ECOMMERCE SITE SEARCH: SOLUTIONS, STATISTICS AND BEST PRACTICES

3 min readApr 25, 2023

Site search is a must-have feature in any website, especially an eCommerce website. eCommerce site search helps users easily find their wished products. A well-functioned eCommerce site search engine may help businesses their raise conversion rate.

eCommerce site search solutions

An eCommerce site search is a search engine that is either built-in or integrated into your online store, and its job is to find the products the user is looking for by matching the user’s search keywords with the products in your store. Users can easily search their target products through text, voice, and scan code, etc.

The eCommerce site search platforms provide two search methods. One is to use the search box to search directly in the text, and the other is to search based on product categories.

eCommerce site search engine method

Types of eCommerce search engines

Quick whale e-commerce editor checked the eCommerce homepage of eBay, Etsy, Amazon and found that the search engines of such e-commerce platforms are similar. They all provide two search methods. One is to use the search box to search directly, and the other is to search by product.

The mainstream query term of the search box is still text-based. This is because most of the content crawled and indexed by search engines is also organized in text. Taobao and Jingdong’s Query has been extended to pictures, and you can upload pictures to search for the same item.

In addition, we see that there are hot search terms below or suggested in the search box. This setting has two purposes: one is to reduce user input operations; the other is generating demands for customers.

Category joint search has also been added to the search box. Taobao is a general screening of product sources, while Amazon and Dangdang are specific to personalized categories, which can be fully matched with category keywords, combined keywords and category double search.

When entering keywords in the search box, the system will match a query list, or some classification suggestions, so that users can provide accurate queries and classification ranges to the retrieval system, reducing the number of repeated searches by users.

Additionally, users also search by product category on eCommerce websites. When it comes to categories, it is necessary to involve the category attribute system. Generally speaking, the category system is divided into a front-end category system and a back-end category system.

Query search and category search of eCommerce site search engines are often accompanied by filtering functions

Generally, when shopping on the website, we search for a keyword, such as “towel”, and then all relevant brand, material and other classification choices will be presented to us, and the search scope can be narrowed according to the necessary conditions.

The filtering methods include classification filtering, label filtering, price range filtering, geographic filtering, inventory filtering, and whether it is self-operated. Also, the eCommerce site search engine supports sorting in various dimensions, including the sorting of attributes such as sales volume, credit, and price, and supports a wider range of searches.

On the filtering page, there is still a search box. When scrolling to view products, the search area will float on the page. Compare Etsy, eBay and Amazon. Do you feel familiar with the location of the search box and category? Right? Yes, you thought of it, that is the “F-type” layout and “heat map”.

According to the predictable behavior of users browsing the web, allowing users to quickly lock search engines within a few seconds, which shows how important search engines are on eCommerce platforms.

Ecommerce Site Search Best Practices

Smart autocomplete suggestions

An eCommerce site search suggestion method includes the following steps: