Treadmill Doctor, an online retailer of repair and replacement parts for home exercise equipment, has improved its conversion rate by 10% since it implemented new site search technology in September, says president Clark Stevenson. The new site search tool auto-suggests search terms as the shopper types in a search query, and also displays thumbnail photos of suggested products that shoppers can click on to go directly to a product page.

The site’s hosted e-commerce search with auto-complete and images from Nextopia Software Corp., which the retailer just implemented to replace a previous site search system, improves the customer experience, Stevenson says. “This makes it easy for consumers,” he says. “We wanted to shorten the number of steps for them to find what they wanted.”

Previously, shoppers who typed a query into the site search box—“NordicTrack belt,” for example—might be presented with a list of as many as 40 products, basically, every product description in the product catalog that included those words. With the new search system, the auto-complete feature starts listing specific models of replacement belts for NordicTrack treadmills as soon as the shoppers types in the “b” in belt. It also populates search results with photos of each belt for NordicTrack treadmills with links to product pages.

Stevenson adds that the product photos within search provide shoppers with added assurance that they are purchasing the right item. “Consumers with home treadmills may not have to work on them at home for five years, and they don’t always remember the name of the part they need to replace,” he says.