App Spotlight: Searchspring

Improve your customers’ shopping experience by adding this app to your BigCommerce or Shopify website.

Your eCommerce website has many roles to fill. Not only is it your company’s virtual storefront, it also has to perform multiple duties such as being your sales showroom, your merchandising team, your salespeople, your warehouse, and a personal shopper for your customers–all at the same time. The larger your business and inventory, the more complicated these tasks become to manage. Your website could stock and sell the best products on the planet for the best prices imaginable. But what good is all of that if your customers can’t find exactly what they want to buy?

Enter Searchspring.

What is Searchspring?

Searchspring is a comprehensive merchandising and product search optimization tool for eCommerce websites. Following their February 2020 merger with Toronto-based eCommerce search and navigation provider, Nextopia, Searchspring is the definitive solution for eCommerce search and merchandising. Searchspring can help grow your online business and boost conversion rates by providing your shoppers with an optimized and efficient shopping experience.

What does Searchspring do?

Once integrated into your BigCommerce, Shopify, or custom eCommerce platform website, Searchspring’s advanced indexing and AI technology can automate complex business processes that would otherwise necessitate excessive amounts of time, money, and manpower to accomplish.

There are six main solutions that Searchspring targets:

• Site Search
• Merchandising
• Navigation
• Recommended Products
• Personalization
• Insights and Analytics

Site Search

Basic searches work on the most generic of criteria and, unsurprisingly, generate results that are equally generic and with minimal relevance. With Searchspring, product searches are made hyper-relevant, displaying only the most pertinent items out of your entire inventory based on semantic search, measurement autodetection, and learned shopper behaviors/trends.

As Searchspring themselves state, “Semantic ecommerce search looks at the subtleties in a search query to classify or group products. In just a few milliseconds, it is able to break apart the words in a query to identify which words are product categories, and which are attributes. This ultimately ensures that shoppers will be taken to the correct set of products, rather than a collection of products that are only loosely related to their query.” Measurement autodetection will focus on your shopper’s search input by keywords and special characters; if your shopper types in 2 inch, 2 in., or 2” into the search field, they will see the exact same set of products each time. You also have the option to let Searchspring automatically bump your top-10 best-selling items to the top of the results for your 250 most frequently-used search terms.

Merchandising

Searchspring also lets you customize how your search results are displayed. You can arrange your products by style, category, price, or even by personal aesthetic choice through the drag-and-drop control feature. Set boost rules on select items to push them up towards the top of your search results based on the number of views, conversion rate, or margin. You can also use these rules to weed out unpopular items and slow sellers, high-cost/low-profit merchandise, or items that are out-of-stock. Create a landing page to promote particular items of interest and schedule a global campaign to influence your shoppers into purchasing. Add banners, publish your page, and get the word out with a generated sharable link.

Navigation

Take control of search relevancy by choosing which filters your shoppers can use in search. You have the ability to sort your search filters manually, by drag-and-drop, or you can let Searchspring automatically arrange your filter groups. Searchspring will position the most relevant filter groups to the top of your filtered navigation.

Recommended Products

In addition to earning higher conversion rates by helping your shoppers find exactly what they want, you can also add more revenue by offering related products to cross-sell or upsell. Recommend products that your shoppers might be interested in adding to their original purchases; related accessories, complimentary add-ons, or even similar competing items within your stock will both drive your customers towards products that they might not have realized they needed or wanted while increasing your average order values. You can suggest trending products, current best-selling products from your inventory that are presently in-demand with your customers. For shoppers who would appreciate a more personalized shopping experience, Searchspring can set up personal product recommendations based off of previous shopper behaviors. Data from past purchases, past searches, and recently viewed product pages is collected to simulate a virtual private assistant shopper for your customers, taking out some of the anonymity of online shopping and restoring some of the ‘human element’ found in physical retail stores with real live people with whom to interact. Set up exclusion and attribute rules to separate products for eligibility and to ensure that your website viewers are being shown only the most relevant items per their own behavior and actions.

Personalization

Along with product recommendations, Searchspring can reorganize how your products are displayed using geo-merchandising. Geo-merchandising uses real-time targeting based on your shopper’s location VIA Internet location services like GPS on mobile devices, user IP address, etc. You can customize your messaging and promotions by region; this is extraordinarily helpful in making arrangements for region-specific situations such as local climate and seasonal merchandise, shipping policies by region, and products that may pertain to notable exceptions based on area such as city sports teams and famous landmarks.

Insights and Analytics

Identifying, understanding, and meeting your customer’s needs are the keys to any successful business. Meet your shoppers and narrow down your target audience with Searchspring’s insights and analytics functions. Searchspring records critical details about your website’s users to help you better serve them while deterring them from your competition. Learn about your website’s hottest search trends, the most popular search terms and most frequently-shopped products, and other useful information to help your business retain previous and current customers and continuously attract brand new ones. Merchandise your web store according to product; product insights let you view individual product performance. From there, you can build sales, merchandising, and inventory strategies by knowing which items sell, which ones don’t, and which products are garnering the most attention without producing conversion results. Additionally, Searchspring can integrate with Google Analytics for even more detail into key insights such as the demographics of visitors and their respective online behaviors.

Searchspring is available for major eCommerce solutions including BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and other platforms including custom eCommerce solutions. Diztinct has built websites using Searchspring for Pompeii3 and Speed Addicts. Both websites are on the BigCommerce platform.

Contact us today to learn more about custom web development for BigCommerce and Shopify, or our additional services: SEO and marketing, graphic design, inventory management, and our complete Yahoo migration, Volusion migration, and Magento website migration services.