Imagine you’re grocery shopping, and you ask the customer service representative, Where can you find whole wheat bread and gets a reply, “Sorry, we don’t sell that.” only to walk to the next aisle to find options full of whole wheat bread. Not having a proper search functionality on your webstore is akin to this – your online store might have all the products, but if visitors can’t find them, there is no point in listing them. Therefore, ecommerce businesses must ensure their products are easily discoverable. Of course, listing all the products on the main page is impossible, but how seamlessly customers find their desired products play a crucial role in your conversion rate. Speaking of this, we must understand how different search & navigation features enhance product discovery.
Search Filters
While search results display the types of products you want, you still have to find the product that matches your desired criteria, and if it contains multiple products, it can be challenging for customers to see what they’re looking for. The search filter lets customers select options so the result page displays products accordingly, e.g., if someone is looking for a red shirt, they can choose red color to see red shirts only.
While most online stores have filters, the options offered for filtering products must be relevant to the products and criteria that customers use when choosing such products. Thus, filtering options allows customers to narrow their search results and see only relevant products. Consequently, customers find it easier to find products, with all their focus, on choosing the product rather than being distracted by irrelevant products.
Sorting
Sorting lets customers arrange displayed products in order; you can sort by different criteria. Just like with the options for filters, you must use sorting options that are pertinent; e.g., if you’re selling that have different models each year, you can use “old to new” or “new to old” sorting criteria. Other popular criteria include:
Sorting by price
Sorting by rating
Sorting by Popularity
Categorizing Products
Ensuring that your products are appropriately categorized can ensure easy product navigation. Therefore, you must define correct categories and sub-categories for your product – customers should find them where they expect them. Furthermore, it is also better that the categories menu is expandable, so customers can see and open the sub-category of their choice through a single click, providing them with a seamless experience.
Breadcrumb
Webstore navigation plays a crucial part in buying journey; if they feel lost in the middle of your online store, they’ll abandon their buying process confounded by the unknown maze of your website structure. Therefore, it’s essential to guide them as they browse your site to give them an idea of where they are and how to get where they want. For this reason, breadcrumbs are useful; they help webstore visitors visualize their journey to the current page with all the links in a hierarchy to the previous store sections.
Breadcrumbs, therefore, enable easy navigation allowing users to understand and visualize the route to different site sections and intuitively jump to them with a single click.
Some other features
There are many other ways you can enhance product discovery in your ecommerce stores:
Autocompletion: This makes the search process seamless, helps to remember product names, and informs users of other related items available similar to their search query.
Items suggestion on the “No search result page”: If the item searched is unavailable, suggest products nearest to the search query.
Fuzzy search: This feature accounts for misspelled words & phrases and descriptions of products in the search bar, returning products that match those; It is useful when customers don’t know the spelling of a product or when customers only know some description without knowing the name.
Conclusion
The discoverability of products is essential to making good sales – that’s why companies focus so much on product visibility. In an online environment, good site navigation and search functionality can significantly help visitors discover products conveniently.
The x2xecommerce having experience in providing ecommerce solutions, can set up a webstore with excellent product discoverability and implement it with other business solutions. One example of an x2xecommerce solution is the x2x BC-Magento solution. Reach out to the x2x team for any query or a free demo for this or any other solution offered by the x2x.