By Charlie Brown
So, you’ve launched your e-commerce store and it’s all stocked up and ready. You’ve chosen Magento as a platform, for its proven performance. You’ve done your social media marketing and email campaigns and traffic is coming in.
Congratulations! Now where are all those sales?
Want to know what’s missing from your success formula? There are a few things you have to have in addition to a great storefront and strong marketing skills these days. If your traffic is up and sales are not, your problems are centered on conversion.
You’re not turning those visitors in to buyers. I’m about to explain 5 possible reasons that isn’t happening. Then I’m going to tell you how to fix all of them. Let’s do this!
- You don’t have the products people are looking for NOW.
Internet shoppers follow trends that change quickly. October’s hottest item may be November’s old news. The most successful online shops are those that keep up with the most popular items in their line of merchandise and stock what’s hot while it’s popular.
That means you need a tool to keep track of what your visitors are searching for. Your basic Magento search extension isn’t going to do that.
- You have the hot items, but they’re too hard to find.
The second thing you should know about Internet shoppers is that they’re impatient. With today’s blazing fast internet speeds and the amount of competition out there for any product line, you don’t have much time to show them what they want.
Again, the fact that you have a Magento search prominent on your store’s home page isn’t enough. When Joe Golfer gets ready to buy that new graphite driver everyone’s talking about, he wants to find it with just those two words. If he has to search through too many results, he’s going to go find it somewhere else.
Alright, so you have to have a tool that knows what Joe Golfer is looking for even if he doesn’t know how to search for it.
- You’re not providing enough visual clues.
Let’s watch Jane Bowler this time. She comes to your site looking for that new ball that’s adding 12 pins to everyone’s game. She can’t remember the name of it, but she knows exactly what it looks like – it had that green and yellow pearl cover stock. That scenario isn’t as far “out there” as you might think. In fact, the most successful web stores are giving their shoppers visual clues in product suggestions even before they’ve finished typing their search phrase. You need a tool that will do that. - There’s no way for the shopper to improve the experience.
Okay, let’s go back to Joe’s experience with the golf club. He entered a couple of words, got a huge list of suggested products, and decided not to waste his time going through all of them. Now, what if Joe had a list of relevant options he could select to narrow down his choices? Suppose he didn’t know the brand name, but did know that it had a graphite composite shaft and that the series number was 250.
If you had an advanced Magento search that showed Joe a few check boxes with those options and threw out the suggestions that didn’t match what he entered, he’d probably find his new club and stick around to buy it.
- You’re not learning from your customers.
Every time a visitor searches for something on your site, he or she is providing you valuable information for your merchandising. That’s true even for those who didn’t find what they wanted – in fact, especially for them. Keeping track of those searches and learning what they are telling you is one of the most important steps in operating a successful enterprise.
Alright, so you need a tool that will gather data from the visitor’s searches on your site and help you decide what it’s all trying to tell you.
Solve All of the Above with One Extension
Sounds like a pretty big list of complex tools, doesn’t it? Well, the surprise is that there’s one Magento advanced search extension that delivers all of this and a whole lot more. It’s a complete set of merchandising tools that installs in a couple of minutes and doesn’t require any changes.
Improved visitor experience equals higher conversion. Magento Search from Instant Search + adds a lightning fast, intelligent and intuitive search for your visitors. It learns from each user’s input and delivers relevant product suggestions as they type.
The briefs include thumbnail images to offer quick identification or just more appeal for the impulse buyers.
There’s a smart navigation widget with custom options for your prospects. They can tailor the search results with a few clicks to see only the products that match. Search results feature a Quick View button that lets customers zoom in on the product without leaving the search page.
You can display an Add to Cart button on the view, too, to speed up the purchasing process.
The Magento Search extension even tracks a visitor’s progress and personalizes search results based on the apparent intent.
Analytics help you improve the experience further. For you, this application provides a complete administrative dashboard that includes powerful analytical functions. The data from user searches can be graphed and analyzed to provide invaluable insights for your merchandising.
See what products are hot and get them while the trends continue.
Place products on your site and in search results according to popularity.
Use geographical clues to help with product placement. Deliver a blend of merchandising and search result-based results to visitors. You simply have to see everything this extension can do for your Magento store, starting from the day you install it.
The Cloud provides speed. All the functions and even the image delivery for Magento Search are handled in the Cloud. This reduces server load to a minimum and gives your searches speed that’s truly unmatched.
See for Yourself: This Magento advanced extension may be the most valuable addition you’ll ever make to your store. Don’t take my word for it, though; there’s much more to see that I can’t fit into this post.
Everything you need to know is available on the website. Go check out Magento Search for yourself today.