Introduction

Over the past years, Smart Search became the thing of the heart of in-site sales - when your customer looks for a specific product using your search input. By many sites and business owners, it's already known that most users take an average of 7 seconds on the site: this 7 seconds is yours to spend, to catch their attention on your products.

This attention (event) can be achieved by many things, for example, a few in order:

1. Quality images
2. Large text
3. Call-To-Action (CTA)
4. User Experience (UX)

The Smart Search methodology is powered by the User Experience, as it will make your users happier while using your search input - and a great UX can convert the user into a potential customer. In other words, Smart Search is a UX feature that can show the best results for your potential customer.

What is this?

You may have learned above that Smart Search is a simple UX trick to make your users happier to use your regular search box. But let's see what it can make to your webshop or E-Commerce website:

1. User Experience

At the same time With the 2nd Customer Relationship point, the best thing you can do to your webshop store is to improve your User Experience. This can be achieved with search history, or just imagine if your regular search box had an auto-complete feature: yes, to help your customers to find what they are looking for.

With a simple Artificial Intelligence technique, you can achieve it, and while your user types some characters inside the search box, the Smart Search function will find all the best matching products from your inner database.

2. Customer Relationship

Imagine if someone came to your website and search for one of your products, for example, an apple. They look at the product, they liked it, but for some reason, they decided or had to leave your website. Time goes on, they visit your website again, but not for the aforementioned an apple as they forgot about it.

Let's compare: imagine when your customer opens up your regular search box this time. It will be just a search box, nothing else. But imagine if it was a search box that is smarter: put the apple search result in front of the user's screen as like search history.

Analytics

A great and effective Smart Search function should not be only a live User Experience method, but it should power your marketing team also: for example, to keep what the users looking for, and when they do it.

Keep timestamps, search keywords, and match with your products inside your listings.

Examples

Pinterest Smart Search

[Pinterest Smart Search - Pinterest]

Pinterest has a very effective Smart Search function on their site: the input box is so wide to easily find it, and when you decide to look for something it will give all the best results very quickly - including an 1. Auto-completed solution with few more possible results, and 2. a Smart Pin finder to find the potential Pins you are looking for.

Muziker Smart Search

[Muziker Smart Search - Muxiker]

When I was looking for music instruments, I found Muziker's solution as the best one I could see. It's pretty decent at its job and it does support multiple solutions at the same time: 1. Search term matching to put potential words to your inserted search term with a nice blue highlight, 2. Category, Brand, and Article matching to show more results using auto-complete and last, but not least 3. Product matching to firstly show the best product result the customer might buy and show possible products if the "best one" didn't work out.

Do I need it for my website?

Well, it's not a question, yes, of course! It is always a great idea to improve your website in terms of UX practices. If you are planning to boost your conversion results and grow your sales, it is a great idea to make your regular search feature a little or smarter.

Are you looking for a professional web developer to make a Smart Search feature for your website - for a great price? Click here and let's meet with me on Fiverr.