Searchandising: What It is, Why It’s Important, and How to Get Started

This is ecommerce, baby, where every point and click can lead to endless shopping possibilities. Standing out isn’t just important—it’s a must.

Just as a brick-and-mortar store relies on catchy tunes, warm lighting, and helpful staff to draw in customers, ecommerce stores need strategies to captivate online shoppers.

Enter searchandising: a key component to successful online retail. Aligning searchandising strategies with business goals is essential to maximize sales, revenue, and customer loyalty, ensuring that every product display and search result moves you closer to your objectives.

But what exactly is searchandising, and why should brands on platforms like Shopify care?

Below, you'll learn how searchandising can help grow your ecommerce store and get six tips to get you started.

What is Search Merchandising?

Searchandising (or search merchandising) is a strategy used by ecommerce businesses to arrange search results and product recommendations based on business-specific rules. These rules allow for the customization of search results to align with your business objectives and user search intent, ensuring that products or content shown are tailored to what the business wants to highlight and what the user is searching for.

The goal is to improve the user experience by showing relevant products or content clearly, which helps increase sales.

By carefully organizing and customizing search results through the application of business-specific rules, your business can efficiently direct users to the products or information they want, making their shopping experience smooth and satisfying. This approach emphasizes the importance of delivering quick and relevant results, ensuring that users are presented with products or content that directly match their interests and needs, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of searchandising.

Why Searchandising Matters for Shopify Merchants

If you're a Shopify merchant looking to increase conversions, a good start would be to improve your site search function. An efficient site search and discovery feature has been proven to be nearly 2x as effective at producing conversions. On top of that, the average revenue from users who used site search is significantly higher than from regular users. Nearly 75% of customers say they are less loyal to a brand when it’s hard to find what they want on a website.

With search representing such a huge opportunity, why aren’t more Shopify merchants investing in searchandising? Because there are specific pain points Shopify merchants face in using searchandising:

• Limited Control Over Search Functionality: Shopify merchants struggle with limited control over the functionality and customization of their search tools. This leads to suboptimal search results and user experience, hindering merchants from adapting their search functionality to meet specific business objectives.

• Lack of Data Insights: Without access to comprehensive data insights about user search behavior and preferences, merchants struggle to understand how users interact with their search functionality, making it difficult to optimize merchandising strategies effectively. Analyzing search data is crucial for monitoring user interactions and making data-driven adjustments to search relevance and product offerings.

• Difficulty in Implementing Advanced Features: Implementing advanced searchandising features, such as AI-powered search algorithms or personalized recommendations, can be complex and resource-intensive for Shopify merchants.

Do any of those pain points sound familiar? Without the right data insights and searchandising features, Shopify merchants are left with an ineffective site search. The problem is, Shopify merchants can’t afford to have an ineffective site search because:

• User experience decreases.

• Conversion rates decrease.

• Overall revenue is affected.

The Benefits of AI Site Search & Discovery for Your Shopify Store

Shopify Merchants can enjoy the following benefits from having the right searchandising tools, like Smart Search, in place:

• Reduces Friction: Site search reduces friction in the shopping experience for online store customers and helps them find desired items faster, enhancing overall user satisfaction and reducing time-to-value.

• Builds Trust: Delivering relevant search results builds trust in your brand, as customers perceive your website as reliable and user-friendly.

• Supports Strategy and Campaigns: Include promotions into searches that align with existing marketing strategies and merchandising campaigns.

• Personalizes the Shopping Experience: Site search enables personalized shopping experiences, a feature highly sought after by customers, contributing to increased engagement.

• Uncovers Customer Intent: Analyzing search queries reveals valuable insights into customer intent and interests, allowing you to tailor your offerings and marketing strategies accordingly.

• Attracts Ready-to-Purchase Customers: Efficient site search functions in online stores attract customers who are primed to make a purchase, thereby maximizing conversion opportunities.

1. Create Search Rules

You can gain control over how results appear and rank through implementing tailored search rules. For example, when you launch a new product, strategic adjustments can be made to ensure its priority in search rankings.

The process can be managed either manually through the creation of boost-and-bury rules or automatically using behavioral data and AI site search to sort rankings. Additionally, search rules can be specifically designed to prioritize or promote own brand products in search results, enhancing product visibility and sales.

By creating search rules, you can more precisely control how items are shown in search rankings and results, optimizing your store’s performance.

2. Speak Your Customers’ Language

When optimizing your content, it's crucial to use the terms and phrases your customers are familiar with, rather than relying on industry jargon. For example, if your specialty lies in outdoor gear, referring to "hook and loop" fasteners as "Velcro closures" resonates more with your audience.

By using terminology that aligns with your customers' vocabulary, you make your content more accessible. Remember, effective communication is about speaking the language your customers speak.

3. Cater to Searcher Preferences

Enhance your user’s experience by offering a wide range of filtering choices tailored to their individual preferences. Filters will help the user sort according to their shopping goals such as filtering by department, organizing results by price range, or selecting preferred colors.

Providing a personal search and discovery experience will elevate the consumer journey and increase customer satisfaction.

Rebuy Smart Search filter and sorting rules.

4. Personalize Search Results

Personalize the search journey for every visitor by using site search functionalities such as recent searches, search suggestions, and related searches. By analyzing each shopper's distinct search patterns, your site will tailor product displays to align with their preferences.

For example, if Scott and Charlotte open the search bar function, they'd see different product recommendations in the Quick View (based on their unique customer data) before they even begin typing.

5. Optimize for Conversions

Remember the end goal for searchandising is to increase conversions. One powerful way to optimize for conversions is to include an add-to-cart button in the search results. This allows customers to immediately increase their cart size from the search results page. Why is that important? It allows customers to skip the product pages, thus reducing clicks and guiding the customer to complete their order more quickly.

Another optimization is to use autocomplete. Autocomplete uses algorithms to finish your search query before you finish typing it. This powerful feature has been proven to increase conversions and boost sales by 24%.

One more way to optimize search results? Let users select product variants (size, color, flavor, etc.) from the products displayed on the search results page. Once again, this allows users to save time by skipping the product pages and adding items directly to the cart.

💡 Rebuy Smart Search includes all of these features and more.

Folk Potions uses Rebuy Smart Search to display selectable product variants and add-to-cart buttons to remove friction in the buying process.

6. Apply Insights to Future Searchandising

Use insights gained from search data to inform your future searchandising strategy.

The right solution will meticulously analyze numerous first-party data points, including order data, browsing patterns, preferences, and products. Then, it should deliver real-time, intelligent insights to generate tailored product recommendations for individual shoppers. Shopify and Shopify Plus store owners can leverage these insights to refine and enhance their future searchandising strategies.

Site Search & Discovery for Shopify & Shopify Plus

Staying ahead of the curve isn’t just a goal—it’s a necessity. AI site search can transform how your users navigate, making product discovery seamless and more intuitive. Integrating AI site search with Rebuy Smart Search can transform the shopping experience, reducing time to value and providing users with intelligent shopping experiences tailored to their behaviors.

Give your Shopify store an edge over the competition. Learn more about how Smart Search can increase conversions for your ecommerce website.

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