Search Bars and Digital Merchandising: How to Create the Ultimate eCommerce Experience

Modern websites can’t be simple uploads of your existing inventory in a digital format – they have to be curated and personalized shop fronts within themselves. This is especially important for those looking to digitize their stores in the wake of the Covid pandemic. These physical-to-online digitizations are becoming ever more frequent, with the ecommerce market expected to hit a worldwide value of $6.4 trillion by 2024.

One of the most important aspects to achieving this kind of online merchandising ability is the search bar of your site. Without a competent algorithm behind your search bar, connecting customers to relevant products would be a complete nightmare. The process to create competent search engines isn’t simple either, with a manual build from scratch taking serious time, resources and expertise to complete.

Luckily, there are experts out there who make search engines their passion. This involves the key step of utilizing the right technology for search bars to supercharge digital merchandising and the online experience.

The importance of semantic understanding

Semantic understanding is the contextual knowledge that every human being shares which allows us to engage in nuanced conversation. As humans, we’re so good at this that we seldom understand when we’re doing it.

Imagine you’re having a conversation with a friend, and that friend is discussing what they had for dinner last night. You reply that you had fish and chips for supper. The words ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’ are totally different and contain hardly any shared letters. However, you both know and understand that you’re talking about the same meal. This is the kind of semantic understanding that search engines should be trained in. Leveraging technology, algorithms can be taught to understand the semantic meaning behind such things as synonyms.

Creating the ultimate ecommerce experience is more than just making a visually appealing website – it’s about being able to connect customers to desired products quickly and with maximum relevance. If one customer searches ‘dress shirt’ whilst the other searches ‘shirt dress’, the search results for these two people can’t and shouldn’t be the same, since these are different products despite sharing similar names.

AI-based search technology allows you to create search engines with exactly these kinds of capabilities. Smart search bars with features such as huge dictionaries and multilingual capabilities are able to separate product types and attributes, and understand products on a deeper level. This type of AI is often termed as ‘semantic understanding’ and is a vital technology in curating the perfect ecommerce experience for your customers.

The importance of automation

Although the creation of your search engine may have been a success, you might feel tempted to keep making small tweaks to the way results are displayed. This is totally fine, and proactively tweaking your site to improve engagement and sales is always a good thing. However, these can oftentimes get out of hand, resulting in large backlogs of work as catalogues increase and consumer behaviors change over seasons and trends. This results in far too much work for one team, meaning automation is the only solution.

It’s possible to automate minor tweaks in the semantic understanding of the AI, such as how it understands ‘sneakers’ vs ‘trainers’ or ‘baked goods’ vs ‘pastries’. You want to avoid high bounce rates as much as possible and to reduce customer confusion.

Automated solutions provide these small tweaks without overloading the responsibility on your team, and improve the customer experience whilst keeping your operation running at full speed. Improvements in levels of findability mean customers are helped along their purchasing journeys by the invisible hand of AI and automated solutions.

How these can help supercharge online experience

The use of automation and semantic understanding in search engines is primed to increase digital merchandising capabilities and improve the online experience of customers. One of the major ways this can be done is via personalization.

In the modern era, every customer expects to be treated as an individual. 90% of US consumers find the idea of personalization ‘appealing’, and 63% of customers won’t buy from brands with ‘poor’ personalization. This is contrasted with the 53% of companies who feel they lack the technological capability to provide such personalized experiences in their ecommerce stores.

Implicit personalization can be achieved by tailoring results from search queries to the predicted needs of the customer based on previous user data. Combined with leveraged technologies such as semantic understanding and search query automation, this can help prevent cases where customers are presented with thousands of different products to search through – few of which will be relevant to their needs.

Gaining a deep understanding of your customer’s intentions doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. Pairing site searches and digital merchandising solutions with a customer data platform can create custom audience segments to optimize your site based on their specific preferences.

Leveraging the right technology for search bars and digital merchandising has the unique ability to supercharge your customer’s online experience. Better personalization and search result relevance is a key aspect to optimizing ecommerce sales.