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Retail search boxes help identify 'customer sentiment'
Jun 13 2012, 12:47 PM
Companies that use search boxes on their online retail sites are able to assess consumer sentiment.
This is the verdict of Ed Hoffman, Vice President of global sales and business development at SLI Systems, who was speaking at the eCommerce Expo Manchester.
Mr Hoffman explained that such a feature acts as a method of listening to how customers are describing and identifying products, helping to boost organisations' single customer view.
He also advised that search boxes should provide the best functionality possible to consumers, especially due to the competitive nature of the market, which means that many rivals are only a click away.
"People want to find what they came for and they want to find it quickly, they don't have a lot of patience anymore.
"They know they can with a single click go on another website or be back at Google, so if you don't have an effective search tool you could be losing business," Mr Hoffman suggested.
He recommended that search boxes should not be narrowly-targeted at items that businesses want to sell, but should rather consider the other kinds of content that visitors will be searching for.
Online shopping is extremely popular among Britons, with the 2012 eCommerce Basket survey from payment provider WorldPay finding that 40 per cent of customers buy goods and services via the internet at least once a week.
As well as this, ten per cent admitted to buying ten products on average every month.
Despite the popularity of online shopping, Mr Hoffmann suggested that businesses can still improve how people interact with their websites.
The expert stressed that companies should make it possible for articles and press releases to be accessed through the search tool of websites.
He also emphasised the benefits of the auto-complete function, noting: "We've done some analytics on this kind of feature and the people who interact with auto-complete and rich auto-complete convert at a slightly higher rate and they have an average order value that is 17 per cent higher than people who don't."
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