In an ideal world visitors will come to your website, find what they want and make a purchase. In the real world only a small portion of users will follow this pattern. Many will get interrupted, distracted, or need more time to make a decision for whatever reason. The search history feature is a simple way to allow users to return to their previous session – and the items they were interested in.

An online storefront needs to make it easier for visitors to get directly to the products or information they want in order to improve the chances they’ll make a purchase and increase their engagement with your brand. Enhancing your site search facilitates this no-hassle experience, and there are many ways to do this – for instance, using Rich Auto Complete, offering related search suggestions, and adding refinements. Displaying a search history is another way to improve your site’s usability and drive sales.

As visitors are searching, you can record their queries and make it easy for them to perform these searches again when they come back to the site without having to re-enter keywords, or even remember what they searched for. Displaying the search history in a clearly labeled “Recent Searches” box can serve as a reminder of their previous session and give customers access to the items they’re interested in with just a click or two. You can add the search history list to your search results pages, as well as product pages and your home page, so that visitors can access this list from anywhere on your site.

Here’s how the search history works one of our customers, FTD.com. If a shopper searches for “yellow roses,” then “chrysanthemums,” these search terms will appear in the Search History list at the top of the search refinement bar at left, even after they leave the site and then come back:

A nice feature to offer with search history is the option to “clear list,” as you can see in the FTD.com example above. Similarly, you can also allow visitors to select which terms to delete. Visitors may decide the list is out of date and they may want to delete it; or, if it’s a shared computer, they may not want someone in the same household to know what they’re buying for a birthday gift.

Like FTD.com, the website for True Religion jeans places the search history at top left, just above the list of refinement options:

Search history is yet another tool for making your site a little easier to use and a little easier to buy from. If you’d like to add search history to your site, we can help – contact your SLI customer success manager.

When you’re trying to find something on a poorly designed or overly cluttered website, it can feel like you’re in one of those computer games where you’re trapped in a dark hallway and don’t know which room to choose. Will clicking on a given tab help get you where you want to go, or will you end up in a website “black hole”? Will navigation refinements help you locate the item you need – or will you remain adrift in a sea of products?

When done right, navigation can have a huge impact on your online conversion rate and brand reputation. Likewise, poor navigation can destroy your brand’s credibility and make it hard to attract loyal customers.

While navigation is more an art than a science, there are guidelines you can follow that will create a positive shopping experience for your customers. Based upon our years of providing expert advice and tips in this area, we were able to compile a bunch of best practices. Our initial “Big Book” on site search tips, the “Big Book of Site Search Tips” was so well received that we decided to create a new downloadable “Big Book” around the topic of site navigation called the “Big Book of Navigation Tips” –to help ensure that your visitors don’t get lost trying to navigate through your site. The 50-plus tips – on everything from navigation design to integrating reviews to mobile navigation – can help you shorten the time it takes for visitors to enter your site, find just what they’re looking for and make a purchase.

Many of the tips in the new “Big Book” are easy to put into place and won’t require wholesale changes to your site navigation. For instance, you can eliminate refinement options that visitors don’t use very often, which will help streamline the user experience. You can figure out which options are not proving popular by checking your navigation reports.

Another great tip: Make sure your navigation pages help your SEO efforts by using short URLs that include useful keywords. Also if your navigation links are produced by JavaScript then you should have a non-script version so the search engines can find and follow them.

There’s also a whole section on mobile navigation, which is extremely useful given the rapid growth rate mobile shopping has seen in recent months and will likely continue to see in the months to come. If you have any uncertainty about how to construct the navigation of your mobile site, this book can offer the guidance you need.

The more you do to improve site navigation, the less likely it is that visitors will abandon your site – in fact, with streamlined, easy-to-follow navigation, they’ll stick around longer and likely spend more money. Download the “Big Book of Navigation Tips” today, and let us know what you think – you can send feedback to newsletter@sli-systems.com.

This month, we have a tip on boosting conversions from people who land on your product pages from searches via Google and other Internet search engines. The tip is to show a tailored product banner to these visitors.

You have little control over how Internet search engines will rank your product pages so by showing (on the product page they land on from Google, Yahoo or Bing) your own list of products based on the search term used on Google, Yahoo or Bing you can make sure visitors find what they are actually looking for.

To do this we create a product banner using site search results for the search term they used on the Internet search engine (extracted from the referral URL).

A product that is ranking well in Internet search engines may have gone out of stock, out of fashion, or may simply not be your best seller. This technique allows you to put popular, in-stock items in front of the user that are relevant to what they’re looking for.

Our customer Motorcycle Superstore, an online retailer of motorcycle gear and accessories, is using this technique on its product pages. In the example below, the user searched on Google for “scorpion exo,” and clicked on the “Scorpion EXO-1000 Helmet” from Motorcycle Superstore.

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When the user clicked, the relevant product page was shown and a banner dynamically added showing the site search results for Scorpion EXO helmets. Thus the user sees a range of products that may interest them, as well as the actual product that they clicked on.

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Soon after creating these dynamic banners with SLI’s assistance and search data, Motorcycle Superstore experienced higher sales revenue: the retailer is seeing an average conversion lift of 2–5% for the items featured in the banner. In addition, the site search results banners are consistently in the top four most-clicked merchandising methods on the site.

We love seeing this type of innovation from our customers. We worked closely with Motorcycle Superstore to optimize these pages and were able to launch this feature in just a week. If you’d like to try this on your product pages, please contact your customer success manager. We would love to help you.

Your website visitors have high expectations of quickly finding the products or content they need. However, visitors often struggle to figure out exactly what terms they should use in the search box. Auto Complete, which we’ve talked about in the past, shows suggestions as you type into the search box. Another way to help visitors is to use related searches, which are search suggestions that are shown on the search results page. Related searches can help people find just the right search term, helping remove ambiguity in the query and adding a little serendipity.

For instance, on our customer’s site, Century Novelty, a visitor might search for “graduation favors.” That’s a big category, so the search results for this term would include several related search suggestions designed to narrow the search, or lead the visitor in a slightly different direction:

Related search suggestions encourage site visitors to browse products or content that they might not know about, which can lead to higher-value orders and greater customer satisfaction with your site. Our own research with customers using our Related Searches shows that about 25% of people that search will click on a related search suggestion. That tells us that people find these suggestions useful.

The data for related search suggestions comes directly from your site visitors’ own search behavior – the correlation between search terms entered by visitors, and the products or content they ultimately view. We suggest displaying related search suggestions at both the top and bottom of the search results page. By displaying them at the top, they can help visitors immediately after they’ve entered a query. At the bottom, they provide helpful alternatives if the user has scrolled through the page of results and not found what they want. You can see this placement example on the Century Novelty site by clicking here.

Related searches can also be shown with each search result. You can see an example of this at Green Mountain Coffee:

These same search suggestions can be shown on the product page itself, and used as a navigational aid to find related content. Here is an example from NRS, shown at the bottom of the product page for a dog life jacket.

Related search suggestions are also helpful on mobile commerce sites. Since space is at a premium on the mobile screen and network speeds can vary, you don’t want to force mobile users to scroll down a long list of results or click through on products or content that don’t match their needs. A prominent list of related search suggestions within mobile search results will shrink the time it takes for a mobile user to browse and buy.

SLI’s own patented Related Search is easy to add to your existing SLI search implementation. Contact your Customer Success Manager to find out more about adding value to site search with related suggestions.

At SLI, we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about ways they can improve performance of their site search and navigation, and options to consider for merchandising results pages. We’ve also discussed many best practices approaches in this newsletter – everything from refinement options, display options (e.g. ‘grid view vs. list view’), and advanced features like Rich Auto Complete and Mouse-over Pop-ups.

With so many features and options to consider, how do you know what you should implement, and if they’ll truly make a difference in the experience you deliver to your customers? The answer is pretty simple. You need to TEST.

If that sounds frightening, it shouldn’t. There are a few tools out there you can use (including our own Conversion Optimizer) which make A/B and multivariate testing of site search, navigation, promotions and page layouts pretty painless. But rather than focus on HOW to test (if you are an SLI customer and want guidance here please talk to your Customer Success Manager), we’re going to discuss WHAT to test. The options are wide-ranging, and there are many factors you should consider.

First off, how should you present search results on your page? Do you display items in a grid view or a list view? Should you offer your customers the option of choosing what view they like? There are guidelines you can follow – for example, if you have a lot of products that match particular keywords, a grid view allows more items to be shown above the fold. It also allows for less product detail to be included, avoiding clutter. The only way to tell what method will work best with your customers is to perform some tests.

Another option to test might be how best to display color options in search results. Should you take Jelly Belly’s approach, and offer a clickable color swatch along the left side of the page, or should you provide color options underneath each item in the search results, like Dover Saddlery does? There are many good ways to display color options and many factors to consider and test in implementing the solution that works best for you – like what products you sell, how many of them offer different color options and how they display.

How about video, and user ratings and reviews? These are popular features on e-commerce sites, and we’ve made recommendations to include this content in search results. How you include them and even IF you should include them are questions best answered by doing some tests.

Is your search box placement motivating enough of your users to use it? Research shows that people who search are 2-3 times more likely to convert, so would you see even more conversions if more of your visitors used your search box, and would a different placement, or enhancements to the search box itself, drive more usage?

Let’s take banners. We often recommend that retailers use banners on ‘no results’ pages to drive people towards popular items. Banners are also good ways to promote special offers you’re making, like discounts on shipping, brands on sale or other promotions. Where you show the banners, how big you make them and what content you include are all variables you should test.

There are many more things you can test, such as what refinement options you offer and how you present them (e.g. pull-down menu vs. clickable links), what size images you should include in search results, and whether you should add a “click to buy” button right on each search result. If you have any questions about what to test or how to conduct your tests, our team of experts is here to help – just contact us at sales@sli-systems.com.

With the recent growth in mobile shopping, coupled with new technologies that bring online shopping to the physical world (and vice-versa), the lines between online and offline have blurred. It’s no longer prudent to keep offline and online marketing efforts completely separate from one another, yet many retailers still do. Below are some tips for blending your digital and physical marketing efforts, to increase sales and give your customers a better, more consistent shopping experience across your different channels, ultimately strengthening your brand.

Combine online and offline promotions and customer interactions

With the current craze around sites like Groupon and Living Social, many brands are making offers online that can be redeemed in a physical store. Aside from the obvious benefits of reaching people wherever they are, these types of online offers also allow retailers to track the influence of the web on in-store purchases. Similarly, you can give customers a special code on the receipt from their in-store purchase that can be entered online to receive additional offers. If you have persistent cookies in place, you can then tie this purchase to previous online activity, and continue to monitor how the customer interacts with your brand.

You can also bring the online shopping experience in-store by adding kiosks that shoppers can use to search for product information and availability in real time – and check for other locations or order it online if the store they’re in is out of stock.

Maintain a consistent experience across multiple channels

As today’s shoppers conduct research, compare prices and make purchases from a variety of places – e.g. their computer, mobile device, catalog, or in a physical store – they should have a consistent experience with your brand across all channels. For example, be sure the look and feel of your website matches the look and feel of your catalog – and also extend this as much as possible to your mobile commerce site (although you obviously have less space to work with), your advertising, and your physical stores if you have any.

Additionally, your site search should take your catalog items into account, so that if someone types a product number from the catalog in the search box, they should then be taken straight to the product page. You should also include catalog page numbers on product pages and search results pages on your website, so people can refer back to the catalog if they wish. Also, as user ratings have become a popular feature on e-commerce sites, you can include the star ratings on product labels in the store and in your catalog, and you can take it a step further by including a call for people to look up the product on a kiosk or their mobile device to see the ratings and read reviews.

Provide flexibility and convenience online and offline

Many multi-channel retailers have a larger product inventory in their catalog (whether online or offline) than they do in their store, since an online store takes up virtual shelf space. While a physical store offers the convenience of being able to touch and see a product up close, many shoppers like to spend time thinking or comparison shopping before making a purchase. And if they do decide to purchase, they may prefer to buy online rather than return to the store, so make sure anything that can be bought in the store or catalog can be bought online. Additionally, when customers purchase online, give them the option to pick up the item in a store, as they may prefer not to pay shipping charges or they may not want to wait but rather pick-up the item right away at a local store.

Another convenience worth considering is offering free Wi-Fi to your store shoppers. A recent survey conducted by Wi-Fi software provide Devicescape shows that 80.5% of consumers prefer to shop at a retail store that offers Wi-Fi rather than one that doesn’t. Also, 65% said they’d use the free Wi-Fi to sign up for club cards, store memberships and coupons. Additionally, when you provide wireless connectivity in your store, you encourage people to use their mobile devices, where they might be compelled to talk about their purchase on social networks, post photos or find additional product information that can influence their decision to buy.

Keep search a focal point on web and mobile sites

Search remains a preferred way for visitors to browse a site – and also generates more conversions than standard navigation. To build your mobile presence, you need to understand that consumers “hunt” for products on mobile devices and browse for products on websites – in other words, on a mobile device they want to quickly find a specific product and information, whereas on the web they have more time and a better interface for digital window shopping. Either way, a good site search is critical – and particularly on mobile devices, search should be the focal point. It must deliver relevant information and it must be fast. You should also make it easy for customers to compare prices, read consumer reviews and order products they’ll pick up later in your store – all from their mobile devices.

These are just a few ideas to get you started, and there are many other ways you can get creative and come up with your own unique online/offline blend. Just be sure that whatever you do, you provide a consistent, convenient experience to your customers across all channels. Doing so will help you deliver a better brand experience to your customers, increasing your visibility and solidifying even greater customer loyalty.

Not long ago, you could implement key technology upgrades to your e-commerce site a few months in advance of the crucial holiday shopping season, all in one go – then leave your site alone until next year. However, the accelerated pace of retail technology innovation, along with higher expectations from users, means that you need to constantly stay abreast of new features and trends and understand how to incorporate them into your online business whenever possible.

Web search engines like Google and social networking services like Facebook are heavily influencing the changing expectations of online shoppers. For instance, site visitors expect to access product opinions and ratings from other shoppers, so they can make informed buying decisions. And they expect to see search results that can be broken down into useful categories, like product descriptions, social media content or videos.

So, even though we’ve just wrapped up last year’s holiday season, it’s not too early to consider how to make your site search even better for the holidays in 2011 – and indeed, for the next 12 months. Here’s what to consider adding to site search to meet the needs of your visitors.

Get social: add social media content to your site search. Since your shoppers are becoming avid consumers of social media content, it’s important to bring this material into site search results. Make blog posts, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and any other social media content available for users of site search so that site visitors can tap into the wealth of information within this content about your products and services.

Separate search results by type or category. Thanks to web search engines, site visitors are becoming used to results that are divided into helpful categories. For instance, if they search for a product, they may see results for online shops offering the product, videos about the product, and images. Offer your site visitors options to view their search results in similar ways.

Bring ratings and reviews into search results. We’ve talked about this before in the SLI newsletter and on our blog – and if you still haven’t added ratings and results into search, now’s the time to do it. Ideally you’ll allow site visitors to see reviews and ratings within results, and even refine results based on reviews (for instance, limiting results to products with a three-star or higher rating).

Adapt your site experience to mobile users. The mobile device market, which really took off last year, still has plenty of room for growth – and by this November, an even bigger percentage of your customers will be using these devices to search for holiday gifts. If you’ve already launched a mobile version of your website, monitor how your customers navigate the mobile site so you can quickly respond with improvements. (And if you haven’t yet launched a mobile site, here’s how to get started.)

Integrate the online and offline experience as much as possible. If you are a multi-channel retailer, visitors to your site may want to research products they plan to purchase in a physical store; and visitors to your store may also want access to information before they buy. Show “where to buy” options in search results so shoppers can find the nearest brick-and-mortar store, and include in-store kiosks where people can look up user reviews or conduct comparison shopping online before they make an in-store purchase. If you want some ideas on these topics, contact us – we’d be happy to help.

The companies that succeed in online commerce this year will be the ones that continually innovate, and find new ways to get the right offers in front of the right users at the right time. It’s a challenge that may require you to team up with specialists who can help you keep up with the pace of change. Contact SLI if you want to know how we can help you get your site into shape for 2011 and beyond.

It’s hard to believe another year is coming to a close. In 2010, site search continued to evolve into an important merchandising technology that positively impacts online businesses. As we’ve done in previous years, we’d like to take this opportunity to share with you popular news items, blog posts, and podcasts from the past year. Check them out if you didn’t get to read or listen the first time around.

In 2010, the two biggest developments in online retail were mobile and social media. As more and more website visitors turned to their smartphones and mobile devices to search for content and products, e-tailers quickly built mobile versions of their websites.

Our whitepaper, Site Search and the Mobile Commerce Revolution was a popular document for e-tailers to read as they looked for best practices and tips on incorporating search into their mobile websites. E-tailers also included social media content into site search results in 2010 to deliver a richer, more informed experience for site visitors.

Here are some additional news highlights from 2010:

Using AJAX to improve the speed of delivery of site search results
From Internet Retailer: AJAX loads only necessary data, making searching faster and easier.

Searchable user reviews boost Wine Enthusiast’s traffic 5%
From Internet Retailer: Wine Enthusiast makes user reviews searchable.

Dilbert.com Uses Custom Search to Increase Revenue
From ClickZ: Famed workplace comic strip improves site search usability.

And here are some of our more popular newsletter articles from 2010:

The Big Book: Chock Full of Site Search Tips!
Our customers have shown a growing appetite for practical advice and tips on getting the most value out of site search. The Big Book of Site Search Tips has helped many site owners better merchandise via search and improve the look and feel of their website.
Read more about and download the Big Book of Site Search Tips.

Pain-Free Testing Optimizes Search and Navigation
Setting up and running tests can be difficult and time-consuming. Many e-tailers found better ways of taking the hard work out of performing tests on their websites.
Read more about pain-free testing.

Mobile Site Search Needs to Be Fast, Streamlined and Relevant
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.
Read more about mobile site search.

From our blog, these are the 2010 posts deemed most useful by our readers:

Rich Auto Complete looks good
E-tailers found Rich Auto Complete to be a great way to help visitors find the products they need faster, while adding a “wow” effect to search.
Read more about Rich Auto Complete.

Improve the Way People Find What They Seek on Your Site
Tips on how to drive more people to use the search box and browse your company’s website.
Read more about improving the site search experience.

Some Tips about Page Layout
Why you need clear and specific content titles, as well as consistent image sizes.
Read more about making the most of site search layout.

We’ve worked hard to bring you an informative lineup of guests on our Ecommerce Podcast – here are just a few from the past year:

Linda Bustos
Director of ecommerce research at Elastic Path

Alan Trzuskoski
Ecommerce manager for Abe’s of Maine

Dave Baird
VP of marketing and co-owner at MagnetStreet

If you haven’t had the chance to listen to these podcasts, download them now and put them on your iPod before you hit the airport for your holiday travel.

We expect 2011 to offer up more opportunities to deliver new ideas for improving the value of search – in next month’s newsletter, we’ll give you our predictions for the hottest site search trends, and how you can work them to your advantage.

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.

In last month’s newsletter, we explained how to identify the most useful refinements for your site search, depending on your customers’ needs and the product mix. Figuring out which refinements to offer is the starting point, but there’s more work to be done: This month, we’ll tell you how to display these refinements so that your site visitors can make best use of them, and have a better search (and shopping) experience.

Place frequently used refinements at the top of the list. Make sure that the refinements most likely to be used can be easily accessed by visitors. Less frequently used refinements can be placed farther down on the list, or perhaps made visible only when the user has clicked on a certain category – in which case, they can select refinements that are part of a subcategory.

If you discover over time that visitors are not making use of certain refinements, then you can decide if you want to stop displaying them. This should be an ongoing evaluation process: You should continually look for ways to improve usability (and thereby conversions) by simplifying the site search process. Don’t feel compelled to display all possible refinements, which is confusing to users.

Show the number of results next to refinement options. Next to specific refinements, display the number of results that are available when that refinement is clicked on, so that visitors have a sense of how many results they’ll see. You can view this feature at work on the site for Lighting by Gregory, an SLI customer.

Show color refinements as a palette instead of text. Since colors are visual, site visitors will respond more quickly to a display of actual colors, rather than the names of the colors in text form. A color palette also takes up less space within search, so it helps reduce visual clutter.

For products available in several colors, consider retooling search results so that if a specific color refinement is selected, the product is displayed in that color. For instance, the main photo for a shirt available in red, green and blue may show the red shirt. If visitors select the blue color refinement, the image should change to the blue shirt.

When it comes to deciding how and where to display refinements, take the same approach that you would do with other aspects of your site design: Look at usage data, talk to your customers, and test options to see which refinements and placements work better. If you need advice on choosing and displaying refinements, contact your SLI Systems customer success manager.

Test placement of refinements. Depending on your audience and your site design, users may make more use of refinements depending on where they are placed – most commonly, they appear at the top of the page or in the left navigation pane. Try to avoid placing refinements at the bottom of the page, since visitors need to scroll down to view them. Test different positions to see which ones your visitors prefer.

Allow visitors to navigate between refinements on the same level. If a visitor clicks on a refinement but then decides they want to see a different refinement, don’t require them to click “back” to get to the original search results page first. They should be able to simply click a different refinement option from that page and easily see a new batch of results.

Don’t show refinement options that have no results. For instance, if there are no red products for a particular search, then there should be no link shown to restrict the results to red products.

Avoid drop-down boxes for refinements. Drop-down boxes make it harder for people to see the available refinement options, and they’ll be less likely to use them. If refinements are shown as a list of links, then they can select the refinement with a single click. However, if you have many refinements, or many options within a refinement, then showing them as links can take up too much screen real estate. In this case, drop-down boxes may be the best option.

Show a breadcrumb trail. A breadcrumb trail will show the search term and any refinements that have been made. It helps visitors understand where they’ve been on the site and how they arrived at the page they’re on. It also makes it easy to remove refinements, and helps them go back to a broader range of results if they choose. Breadcrumbs take up very little space, and are a standard navigational element.