Searchandising Strategy: How to improve fashion eCommerce product discovery and search experience
What is Searchandising?
Searchandising is the combination of the terms “search” and “merchandising”. Also known as searchandizing or search merchandising. It’s the process of curating on-site search results to help your customers discover important products on your website as they’re shopping. In other words, searchandising is the eCommerce strategy to improve fashion product discovery and search experience.
From Merchandising to Searchandising
In brick and mortar stores, merchandising is well understood. You can build window displays, arrange in-store products to promote certain items or respond to customer demand. The merchandising process is just as important in e-commerce stores, where the organization of products greatly affects the customer’s experience.
With searchandising, you can bring the benefits of brick-and-mortar merchandising to the e-commerce store, guiding customers on an engaging journey through the site.
Why is searchandising important for eCommerce Sites?
On e-commerce websites, nearly 30% of users go directly to the search bar. This probably sounds simple but it’s very important – make it easy and quickly to find the desired product for your customers… or risk losing revenue. If search representing such a huge opportunity, why aren’t more e-commerce sites investing in searchandising?
With this introduction, let’s look at some tips to improve your searchandising strategies:
1. Make your products more searchables with AI-enriched tags:
Poor descriptions, titles, and tags impact product searchability on the web. An efficient product tagging system is a must to respond to shoppers’ intuitive (or not most intuitive) queries.
The more relevant tags a product image has, the greater probability it has to appear in specific search results from shoppers. This is one of the main uses of Wide Eyes’ Autotagging API.
The Auto-tagging system by Wide Eyes Technologies automatically suggests high quality tags based on visual features (UGC, catalog photos, product pictures, etc). The system provides tags that really make the difference, because every detail matters when it comes to fashion.
2. Optimize your search bar adding visual search tool:
Visual search is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to enable shoppers to discover fashion items in the same way they think about it – visually with no words.
This is extremely helpful for people who don’t know exactly how to describe what they’re looking for or type the wrong search terms into the search bar. In cases like these, search by image API helps to simplify the search process. Connecting inspirational images (from Instagram, from a gallery or taken from devices) directly to products in just one click. In short, visual search (or search by image) is a one-click discovery.
The Wide Eyes’ Search-by-Image solution detects all products on image (not only one item) automatically, and suggests similar products from your inventory to ensure shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for, faster and easier.
3. Provide smart suggestions based on what shoppers like at every step:
Showing users related products doesn’t just have to be on a product page. Doing so directly in search (or Social Ads, Retargeting or anywhere visuals can influence the buying decision of a customer) provides an intuitive user experience and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
A similar recommendation engine can be used to serve customers with personalized online product recommendations based on available products visually similar in color, pattern, shape, etc. to the required product.
The AI product recommendation system like Wide Eyes’ helps customers to automatically access a greater number of products in one click, and also to navigate the product catalog in a more visual, intuitive and attractive way.
Searchandising for your e-commerce site
Effective, ongoing searchandising requires non-technical users to be able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.
To do so, you’ll need a smart and personalized search solution to improve the customer experience and drive conversions on your e-commerce site.
You are one step to power discovery experiences for your users, and drive better business results for you. Wanna talk?
