So what is Searchandising and what is the second biggest problem for E commerce site owners, plus for good measure what is the first problem??

The First Problem (for all site owners)

If you haven’t guessed it yet, the first problem is getting people to the site in the first place. As many business people have found, setting up a website and waiting for the people to flock in normally has only one outcome, a long wait (and a website covered in electronic dust). No, for all but the luckiest of businesses, a lot of hard work is required to get those potential customers to their site in the first place…

So What’s the Second Problem then?

You may be ahead of me here again, because, as I’m sure you will have guessed the second (and perhaps more important) problem is getting those visitors to do something when they get to the site…

That “something” will vary from one site to another. For some all they want is for the visitor to join a mailing list, for others they need to sell something. However these Ecommerce sites, when they are of any size at any rate, can often get quite difficult to navigate, which often makes it very hard for the visitor to find what they want..

The answer is of course the “Search” box. You’ll find these on many sites, and when they are done in the right way, they are really useful. With just a few clicks you can input the term “rubber ducks” and be provided with a list of all the ones that site has to sell, all without all that tiresome tracking through the navigation.

Searchandising

The term “Searchandising” is in fact all about the science of implementing these search boxes and the analysis of the data it provides.

You see, a properly implemented Search function is one that allows for the fact that humans are well, human, they just don’t do things the way a “sensible computer” would. For a start they can’t spell in many cases, and they tend to write as they speak, in other words they may well type in “yelow rubber duks”. Now a system that expects you to type in just “rubber ducks” is going to get really confused here and will probably decide that there is nothing on the site that matches these requirements and come up with an empty search list. Result, the user goes elsewhere and that potential sale is lost…

There is a lot of difference between a search system that just does a simple cross referencing between the search term and a part of its database and one that uses what is termed “Natural Language Processing”. Such systems can recognise misspelled words and ignore any part of the search term that just looks odd etc. Some of the best even allow the website owner to customise the dictionary and thesaurus that forms the core of the internal search engine, all with the aims of making sure that if the site has something like what the person is searching for, that it is displayed in the list of products. This can make all the difference between a sale and no sale…

Listing the Results

Listing the results is by the way another key factor. Being able to understand what the user wants is fine, but you also have to display the results in a way that they can understand, and thus continue their journey through your site. Keeping the results looking like the Search Engines is said to be good idea, rating the list by relevance (show a % if you want) and providing pictures of products helps too. Allowing the user to search within the list, so that they can narrow the number of items down, or to change the sort criteria are some other good ideas. Whatever you do though make sure it is simple and intuitive.

Analysing the Data

A trick that is often missed on sites with a search facility is to check to see what people have actually typed in / are looking for. You can use this data to improve the way the site is laid out, e.g. what products are on the first page, you could even have (as many sites do) a “most searched for product list” on the front page, all linked up for the user to click on (and hopefully go on to buy).

You can also glean a lot of information about visitor behaviour, adding words to that dictionary and “training” the system to be more helpful in the future for some search terms. The data is also very useful for SEO purposes too, as there is a fair chance that any term typed into an internal search engine will be typed into Google and the like. Thus optimising your site for these terms is a great way of getting ahead of the competition.

So What Should I Do?

It’s quite simple really, go to your site and try to “break” the search facility. If for example you do indeed sell “Oak bedroom suites” make sure that if someone types in “bedrom suits in Oak” that your system returns what you would like it to return and that the list looks easy to understand. If either of these two cannot be achieved, then I’m afraid it’s back to the website builder you go on a mission to “make it better”.

Graham Baylis
Internet Marketing and Promotion Specialists
www.I-O-M.com
"Making sure your needle is found in the Internet Haystack"