As per a 2021 survey of 2800+ Shopify stores, a mere 1.6% of eCommerce store visitors make a successful purchase. The rest 98.4% of your visitors are probably busy surfing the store via your Shopify search bar struggling to find the right product.
With purchase conversion directly translating to revenue, it’s important to pay attention to 98% of your visitors who aren’t converting. A simple way out would be to facilitate the first action a customer takes when they visit your store - search for the product they wish to buy, faster.
In this article, we guide you on how optimizing your search experience using a simple Shopify search bar app can help you beat the industry average of purchase conversion numbers.
What should one pay attention to the ‘search experience’ of the customer?
Most of the customers when they arrive at your website already have an intent to purchase an item that they think would be potentially available in your inventory. To find out, they click on your Shopify search bar and type out the desired product name.
Though, an ideal case scenario would be to simply get the relevant product and the shopper makes a purchase, but that’s hardly the case. While it’s possible that on the user’s end, maybe their internet connection is slow, or their mobile/laptop setup is not of the latest generation that can cause some glitches in their navigation experience. But generally, the dropouts result due to not being able to search for the right product they want and not enough trust generated by your website to keep their interest alive.
During this crucial phase of the search, there are multiple reasons that your customer decided to drop out:
- Slow pages: when the search query is sent and your website keeps showing the ‘wait’ icon can lead to annoyance in an already impatient customer
- Wrong redirects: if clicking on a particular search result leads to a different product, it can create confusion
- No filters: Availability of filters as per the user behavior can save their time, otherwise, they have to manually search that increases friction
- Blank search results: in this case, shoppers are not left with any option but to leave the site and look somewhere else
- Nobody likes typing: lack of modern search techniques like voice or autocomplete can create hindrance as customers have to manually type every time they search a product
Anyone, as a customer, who has to go through the above search experience, would drop out of the site. That’s not a mere customer closing your website’s tab, but literally the loss of revenue for you.
What are the ways in which eCommerce stores can improve the Shopify search bar experience?
As an eCommerce store owner, you must prioritize improving your Shopify search flow to create a glitch-free experience. Here are a top 10 ways to improve Shopify search one can implement:
- Fast browsing: decrease page load times when your customer enters their search queries
- Optimize product catalog: analyze the Shopify search queries so that you can improve product options to include and push ones that are in demand
- Check redirects: ensure your Shopify search queries do not result in 404 pages or random redirects to spam websites
- Fix blank results: do not leave your customer empty haded with blank search results - instead, add similar recommendations as options
- Share surprise offers: detect and push products at discounts and bestsellers to increase chances of sales
- Save searches: Track user’s search behavior and save their previous searches to increase convenience for repeated searches
- Reduce efforts: Include features like autocomplete and autocorrect to remove typing friction
- Add filters: let your customers feel in control while searching as they customize quickly towards the result
- Responsive: make your search pages and Shopify search bar mobile, tab, and desktop-friendly to avoid navigation issues
- Increase search options: upgrade your search for voice and image-based searching to simplify customer’s search journey
There are various plugins available on Shopify Appstore that promise to provide you with some or all of the above main features mentioned. Refer to our article on 8 Best Paid and Free Shopify Search App in 2021.
Shopify search bar app provides more value than just optimizing the search experience
If the Shopify search bar app you choose provides you with the above-mentioned features, you can not only improve your search workflow but also optimize other aspects of your eCommerce business as follows:
- Improve Product Catalog: with search analytics, you will be able to understand the products that are in demand and push them as per your customer’s previous search history
- Improve Shopify SEO: your search pages can be a great source of SEO optimized links that will improve your website’s ranking in search results
- Design Marketing Campaigns: Knowing your customer’s search data can help you launch relevant promotional campaigns and upsell while searching or post search results
- Improve product linking: In order to provide product recommendations, you will have to ensure you add relevant search keywords and create collections so that your customer’s search results are more tightly knitted
Are third-party Shopify search bar apps trustworthy for managing eCommerce store search experience?
It is understood that trusting third-party plugins for managing your eCommerce store’s most important customer workflow can give one anxiety. Hence, we have created the following checklist that you can use to easily choose among 100s of available Shopify search bar apps:
- App size: conduct regular audits to check page load times as your product catalog increases with business growth
- Page load time: conduct regular audits to check page load times as your product catalog increases with business growth
- Upselling options: check if your Shopify search bar app provides multiple ways to promote and cross-sell products while searching
- Analytics: opt for instant search apps that are powered by AI and can provide insights on improving the overall store experience
- Real-time sync: as you add or remove products, it’s important your Shopify search bar app syncs with your product database
- Strong support: an active support team will help you fix bugs and troubleshoot compatibility on time to avoid any loss of sales
By ensuring the above 6 Shopify search bar app features, you will definitely improve your eCommerce store’s search experience without worrying about scalability and return on investment.
We can help you improve your Shopify Search experience
At Sparq, we provide an AI-enabled search experience for your eCommerce store with mere 25 milliseconds required to get to the search results!
We have successfully provided a 20% increase in search revenues by increasing sales conversions for our customers due to a heavy focus on AI-enabled personalization. This has also led to a 40% reduction in visitor dropouts with a 30% improvement in average time spent on stores.
Learn how you can achieve the same for your eCommerce store by contacting our team.
You can also check out our demo to understand how adding our Shopify search bar app can upgrade the search experience - View Demo
