller form factor leaves a tiny margin for error. This has significant consequences for retailers: research from RichRelevance shows that 73% of U.S. shoppers are extremely likely or likely to leave a retail site that doesn’t provide good search results, and 37% are not at all likely to return.
According to Brendan Witcher, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research: “Site search often falls short in its core responsibility: creating an exceptional online experience by delivering the most relevant, contextually-driven answer from a customer query. Traditional site search simply wasn’t designed years ago to properly handle today’s dynamic online and mobile engagements. Search is limited in its ability to effectively serve today’s customer.”
Find: Personal, Real-Time & Friendly
With Find, RichRelevance has launched the first comprehensive personalized site search solution available in the market in the last decade. Through the Relevance Cloud, Find leverages omnichannel data on current and past behaviors, as well as brand affinities and price preferences to algorithmically surface the most relevant products for a given query, context and device. Find also introduces Findability, a real-time metric that measures the success or failure of a search query at scale to help retailers understand if their shoppers are locating the items they wish to buy.
With Find, for the first time ever, site search is personal, real-time and friendly:
- Personal: Find uses real-time shopper behavior to match individualized results to user intent, increasing Findability across all devices. Find predicts and suggests products and keywords with every tap or keystroke, continuously refining the product assortment displayed on screen as the shopper completes their search.
- Real-Time: Find erases indexing delays, allowing results to be based on signals received less than one second earlier. Global pattern & trend alert notifications allow merchandisers to respond is real-time to changes in search behavior, improving sales.
- Friendly: Find’s intuitive dashboard and reporting empowers business users to execute changes and manage the site search function without relying on IT resource. For shoppers, Find delivers a wholly unique search experience that is dynamic and engaging.
Find: Key Features
Find integrates state-of-the-art search technology into the Relevance Cloud platform to debut the most innovative technology architecture for site-wide search personalization. The key features of Find include:
- Personalized Search & Browse: Attribute Sort Options; Algorithmic Sorting; Contextual Considerations; Real-time Affinities; Multi-language; Assortment Equalizer; Predictive faceting; Wisdom of the crowds
- Shopper Experience: Interactive search results dynamically change as shopper applies filters or additional keywords; Visual feedback with explanation of why shopper is seeing particular results
- Merchandising Controls: Conditional Boosting; Conditional Burying; Filtering; Linking
- Testing & Reporting: Personalization MVT; Wisdom of Crowds MVT; Catalog fields MVT; Findability Monitor; Query Alerting
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
Take a moment and think about how you interact with your mobile device, how do you research or make purchases on your mobile phone? You’ll quickly realize that your path to purchase most often begins with a keyword search, which often is vastly different than how you navigate a dot-com site or your local brick and mortar retailer. Infact, 56% of all retail searches occur on mobile devices. Mobile access has changed the way we as consumers interact with the world and it has significantly changed the path to purchase. Mobile was once used for showrooming purposes, sending retailers into a tailspin about how to ensure shoppers didn’t browse in store and convert elsewhere. Today, our challenge is different, mobile devices and behaviors have evolved, they’re more intelligent and more capable to handle a complete shopping journey. While showrooming and browsing behaviors still occur, the completion of the purchase on the mobile device is accounting for more and more of a retailer’s revenue. According to Internet Retailer, mobile commerce is growing at 3 times the rate of US ecommerce overall, accounting for more than $104 billion in 2015.
Today’s challenge is focused on how retailers ensure that customers are finding what they’re looking for on mobile devices so that they ultimately convert. This begs the question, how well is your site search performing? Are your customers finding what they seek? Is your site search delivering a customer centric and mobile considerate experience? What metrics are you using to determine it’s success or failure?
The traditional and dated way of measuring site performance (and commerce search within) by Revenue Per Session (RPS) and conversion were valid when ecommerce was simply just a dot-com site, which is not the case for today’s world. Today, it is essential to measure the performance of each individual feature that leads to a purchase/conversion. In the case of site search, success is defined by the relevance of the results delivered by a search engine to an individual user.
Search is innately unique in the respect that it is the single place in digital shopping journeys where users communicate with technology in their own words and expect a comprehensive response or set of responses. By default, search demands 1:1 communication, and is one of the most impactful places to influence and enhance the customer experience. Search is often a retailer’s first impression, especially on mobile, it is a critical opportunity to succeed by providing relevant and individualized results. Commerce Search accelerates product discovery and drives consumer conversion by delivering the most relevant results for each unique search query. The accuracy of the responses delivered by search is measured by what is known as “Findability”.
Findability a term first coined by Professor Michael Hendron, whose research indicates that nearly a third of e-commerce shoppers use site search, and 90% of buyers will probably use it. Yet these same sought after buyers only find what they seek in half of all site searches.
Since when did the retail industry accept a success rate of just 50%?
Given that search is a feature most often chosen by a determined and informed consumer who knows exactly what he/she wants, especially in ecommerce, it is essential to measure how successful the actual search experience is for that individual. This is why Findability must be a focal point of consideration when analyzing the performance of site search. Findability tells merchants whether consumers find what they are looking for and if they are ultimately pleased with those items. The conversion of these shoppers can only come if they have in fact located the items they desire. It is a cause and effect relationship, and a relationship that if treated right will thrive. When consumers trust that their searches will yield results they’re satisfied with, their search frequency and dependency simultaneously increases.
Are you measuring your site search properly? Are your customers finding what they’re looking for? Perhaps the metrics you’re currently using to determine performance are not providing you with the whole story. To get deeper insight into how to enhance your site search performance and learn more about Findability please visit https://richrelevance.com/relevance-cloud/find/ to stay in the know about our newest product launch Find™, the next generation of personalized search for an omnichannel world.
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