As a retail leader, your goal is simple: You want to create the best possible shopping experience for your customers while increasing revenue for your business.

One of the keys to e-commerce success is to be relevant. Deliver the products and information customers seek and you’ll thrive. But remaining relevant in today’s ever-evolving e-commerce world isn’t easy. It requires the right tools to quickly present the most valuable information for an engaging and consistent shopping experience, and it entails listening to shoppers.

When site visitors search for a product, they are telling you what they want in their own words. This direct understanding of customers’ intent enables you to deliver compelling merchandising messages, provide relevant information and offer the right products to your shoppers all while enhancing the user experience.

Data mined from site search activity allows you to anticipate market changes and trends, so you can align your merchandising practices accordingly. Use the following merchandising practices to help deliver a standout shopping experience to your customers.

Drive Impulse Buying with Ribbon Overlays

Ribbon overlays are digital stickers you can apply to individual search results to visually accentuate something special about the product, such as best-seller status, out of stock, free shipping, top-rated products, limited availability, or newly added products and videos.

Online videos are a popular way to boost site conversions. You can use ribbon overlays to highlight when product videos are available. These overlays offer an additional incentive for customers to click the product because seeing the product in action may convey tangible information such as fit and size faster than reading product specifications.

Tune Results for Perfect Promotion

There are times when you want to promote certain products to your customers on a search results page. Conversely, there may be results you wish to push to the bottom or hide for that particular search string. Tools to create tuning rules should be easily accessible in a merchandising console so you have complete ability to promote or demote particular products based on your desired outcomes.

Curate a Custom Experience with Landing Pages

You can also use merchandising tuning rules to create curated landing pages. If you would like to promote a series of special holiday products, for example, you can create a landing page that loads when the word “holiday” is searched. At the same time, you can create a dedicated PPC [pay-per-click] link that directs users to that page. When you use the same PPC link in email marketing campaigns, you can track the success of your campaign in Google Analytics.

Offer More Products to Your Visitors

Often shoppers will enter your site through a product link from a search on Google or Bing rather than directly from your home page. When visitors land on a single product page, you run the risk of showing them an item that is not the most relevant to their search. You can solve this problem by presenting a merchandising banner that shows products relevant to their original search term. These merchandised landing pages can keep customers engaged and drive more page views and conversions.

Use Synonyms for Global Reach

Using synonyms is a great way to improve the relevance of your search results and avoid pitfalls like “no results” dead ends. Synonym groups are usually created by gathering words together that are correlated. The result is that a search for any of the words in that group will also trigger a search for the corresponding synonyms. Even when different countries speak common languages, not everyone uses the same words to refer to the same products. For example, what is known as a cooler or icebox in the U.S. is known as an esky in Australia. Synonyms help visitors find what they’re looking for regardless of the phrase used.

Make Search Results Highly Visual

When it comes to presenting search results in a simple and engaging manner, product images are indeed worth a thousand words. Displaying one search result image that’s significantly larger than the other thumbnail images is a merchandising practice that improves conversion and boosts sales. Larger product images that convert well include results from top searches, highest-rated products, best sellers and high-margin products.

Showcase Your Products’ Social Status

Today’s shoppers respond well to social validation from others. You can support this by showcasing social approvals, ratings, reviews and recommendations. Encourage your customers to share the best products from your site across their social networks by integrating social media buttons on your pages. For instance, use Pinterest “Pin It” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons on search results.

Additionally, showing the recommendations of other influencers (e.g. top editors, celebrity curators, popular or emerging stylists) within search results is another merchandising practice that taps popular opinion to build community and grow sales.

Site search data lets you listen to and learn more about your customers, and drive merchandising practices that create more relevant and engaging online experiences that boost conversions, increase average order sizes and grow online revenue.

SLI Systems provides site search technology to 84 of the Top 1000 online retailers in North America, according to Top500Guide.com.

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