The process of prepping your online storefront for holiday shoppers begins earlier every year – but there’s still time for last-minute “quick hits” that can help boost conversions and encourage shoppers to browse (and shop) longer on your site. Along with FitForCommerce, we’re presenting several of these quick-hit ideas in a free webinar on Wednesday, November 16 – read on for a sneak peek:

#1: Optimize holiday search terms: Review your shoppers’ most popular search terms from last year, and make sure you’ve matched these terms to the best products. Also, optimize searches that include general holiday-related keywords (like “gift” or “dad present”) to make sure results are relevant.

#2: Use site search as “your ears to the floor”: Site search gives you a real-time picture of what your customers want from your site. Review site search keywords and adjust landing pages and home pages as needed.

#3: Merchandise search and landing pages: Don’t miss out on opportunities to highlight products and special offers when visitors come to search results or landing pages. Create a gift finder that can help shoppers find gifts based on recipient and price, or add a special holiday product category that’s powered by search.

#4: Add holiday messages to navigation and search: Allow shoppers to reorder search results based on holiday-related categories like “top holiday picks” or “best-selling gifts.” Also, promote special holiday deals using banners or other messages within search – such as deals on shipping or free gift-wrapping.

#5: Incorporate mobile and social into the holiday shopping experience: More and more shoppers expect to do some of their holiday gift-buying from their mobile devices, and they want to research products via their social networks. Add social content into search results, and make mobile search and navigation as user-friendly as possible.

Looking for more ideas as you ramp up for holiday shoppers? Register for the November 16 webinar.

Have you ever shopped for clothing, books, or sporting supplies on your mobile device? If so, was it an easy process, or was it cumbersome and time-consuming? While the numbers vary a bit from report to report, most experts predict that consumers will soon launch themselves into the mobile commerce revolution – possibly even during the holidays. You need to make sure your online business is ready for these shoppers.

If you’re ready to take the mobile plunge, we have some tools and services that can help you do so quickly and cost-effectively. We recently introduced SLI Mobile, which helps you create a mobile version of your e-commerce website, complete with search and navigation features. Our solution takes into account the special challenges of conducting e-commerce on a device with a small screen and varying data speeds, so we offer several tools to make searching easier, such as refinements and smaller images.

And just like the service we provide for regular e-commerce sites, we allow you to integrate your product pages with ratings and review solutions, as well as social media content. We can create mobile sites that work on all major devices and platforms, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Android phones. If you already have a mobile site, we can simply provide you with search and navigation functionality – or, we can provide you with search, navigation, and product pages and integrate them with your shopping cart.

For our existing customers, launching the mobile site is a fast and painless process – we already have all the data and can set up the mobile site with almost no effort from the customer. Our customer Century Novelty, whose mobile site is now live, found out just how painless and cost-effective SLI Mobile is: “SLI Systems did all of the heavy lifting to create the site, and at one-third of the cost estimates we received from other mobile vendors—and the entire process took just a few hours of my time,” explains Ian MacDonald, vice president and general manager of Century Novelty.

If you’d like to study up on mobile commerce, download our new white paper, Site Search and the Mobile Commerce Revolution. It’s free, and inside you’ll get fresh ideas on developing a mobile strategy, and making your mobile commerce site as user-friendly as possible. Click here to download the guide – and to find out more about SLI Mobile, contact your Customer Success Manager or our sales team at sales@sli-systems.com.

Given the rapid adoption of smartphones, everyone in ecommerce knows the importance of developing a mobile version of their web site. What’s perhaps even more important is creating a mobile version of your site search.

Why is mobile site search so important? It’s a vital part of the web-browsing experience when you’re on a mobile device. Limited screen real estate provides little room for navigating from page to page or product to product. With effective mobile site search, people don’t need to rely on navigation – so it’s a space-effective way of getting people to the information they want to find on your site.

When you develop mobile site search, you need to take into account the unique challenges of browsing the web via these devices. Obviously, the small screen size will constrict the search choices you can offer to mobile device users. For instance, it’s very difficult to show options for refining search results. In addition, variable download speeds will limit how long these users are willing to wait for the search results to load.

These factors make site search even more crucial to a mobile website since it’s more difficult to navigate through a website via a mobile device. Therefore, you should consider giving site search prominent placement on your mobile site. Amazon does this with its own mobile site – as you can see when you visit the site, search dominates the screen.

Relevance of search results is particularly key for mobile site search, since it’s difficult to show facets to refine results – you want to make every effort to ensure the results are relevant after typing in a keyword. Users can’t or won’t scroll through pages of results to find what they need. It’s also important to keep the site search feature light in terms of images – any pictures should be small so as not to slow down page loads. On the other hand, you may want to include easy access to product reviews – people tend to use mobile devices when they are shopping, and they may want to access reviews on the spot.

We’re happy to offer advice on the best practices for mobile site search that’s fast and effective. If you’re an existing SLI customer and would like to develop a mobile version of your site search, contact your Customer Success Manager.