Workstand Blog

SmartEtailing Site Search Just Got Faster

By Ryan Atkinson
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Our new site search experience is live for all SmartEtailing clients. Now local cyclists shopping on your bike shop website can find product faster and better than ever.

Did you know that 50% of visitors to your website use the search bar looking for product you sell? Depending on how your homepage and navigation are configured, your specific ratio might be even higher.

People who use site search know exactly what they are looking for, like a specific product name. These shoppers are often in the late-stage of buying, the information gathering phase is completed and they have made a decision which product to buy. You want to give that person exactly what they want. Fast.

44% faster search results

Everyone cares about speed, especially online shoppers. Whether your shoppers want to buy in-store or online, they want to quickly discover whether you have the product that they want.

The new solution has been tested to perform 44% faster than the previous search engine. Ecommerce is all about data and how fast a user can access it. We have a team of developers spend over 150 hours on this project and the results are impressive.

We’ve benchmarked our new search engine against national specialty sports ecommerce sellers and we are confident that your site now works just as well as these best-in-class platforms.


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Tuned specifically for bike shops

At lot happens under the hood when a user searches for a product on your website. Compared to off-the-shelf website providers, SmartEtailing’s search is tuned just for a bike shop. Your shoppers will get precisely the results they are looking for.

If you built your own site with a comprehensive catalog on another platform, you’d discover very quickly how important this is.

You know what a mountain bike is, but most site search engines do not. They read the word “bike” and show consumers all items that contain that word. I’m sure you would find that frustrating if you were a shopper.

We understand the products that you sell and the way cyclists shop. We have your website search configured to outperform any of your competition.

Ongoing ability to fine tune results

The new SmartEtailing site search will be adjusted continually to adapt to the specific needs of a bike shop, with all of our unique product names and combinations.

Think of all of the brands and categories you sell. When a user types in “brand + category” into the search bar, the search engine has to make sense of a lot of information. A classic case in cycling is “S-Works mountain bike”. Most search engines don’t know what “S-Works” is, let alone how to cross reference the brand name with a product type.

Our new search engine has tools for monitoring and management that give us complete visibility and control. We are able to track search queries that don’t return optimal results and update our search engine to respond to actual user behavior.

Why is search so important?

As more and more consumers browse on mobile devices, search is becoming increasingly important. Even the best mobile navigation on a large ecommerce website can be challenging to navigate. On-the-go shoppers want to quickly discover if you have what they are looking for.

Search lets users control their own actions and quickly find things they are looking for, and many shoppers prefer search to navigation. Search is also the users’ escape when they can’t find what they are looking for in a website’s navigation.

Search is more important the larger your catalog is. Your bike shop has thousands of items in stock, and tens of thousands more available from your suppliers. Visitors are becoming more and more comfortable using a search interface to discover new content and to navigate large and extremely complex sites on a regular basis.

Needless to say, fast and accurate site search is incredibly valuable for your bike shop. SmartEtailing delivers. Try it for yourself. Use the search bar on your website and see how rapidly the product list appears. You’ll be hard pressed to find an ecommerce search that’s any faster.

Topics: Websites Bicycle Retail Insights Client Updates

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