Search Product

This article discusses various features which are essential in your ecommerce site for Search Engine’ . If your ecommerce store search experience is bad your customer might hop to the next available ecommerce site to make that purchase.

If you have huge ecommerce catalog, optimizing and organizing the catalog and improving the search experience is key to the success of your ecommerce store and also the most important job of ecommerce Manager. Before we go further let's explore key terms which will help us understand the article better

• Category Listing Page or Catalog Listing page: List of Products segregated based on the category with filters/facets typically on the left side.
• Search Result Page: This is similar to category listing page, the only difference is all ‘List of products’ may come from different categories.
• Customer: One who is visiting the site to make purchase from your ecommerce store.
• Facet / Filter: These are the options usually displayed on the left of top to reduce the results of product.
• Admin: Its could be you or your store ecommerce Manager.

Minimal Features required in your ecommerce ‘Search Engine’.

BreadCrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation helps user to get back to the previous category or page etc. This is normally available in ecommerce or CMS applications.

Facets 

Facets give the users ability to iteratively refine or expand the ‘Search Results’ and ultimately helps the user to browse the list of products which he intended to quickly. This ‘filtering’ now in modern websites is usually done via ‘ajax’ or using ‘Single page application to make the ‘Search Results’ load faster.

1. Refine or Expand Results
2. Show the Count for each filtering Option
3. Show only popular ‘Filtering Options’ for the rest give a ‘More’ link.
4. Show certain ‘Filtering Options’ as range of values

5.These facets/filters are product attributes and they should be configurable,  meaning a ‘Product Attribute’ should have config setting ‘ To make it Searchable’ and ‘ To Show as Facet or Filter’ in the catalog list view.

Sort By

User should be able to Sort the ‘Search Result’, for example sort Price (Low to high) helps the user to find the products which he is looking.Various ‘Sort By’ options which are normally found in the Search Engines.

• Price (Low<->High)
• Brand (A<->Z)
• Best Match
• Ability to again revert back on Relevance of Search Results.
• Created Date
• Category page Displaying products by Sorting order or newly added products
• Sort by Reviews
• Sort by Best Sellers
• Recommended Products
• Featured

Auto Suggest Functionality

Made popular by google search engine, this helps the user to choose the product based on few letters he entered this helps customer search products with Keyword or Partial Key Term or some other attribute of the product. Typically this most used feature by the customer to search the product.

In auto suggest these can be displayed

• Search Terms - These are the terms which were already searched by some other user in your sites. These can be created by store admin also if necessary and here synonyms can be added to search terms. Please refer the next picture
• Actual Products
• Attributes of the Products such as color, size or any other attribute based on the options available
• If there are no result or less results from the auto suggest,  we can correct the user by either using ‘Did you mean’ or Auto Correct Functionality

Other Advanced ecommerce Search Functionalities

• Search with result
• Enhance Search with Snippets and Highlights
• Enhance search with redirect to particular page

Few Search Engine Technical choices available

There are plenty of choices to use various search engines, again it depends your ecommerce application and the language which it written but in general these are good suggestions.

• Regular Databases (mysql, postgresql, MongoDB)
• Sphinx
  Sphinx is a full text search engine that provides text search functionality to client applications.
• Apache SOLR   
  Open Sourced by Apache and its merged effort of both Lucene and SOLR and now called SOLR. This is also one of amongst the popular option available.
• ElasticSearch
  • Inbuilt cluster
  • Has many out of box features.
  • Plugins are typically available for major ecommerce platforms such as ‘Magento’, ‘OpenCart’
  • ElasticSearch is currently number one leader in the search market. This product also is open source and also a fork of lucene.
• Amazon ES service
  • Amazon AWS provided service for Elastic search.
• Amazon CloudSearch
  • Amazon AWS product, can be used as solution for your ecommerce search engine.