For the online retailer, few things are more important than your site search functions. Customers use it to find products, naturally, browse as they shop and to find add-on and similar products as well. An effective site search is necessary, but it will also enhance an online shopper's experience, and in return, potentially boost your sales and tell you more about how customers use your Web site.
According to a recent study by Aberdeen Group, a Web site search is the minimum competitive requirement for online commerce. In fact, the research firm says that 59 percent of the e-commerce Web sites it surveyed currently have a search tool in place and over the next two years that number is expected to jump to 96 percent.
Much like Internet search engines, e-commerce-based search engines all offer a different combination of search options, results displays, organization formats and other options. Keeping in mind that your Web site search should be an ongoing process of tweaking and updating, merchants need to look for a product search solution that not only meets their own analytic needs, but also produces accurate and relevant search
results for their customers, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface.
Specialized e-commerce search engines can offer merchants a variety of benefits, such as up-selling by showing customers related products or what others have purchased. They can produce customer analytics for the merchant, assist in merchandising and even be customized to provide unique search results for a customer based on his or her purchasing history. This is certainly a far cry from your standard database matching in which a user types in a keyword and sees a generic list of all pages within a Web site that contain the keyword.
Of course a robust product search solution doesn't come cheap. As a rule of thumb, the more options, customization and features you want, the bigger the budget you'll need. Of course, merchants will also need to decide between a software package and a managed search solution. With a managed solution all the hardware and technical know-how is offset to a third party, removing bandwidth, hardware and IT requirements from your business. Naturally, you will pay more for a hosted search upfront, and, usually these are offered on a subscription basis, depending on the exact services required, the number of products indexed or the number of search queries performed.
For those online merchants shopping for stand-alone Web site search solutions, we took a look at several e-commerce Web site search
products, both software and managed-service solutions, that offer different features at, of course, different prices.
Dieselpoint Search (Dieselpoint, Inc.)
Dieselpoint Search offers a solution for product catalogs, Web site search, document repositories, intranet search and more. Dieselpoint's software includes a feature called faceted navigation, which allows users to navigate search results using any structured information that happens to be present.
For example, a consumer searching an e-commerce site could see a list of the most relevant hits, and also a list of all the product categories, brands, pricing and other information.
Other Dieselpoint Search functions include text "hit" highlighting, or smart document summaries that show query terms highlighted in context, suggestions for alternative searches when users enter in perceived misspelled words and inflectional forms of search terms, which means, for instance, a search for "drill" will also show results that include other forms of the word. Pricing was not available at the time of publication.
eComm|Search (Nextopia Software Corporation)
Nextopia's eComm|Search is fully compatible with custom ASP (define), .NET (define) or PHP (define) systems, and is also available for hosted storefronts such as Yahoo Merchant Solutions, MIVA Merchant and Monster Commerce. eComm|Search locates product matches based on both user input and inference and combines keyword stemming, related product suggestions, real time product comparisons, spell checking and "error forgiveness" for results.
eComm|Search enables merchants to control product ranking within search results, feature any product on top of results based on any set of rules and also displays promotional banners based on keywords. eComm|Search also offers shoppers suggestions based on correct spelling, synonyms or alternate products and brands. E-tailers can also get reports based customer search engine behavior. The information in these reports includes details on what your customers are finding — or not finding in some cases — popular search terms, keywords, revenue performance, purchase and search trails.
Nextopia's eComm|Search costs $1,000 per year (up to 10,000 SKUs). The company offers a free 30-day trial and will integrate eComm|Search into your e-commerce platform at no charge.
MondoSearch (Mondosoft)
As recommended by one of our forum users, MondoSearch by Mondosoft offers a suite of managed search, analytics and site optimization products. MondoSearch is a multi-lingual search engine (built with .NET) that offers a host of customizable controls for indexing, searching and search results. Indexing capabilities include enhanced crawler features, ranking control, duplicate detection and support for multiple files such as PDF, Microsoft Office, Flash and others. The latest version of MondoSearch includes BehaviorTracking integration, which offers search statistics based on visitor type with individual or group preferences, search word highlighting, unique page descriptions, complete customization, phrase searching and more. Pricing was not available at the time of publication.
iSearch (iSearch)
For the budget-minded business, iSearch is a PHP (define) search engine that lets you build a searchable database for your Web site. While iSearch only offers simple page-match scoring and ranking, best suited to the new or novice online merchant, it still has beneficial features. It will
spider sub-domains or multiple domains and allow you to exclude parts of pages from being indexed, for example, you could exclude your menu from showing up in search results on multiple queries.
You can download a free version of iSearch, or you can opt for the "pro" version (recommended for a professional e-commerce Web site) that will remove the "Powered By iSearch" taglines found in the free version. The pro version works with PDF and Microsoft Word documents, and supports group searching, adds additional links for particular keywords, exact search and phrase matching and provides you with the source code to customize the search to fit your own site. The license for the Pro version of iSearch allows you to install a single copy of iSearch and costs $40.
WebSideStory Search (WebSideStory )
WebSideStory offers a suite of e-commerce applications, one of which is WebSideStory Search, a hosted search solution for marketplaces. This on-demand site search allows merchants to control how search results are displayed, influence search results rankings based on key business criteria and also includes information on promotions ands special offers directly into the search results pages.
WebSideStory Search allows you to adjust product rankings and relevancy within search results so you can raise the visibility of products using any type of metadata, such as brand, price or ratings.
You can also display "likely targeted" products if keywords were misspelled by the user, and linguistics supports excluded word control, bi-directional multi-word acronym support, sound-alike matching and more.
This solution also submits data feeds to online comparison shopping engines, provides basic analytics (but works with the HBX Analytics products, sold separately), as well as other features. Pricing was not available at the time of publication.
SLI Systems Learning Search (SLI Systems)
SLI Systems also offers e-tailers a managed search solution. As the name suggest, this "Learning Search" product continually "learns" from past site search activity by tracking visitors' aggregate search queries and click-through tracking. With SLI's software, Web shop owners can have the search results presented in a design that matches their e-commerce layout, and also include images and graphical links such as "buy now."
Suggested queries that are related to a particular search term, as well as suggestions for misspelled words, are also provided. Learning Search also offers merchandizing controls, automatically generates navigational pages and includes reporting and analytics.
SLI Systems' Learning Search subscriptions start at $800 per month. You can learn more about this managed search service here in Savvy Site Search Specs.
Bottom Line: It's the Journey, Not the Destination
In general, e-tailers may find managed search easier to implement, however, its not an option that will fit all small-business budgets. Search technology is always evolving and it is one important aspect of your e-commerce site that will require maintenance and upgrades. Like those who start with a packaged, hosted storefront and do well enough to grow their retail space into a customized e-store, product search is also an element that you may also outgrow as your online business expands. But by knowing what is available, what to expect in terms of upkeep and costs, you can plan for your own customer growth as needed while meeting your customers' online shopping expectations.
Vangie Beal is a frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.
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