Report "Comfortable search engines in e-commerce" explains how to increase conversion

WROCLAW, Poland - Nov. 8, 2019 - PRLog -- Direct searches can generate up to 30% of income, and a visit paid by a user that uses a site search means 2 to 3 times higher chance for conversion in comparison with users who do not use site searches. Therefore, this functionality can be considered a key position on the website. Its optimization is a great opportunity for e-commerce to increase sales and it would be a shame not to use this potential.

The Usability LAB company from the RST Group has published a report containing an audit of search engines in 50 online stores from Europe. It contains an audit of 50 e-store search engines – 25 from Poland and 25 from Europe. 59 usability criteria were analyzed in four areas: search bar, suggestions, search results and multiple request handling.

Top five – Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Poland

The top five audit results are: the British bookstore waterstones.com (meeting 73.91% of control criteria), the Dutch clothing store debijenkorf.nl (73.47%), the store of the British clothing brand marksandspencer.com (73.08%), a Dutch electronics and home appliances store coolblue.nl (71.70%) and ex aequo two Polish stores – electronics and home appliances euro.com.pl and construction castorama.pl (70.37%).

Of all the sites examined, only seven met over 70% of control criteria. On average, the audited stores met 60% of the criteria from the Control List of the Usability of Webstore Searches.

Do large and well-known stores have the best search engines?

It could seem that the larger the store (with more visits), the more importance it pays to the operation of all elements on the page – including the site search engine. However, no correlation was found between the size of the store in terms of visits per month and the quality of its search engine.

If we consider 10 stores with the highest numbers of visits (with an average number of visits over 20 million), we will see that their average score is only 55%. This is less than the average of all stores examined, which is 60%.

The usability of mechanisms supporting suggestions had the best results. And the worst?

The control list has been divided into four areas: search bar, suggestions, search results, and multiple request handling. The survey shows that stores cope best with mechanisms supporting suggestions – their average score is on average 71%. However, the largest room for improvement remains in the case of Multiple request handling. On average, e-stores met 42% of the control criteria in this area.

The full report can be downloaded for free at: https://bit.ly/2K4cl3Y