What is Search and Product Discovery?

Research has shown that most users who make a successful purchase online spend time searching for what they want before clicking the “add to cart” button. In fact, 64% of people use search to handle their “I want to buy moment,” which is expected in a time when everything happens online. 

With this in mind–the importance of integrating a search and product discovery solution into your online website cannot be overstated, especially if you house thousands (or even millions) of products for your users to filter through.

In this article, we’ll examine the meaning of search, merchandising, searchandising, and product discovery and how these solutions can help online merchants.

How Search, Merchandising, Searchandising, Recommendation, and Product Discovery Works

Ecommerce Search is a technology that helps shoppers easily find the product they are looking for. It works just like a search engine–only that it is designed for online merchants. When a user enters a search query, the search engine scans the website's search index to identify relevant products and information. It then ranks the results based on relevance and presents them to the user.

Merchandising is a more strategic process of planning, organizing, promoting, and selling products/services. It involves various techniques, which can include product placement, pricing strategies, and promotional campaigns. These techniques are powerful and are more likely to attract customers and encourage them to make a purchase. In a more simple explanation, merchandising involves how the products are placed in a catalog, what pricing strategy is implemented on which page, and so on.

Searchandising is a relatively new term that combines the elements of search engine optimization and merchandising. In searchandising, you optimize product listings based on your merchandising strategy for search engine placements to improve visibility, revenue, or profitability.  Searchandising lets you easily change how your search engine ranks results to match your business goals, marketing campaigns, sales goals, or other key performance indicators (KPIs). It works by combining business-specific rules with the basic relevance rules of a site's search engine. 

Product Recommendation involves surfacing relevant products to customers–especially when there are thousands (and sometimes millions) of products to choose from. Product recommendation systems usually work with machine learning models and suggest which products should be shown to customers based on set algorithms. Product recommendations are typically placed on the homepage, product listing pages (PLPSs)–also known as category pages, product detail pages (PDPs), or cart pages. They appear in the form of overlays and popups. Imagine when you’re looking to buy a T-shirt, and you’re recommended a set of jeans by a ‘complete the look’ widget. 

Product discovery encompasses search, merchandising, searchandising, and product recommendation, all working together to improve how easy it is for shoppers to find or discover products. The idea of product discovery is to allow customers to come across products they probably didn’t know they needed.

Product discovery goes beyond the norms of traditional search functionalities by including category navigation, product taxonomy, merchandising, and recommendations. Now that we have learned the brief meanings of these concepts let’s look at their importance in the next section.

Why are they important for e-commerce businesses?

Let's think this way: as a merchant, you want to make it easy for buyers to view and purchase your products. You’ve set up a great product launch but have no idea how to get the most relevant products to your buyers. Searchandising solutions provide a framework to help solve some of these challenges. You can custom fine-tune your eCommerce website to match your set criteria. Then you can enjoy benefits like:

• Better User Experience: Integrating these solutions can greatly improve UX by reducing the amount of time shoppers spend on your website searching for products.

• Higher Conversion Rates: If implemented correctly, searchandising techniques coupled with product discovery can boost your conversion rates significantly. This means lowering your bounce rate and increasing sales with your site's existing web traffic. 

• Customer Satisfaction: The easier it is for customers to find and purchase your products, the more satisfied they will be. These solutions allow customers to type in their search queries and get a response almost immediately–usually in milliseconds. 

• Retention: Businesses that implement these solutions gain an edge by offering a superior online experience that not only attracts but retains shoppers.

The Role of Search and Product Discovery Solutions in E-commerce

As we discussed earlier, search and merchandising solutions play an important role in e-commerce, from better customer satisfaction to improved user experience. Let’s examine its role in this section:

Improved Search Relevance and Accuracy

Search and product discovery solutions help to show shoppers the most relevant products to shoppers based on certain criteria, such as best-performing, most searched, or most popular products. You may wonder, " How does it do this?” Well, it does this by understanding user intent through NLP and ML—and using advanced behavioral tracking software.

Algolia is a good example of a Searchandising solution that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand user search intent. Whereas Crownpeak Experience Orchestrator (XO) uses personalization and customer data with advanced behavioral tracking to suggest relevant search results. 

Personalizing Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are tailored suggestions of products that a customer might be interested in based on their past browsing behavior, purchase history, and other factors.  Search and merchandising solutions play a very important role by using data analytics to identify customer preferences and patterns. It also uses some sort of recommendation algorithm that takes into account a wide range of factors, such as the customer's most-viewed product or most-purchased product.

Optimizing Product Placement and Visibility

Search and merchandising solutions optimize product placement and visibility by using merchandising rules to showcase high-margin items, trending products, and seasonal offerings. They are also used to create personalized product landing pages and categories, as well as visual elements such as images, videos, and banners to attract attention to products.

Driving Sales and Conversions

Driving sales is one of a business's most important aspects. Without consistently driving sales, a business can suffer. Fortunately, businesses can stand a better chance of growing sales and conversions by implementing a search solution. Search and merchandising solutions are part of the digital transformations that make this seamless by guiding customers towards desirable products through relevant search results and personalized recommendations– influencing purchasing decisions by highlighting product features and benefits while promoting a seamless and engaging shopping experience.

The Different Layers of Search 

Let’s look at the four main layers of search merchandising 

• Semantic Understanding: Also known as Natural language understanding. This is usually the first step in search query processing. It’s important for a search solution to understand shoppers' queries and intent–this involves understanding synonyms, spell corrections, and sentence completions. 

• Recall and ranking Algorithms: Once the process of semantic understanding is done, the system then checks for all the potential matches on the sites product or content database (search recall), then ranks the most relevant product based on the users search query. This whole process is done using complex algorithms that determines a product’s relevance based on a number of factors such as search and transaction history.

• Search Relevancy: This layer focuses on refining search algorithms to ensure accurate and context-aware search results. It analyzes search patterns, user behavior, and query intent to improve relevance.

• Product Visibility: The second layer involves strategically promoting products based on search queries, popularity, or business priorities–making products that otherwise won't be seen by shoppers to become visible.

• Personalized Searchandising: Relevant search results are great—but imagine combining them with personalization. Doing this will only get you more sales conversion and ROI. In this layer, these solutions provide personalized product recommendations based on customers' shopping history and engagement. 

• Merchandising Tactics: This layer works with merchandising techniques, such as cross-selling, upselling, ‘complete-the-look’ and promotional strategies, to drive sales and increase customer engagement.

Businesses that could benefit from using Search Solutions

The benefits of implementing search solutions aren't limited to a specific industry or business size—any company with an online presence and a desire to drive sales and improve customer satisfaction can benefit from this. 

However, the following types of businesses can especially enjoy the power of these solutions:

• Online Retailers and E-commerce Platforms: online retailers and e-commerce solutions are at the forefront of search and merchandising. When customers checkout your online store, they already have a particular product in mind. They want to be able to input a search query, let’s say “a red sundress,” and get a result of various high-quality sundresses within milliseconds. Also, an e-commerce store with different products will benefit from recommending the best products to customers, either through past purchases or hot, trending products.

• Content Publishers: Websites that publish vast content can benefit from search solutions. A good example is a knowledge base with hundreds or even thousands of materials to read from. A visitor can just search up  the particular material they are looking for, without having to manually filter through the site.

• Travel and Hospitality: Travel agencies, hotel booking platforms, and other hospitality services can optimize search results to provide personalized recommendations and improved booking experience.

Review sites, marketplaces, comparison sites, and affiliate sites are other businesses that can benefit from implementing search solutions.

Wrapping up

While creating the perfect product is great, it's also important to make it a seamless experience for customers to find them. To evaluate your website's e-commerce, you need to ask questions like “How easy it is for customers to find relevant products?” “How do I personalize customers' product discovery?” and “How well can I promote my brand/products to the right customers?”

Search, merchandising, and product discovery solutions help you answer and tackle these questions using advanced data science, such as semantic understanding, vector search, big data, AI, and machine learning.

If you have an ecommerce site with a large catalog with hundreds or even thousands of product variations–adopting these solutions is a great way to improve customer user experience. 

To learn more about how we can transform your digital presence, contact us.