Promoting products through your Shopify store is supported with a barrage of unique strategies, a lot of which have to do with promotional banners, images, and push notifications. One part of your store that may not have come to your mind for your merchandising needs, however, is the search bar.
How does searchandising connect your search bar and your product promotions? This article answers this and presents you with extra actionable information you need. Let’s get right in.
What Is Searchandising?
Searchandising is a blend of the words “search” and “merchandising”, wherein merchandising is the practice of directing your customers’ or store visitors' attention to particular products or services you find important to your sales goals. Searchandising connotes an eCommerce strategy making use of your search function and results for merchandising purposes.
You have goals that define your eCommerce business objectives. Where these goals involve particular products, search merchandising serves as a technique to drive conversions, sales, and revenue from them. General strategies of searchandising aim at placing these particular products at the top of search results, keeping them in the mind of customers without affecting their shopping experience in your store.
Basic Principles Of Searchandising
Searchandising is guided by three major principles dedicated to perfecting your eCommerce merchandising operations:
Identifying Your Business Goals
To choose the best searchandising strategy to implement, you first identify your specific business goals. Searchandising strategies have more effect on particular eCommerce operations. Establishing your business goals helps with the next step.
Developing KPIs For Monitoring
KPIs are metrics you use to measure your progress towards achieving your established business goals. You use them to track the effects of your implemented searchandising strategy with a focus placed on data about your click-through and conversion rates. The profit margin of your promoted products, as well as average order value and available inventory, are also important metrics to consider, among others.
Implementing And Optimizing Strategies
Now, based on the goals you wish to accomplish with your searchandising operations, you implement appropriate strategies. The effectiveness of these strategies is measured using your established KPIs and the whole operation is optimized to ensure promotional business goals are accomplished. So, what are the different strategies to implement?
Searchandising Strategies for your eCommerce store
Before getting into the strategies to implement, it is important to note that a searchandising strategy is best applied with the use of dedicated software. With a barrage of applications available to you in the Shopify app store, one gives you all the features and capabilities you need to implement merchandising strategies and do more with your search function; Sparq.
Sparq is an AI-powered Shopify search app that expands your search bar functionality, presenting you with features for your search bar personalizations, optimizations, and, of course, searchandising operations. Some of the best searchandising strategies to implement include:
Implement On-going Tracking
To keep track of your progress and measure KPIs, you implement ongoing tracking on your store and through your Shopify search bar. With Sparq, you track the behavioural activities of your store visitors, collecting data on how they go through your conversion funnel and having a detailed overview of how well your strategies perform.
By tracking and rating performance through your KPIs, you know which part of your searchandising operations to improve, which strategies to change, and get the best out of your search bar function while promoting your important products.
Push Products To The Top
The most direct strategy in promoting products through your search function is pushing them to the top of search results. Sparq gives you this, presenting your visitors with your promoted items where they are appropriate for the keywords inputted.
This strategy is particularly useful as, alongside being direct, by presenting your customers with results that are only appropriate for the search queries made by them, it also avoids being annoying. Your visitors show particular interest in products fitting search queries, so having your important products be the first thing they see increases your sales.
However, in applying this, understand that manually pushing certain products may have a bad effect on your customers’ experience. So you keep track of customer behaviour and metrics to ensure things are going as planned.
Automated Result Prioritization
Now, rather than manually pushing specific products to the top, you prioritize your products within search results based on data collected from your visitor’s behaviour. This strategy places fewer risks on your result optimizations, as with the use of an advanced tool like Sparq, you provide visitors with results they are more familiar with or interested in
Embed product listings
Alongside presenting your visitors with suggestions, you embed product listings into your search bar dropdown interface. Sparq, of course, also serves as a reliable Shopify listing tool to implement this strategy. For this, you additionally have access to options to personalize your dropdown interface, presenting your customers and visitors with product ratings and reviews right through your search function.
Providing them with this much information about your promoted products makes the whole experience more seamless for them. Where ratings are favourable, they make moves for this product rather than having to check through every product landing page which could be tiring.
Use Promotional Badges
Changing the ranking of your search results could swing either way, having positive or negative effects on your promotions and sales. One strategy that does not have any negative impact at all is making use of promotional badges. You don’t affect your visitor’s search experience in any way but rather give them a subtle way of identifying distinguished products.
Badges may be used to give them knowledge about new products, discounted products, last-chance sales, or upgraded products. No matter the category your products fit, applying badges is one seamless searchandising strategy that improves your customers’ experience.
Personalize category pages
Category pages serve as search landing pages grouping related products. Where your customers don’t have a particular product they are looking for or are interested in products related to a particular topic, category pages prove very useful.
You personalize these category pages to increase your conversions, either manually based on tracked data or through automated tools that track your customer’s behaviour on your website and implement appropriate optimizations.
Take Advantage Of Your No-results Page
For most Shopify stores, the no-results page is typically left with a “no results found” message and nothing more. Why don’t you make use of the extra space on the page for your merchandising? You promote other products, especially products related to the search query, as well as discounts and other promotional offers. Thankfully, there really isn’t any rule strictly guiding this, so you might as well place promotions on particular important products within the search page, even where they are unrelated.
Ready To Implement Searchandising for Shopify Strategies?
At Sparq, we enable you to use the above-mentioned tricks to get the most of your search space. Grab the opportunity a high intent action like ‘searching for a product’ offers to increase your purchase conversion.
Get in touch with our team today to understand how to implement searchandising for Shopify today. Drop an email us at [email protected]
