Product discoverability is when you discover the perfect product, even though you didn’t intend to search that product. You may not necessarily look for it but its discovery somehow satisfies you. The time you take to discover that product is called as product discoverability time.

Product finding is when you are aware of the products when you look for the certain products and you manage to find them. The total time was taken after landing the website and just before finding the product is called as product finding time. eCommerce product searching, when executed properly, can help you to optimize both the issues.

There have been several issues with product searching and in order to narrow down the searching result, eCommerce owners have to overcome these barriers:    

Unoptimized Search Bar

Product filtering and site search go hand in hand. They both contribute significantly to the user experience. An unoptimized site search is the worst an eCommerce website give to its customers. The myriad of products, your impeccable services, and unconditional help desk are of no use when your website doesn’t let your customers search the products properly.

Characteristics of an unoptimized search bar

❏    Lags speed in searching. A poorly optimized site search bar would consume customers’ time by slow page loads.
❏    Shows irrelevant data more than the required one. This hampers the decision making and product mapping for the customers.
❏    Doesn’t search things smartly. Have no thesaurus or synonym tools to fetch the similar meaning words.
❏    Doesn’t show detail about the products in the search menu.
❏    Shows no history of the searched products and doesn’t allow to view more results.

What Should you Do for Improving the Product Searching?

Entertain your customers for the first 40 seconds and they will entertain you for a long period. Qualitative product searching is a tough job. But with the rise in third-party search solution, a lot of eCommerce platforms abort the Magento 2 default search and opt for their search solutions. These parties not only promise to improve the product searching but overall shopping experience. Let’s skim through some of the points to improve the product searching and finding:

★    Make the visibility of search box easy. You can’t put it away from the shopper’s vision. You want them to step into the store and immediately find the search bar.
★    Set the proper length of the search text field. Make sure that you make it big enough for long queries.
★    Use search autocomplete to suggest the smart results. It helps those users who are unsure of the spelling or don’t exactly remember the name. The least you want your customers to work, the better you convert the opportunity into a sale.
★    Use advanced autocomplete to get the detailed idea about the products. Use them for merchandising. Use it in such a manner that it reflects the results with several attributes like price, ratings, etc.
★    You can include a drop-down menu in the search bar itself. It allows the users to look around within a particular department. It’s a great way to filter the products right when the shopping starts.
★    Don’t leave the search bar blank. You should give ghost texts like “Please, use me to search” to your search bar. As soon as the user clicks, the text should disappear. This sounds like an effective way inviting the customers to search.
★    Place search box on each page of the website. The users should not get back home to search something new. They should be able to search anything from any page.
★    Hide non-existent products. Reflecting out of stock results on the search result can carve a negative image of your store.
★    “No results” is a big no. You can’t afford to offer “no results” to your customers. They are the dead ends and your customers won’t really appreciate it.
★    Since a user can enter anything, it is difficult to display results even if there is no result. You can use synonymous and thesaurus tools for your store to find out the similar meaning words. It would directly minimize the threat of no results.
★    Allow the users to check the search result in different view modes. I personally like the grid view mode.
★    Let the search bar empower the users to add the products to cart directly from the search result.
★    Display the searched query on the result page. It reminds the user whether the keyword entered by them is correct or not.

How Can you Achieve the Said?

As mentioned earlier, you can use a third-party extension to achieve a remarkable site search. Here is why you should prefer M-Connect Media’s Advanced Search Autocomplete & Suggest Magento 2 extension to improve the search result.

The name itself says everything. Let’s just understand the semantics of AJAX search autocomplete. AJAX autocomplete search is devised with smart predictive suggestion module. Smart predictive module simplifies the search process for those users who either don’t know the spelling or don’t remember the product. It also gives an instant result stashing a lot of time. It makes searchability so simple that customers can enter the keyword and get the search result. As soon as the text field predicts, a customer can click on the desired result without having to press the enter button. Typing 3 characters would reflect suggestions and results with Ajax sphinx search.

A quick read through a list of Search Autocomplete features by M-connect Media:

●    Gives a fantastic control over the number of products reflected in the search results.
●    Happens to predict the products just by entering the 3 characters (minimum).
●    Ability to display the counter which counts the number of products found with the keyword search.
●    Offers an option of “View all” at the bottom of the search results pop up to skim all the found products.
●    Choose the product data which will appear in search results.
●    Add the products directly to the shopping cart.
●    Avoid pages, category and parent category appearance on the search results pop up.
●    Additional advantage of fully customizing the layout of the popup window

The Final Call

The past decade has seen a lot of improvement in the product searching and there is a lot to be done now. There is no halt to technology. There is a great room for improvement in it and only they will survive who are willing to evolve in this intense competition of digital world.