For budding
ecommerce developers and new e-entrepreneurs, one of the
biggest mistakes made is the exclusion of some type of
product search feature on their site. It's a commonly
overlooked feature that has a huge impact on sales. We’ve
seen 30% or more of sales come from internal search results,
depending on how complex the feature is.
Using the
figure of 30%, let’s take a quick look at the what using a
search feature could do for you. If your sales are $20k
per year, that’s an additional $6k per year left on
the table [My father used to say, “It’s like picking it up
off the street!”]. If your sales are $200k a year, that’s an
additional $60,000 bucks. Whoa! You can see where I’m
going with this...keep doing the math. Depending on volume,
even a small percentage can make a huge difference as far as
the bottom line is concerned.
For
Yahoo! store merchants, utilizing their basic search is a
great starting point. We choose to integrate it on every
page we design. If you aren't a Yahoo! store merchant and
are on a budget try
Google’s Free Service. Either
will create sales that you wouldn’t normal receive. If you
have a budget, you may want to design and host your own.
Some of the features that you will want to consider when
designing your engine can be viewed
here. These are the big ones you
will need: search by a price range, search by an item code
[which you should always associate with an item], some type
of sorting mechanism, product image and brief description
with price, and if the product line permits it, an order
button right
on the search results page similar to:
http://nutripeak.info/?searchTerms=protein
Adding search
can be a big project, but the punch that it creates is
usually tremendous and well worth the time. Remember, this
is all about long term ROI.
