Why do it?
This previous article about the long tail of search in ecommerce makes already a good case for better site search in ecommerce sites. This said, it is also important to remind people that past studies have shown that about half of all visitors gravitate straight to the search box. They don’t waste their time browsing for products to buy in the directory structures of your store catalog’s categories, they want something specific and Google has taught them to find this with search. This little roundup of the state of industry aims to show you where we think ecommerce search engine products are coming from and where they are going.
What is it?
The Search Legacy
Search software has been all the rage since the late 90s. When I worked for Netscape, and later Infoseek, I saw the search software industry explode and split into multiple major segments. The Internet search segment (Google, and co.) found pursued growth opportunities in media with added value portals and other advertising-supported business models. The cost of entry in this category became so high eventually, however, that the late arrival of Google on the Web was seen as a miracle-of-sorts. Search software editors on the other hand kept sprouting with new products and new approaches.
Some search products were outgrowth of web search ventures: Ultraseek, Inktomi, Google Appliance, etc. Others aimed straight at the enterprise with a mix of full-text search tools and database and ERP connectors (Endeca, Microsoft/Fast, Autonomy, SLI, etc.).
While that was happening no-one paid too much attention to the relatively small ecommerce opportunities. Enterprise search contracts often started at around $250K (sometimes yearly). So why focusing on ecommerce where the only enterprise-size businesses (eBay, Amazon, and a few others) mostly hired their own R&D and software development staff.
The Ecommerce Legacy
Strangely enough (as Tobi Lütke the founder of Shopify pertinently explains here) search remained anafterthought for most of the ecommerce software developers. Their initial focus was to automate the brick-and-mortar processes of the real world through advanced database powered applications. They never envisioned the volume of traffic that some ecommerce properties see these days and the very small portion of visitors, surfers, and product researchers who actually complete transactions.
Many ecommerce platforms were developed based on a mix of full-text search technology (crawler-indexer). These technologies are just not what the ecommerce platforms need because their data (products, services, customers) is already structured in databases. Furthermore, the search results logic that presides over content (documents, web pages) is very different from the way a shopper behaves with the catalog of an online store. Retailers need ways to serve search results that help the visitors find what they want to search for. Not just results to a well-prepared query. Online merchants also need to cross-sell, cross-promote, and present visitors with as many relevant opportunities to transact as possible.
What is Site Search for Ecommerce?
So at the end of the day, running simple queries against a database just isn’t enough anymore for powerful ecommerce search experiences. What is needed in terms of features is a mix of the following features:
- a powerful structured data search facility which can handle fast recall with error-tolerance like:
- misspellings
- synonyms
- taxonomies (related terms, catagories, facets, etc.)
- advanced interfaces like real-time AJAX search results controls and autocompletes (like the Google Suggest)
- Search Reporting and Analytics to allow continuous improvement of catalog inventory and descriptions to match highly sought after products (this data also needs to be exportable to third party business intelligence tools like Google Analytics or Omniture)
- advanced search-powered merchandising modules like “related products”, “contextual promos”, “you might also like” which can only get better if they are based on the same error-tolerant features cited above
- full-text search for non-catalog content on the store’s web site (web pages, support pages, corporate content, etc.)
What’s Ecommerce Search made of These Days?
Search-only offerings:
- Exorbyte Commerce
- Endeca
- Omniture / Mercado
- Celebros
- SLI
- Fast
- Nextopia
- Baynote
- Shoptivate
Ecommerce platforms with better-than-average search features:
- Prestashop
- Volusion
- Demandware (not on all stores)
- a proprietary search engine that allows high error tolerance, very fast recall (for autocomplete) and phonetic, edit distance, and more matching algorithms
- merchandising features for easy control of search ranking, faceted search, and more.
- advanced reporting showing what people are search for, what they are finding, what they are not finding and allowing conversion tracking
- a system that allows for multilingual product data search (any language for product catalog data, any language for search matching logic above)
- hosted software-as-a-service mode for delivery (considerably more affordable for the online retailer)
- complete integration using AJAX technology ( no more jumping to a special domain or complex DNS integrations, search is delivered as if it lived on the store’s own servers)
- easy customization for special custom data attributes about products for rich catalogs and faceted search
So what do you think? Please comment.
