In this article, we’re going to cover the top ecommerce search engines in 2023. You may be wondering what ecommerce search platforms are and why they matter. Whenever you shop online, you’re using an ecommerce product search engine to find the products you’re looking for. If you own an online store, ecommerce search tools can help you personalize your customer’s experience and increase customer satisfaction, amongst other benefits.

According to Algolia, 43% of customers use the search bar when visiting a site and are 2.4 times more likely to purchase a product. Despite this, Baymard’s commerce UX search benchmarks found that 42% of all sites perform below an acceptable e-commerce search UX performance.

The ecommerce market is expected to reach $96.2 billion in 2023. High performance ecommerce search platforms are an opportunity you don’t want to miss for increasing business revenue. That’s why in this article, we’re going to cover the top ecommerce search engines in 2023 to help you choose the right one for your business.

What Is An Ecommerce Search Engine?

An ecommerce search engine is the search box that your customers use to search for products on your website. It works similarly to Amazon to help shoppers find products easily and efficiently by crawling through the website and indexing products.

A good ecommerce product search engine will shorten the path to purchase. It offers a better shopping experience for your customers by helping them find the products that they’re looking for. Depending on the ecommerce search engine, it can provide intelligent product recommendations for your customers while also collecting valuable customer insights to help you improve your marketing efforts.

Why Are Ecommerce Search Engines Important?

Ecommerce search engines are a defining factor in the user experience on your website. According to Shopify, 43% of customers rely on search engines to shop and do so immediately upon visiting your website. Ecommerce search engines can help your ecommerce business in more ways than one:

They Increase Customer Satisfaction

Ecommerce search engines not only convert visitors into buyers, but they build customer loyalty by increasing customer satisfaction. That’s why they’re an important consideration when it comes to designing your website. Your ecommerce search engine should be easy to use and able to pull relevant results quickly.

Research shows that 87% of customers who had a good experience on your website will return for another purchase. And because word-of-mouth marketing accounts for 90% of purchases, giving your customers a good experience should be at the top of your list.

They Personalize User Experience

Personalization is taking marketing by storm with 71% of shoppers demanding it and 78% of shoppers more likely to return because of it. There is a direct link between revenue growth and customer intimacy. That being said, the ecommerce search engine you choose can help you personalize user experience.

Your ecommerce search engine should not only show relevant results for the search query, but also provide relevant results to the user profile. For example, if someone is shopping for clothes online and only buys children’s clothes, your search engine should prioritize these products at the top of the search results.

Personalization not only generates more revenue, but it can build customer loyalty leading to higher customer retention. Combined with other marketing tools, customer loyalty is an easy way to cross-sell or ut-sell products.

They Increase Conversion Rate

While the average conversion rate in ecommerce is about 2.7%, visitors who use the search engine convert at 4.6%. Meaning, the better your search engine, the more conversions you will have on your website.

They Collect Customer Insights

Your ecommerce website is a valuable resource for collecting customer insights. By monitoring and analyzing your site’s search data, you can discover what customers are searching for and what they can’t seem to find. The top ecommerce search engines will include a search data section for you to analyze this data. Based on these statistics, you can make informed decisions about which products or services to advertise.

What Features Should My Ecommerce Search Platform Have?

Now that you know the importance of ecommerce search tools, what features should you consider? In order for a search engine to be effective, it needs to search across your entire product catalog to check for inventory, out-of-stock items, and price updates. It should also leverage a visitor’s profile from the CRM (Customer Relationship Management). But what else should you consider when choosing an ecommerce search engine?

Fast Loading Time

The faster your ecommerce search engine, the better. Research shows that 1 in 4 visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to display search results. Mobile optimization is especially important as 60% of searches in 2021 were done by smartphone. Even if your search engine can pull relevant results, a slow loading time may drive customers away. A study done by Amazon found that even a 100 millisecond lag lost them 1% in sales revenue. That’s why a fast loading time is essential in keeping and converting customers.

Autocomplete And Suggestions

Similar to how Google works, the top ecommerce search engines can autocomplete a search query for quicker results. Suggestions can also correct any spelling mistakes. Having both autocomplete and suggestions in your search engine can bring an additional 24% revenue. It’s also a great way to shorten the path to purchase.

Related: Internet Users in Canada

The best ecommerce search solution will not only crawl your website for products but will search for text across all pages to find other relevant information. There are four types of search queries that your search engine should be able to do:

  • Exact product search using the product’s name (e.g. iPhone 13 Pro Max)
  • Product type search, when looking for a general product (e.g. smartphone)
  • Problem-based search, when users need a solution to an issue (e.g. how to transfer data from old iPhone to new iPhone)
  • Non-product search, when users are looking for information rather than a product (e.g. order tracking)

Product Search Images

Product search images are a great way to encourage users to click on a product. Depending on your search engine, your product listings can include all of the important information such as a photo, price, and inventory availability directly in the search bar. Research shows that 78% of customers want products that display images, and they are 3 times more likely to purchase if the images are high-quality.

Synonyms

One major issue with ecommerce search engines is that most can’t find synonyms to product names. For example, if someone is searching for running shoes but uses the term “trainers”, some search bars will lead to a “no results” page, potentially resulting in a lost sale. So if you’re looking to drive revenue, synonyms will be an important consideration.

Social Proof

As mentioned above, word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful way to increase sales. Research shows that 91% of Canadians read at least one review before purchasing a product. Additionally, over 37% of Canadians say that online reviews strongly affect their buying choices. Ecommerce search engines that include social proof, such as a star rating, are more likely to convert.

The Best Ecommerce Search Solutions

No matter your budget, there are plenty of options on the market each offering something unique. Keep the above considerations in mind when choosing the right search engine for you. Here are the top ecommerce search engines to help your business thrive in 2023:

Algolia

Algolia - ecommerce search engine

Algolia Search & Discovery is a powerful API platform that offers a dynamic user experience to help businesses maximize their search speed. Users can find what they’re looking for within milliseconds. Algolia solves the issue of relevant search results by utilizing the power of  AI. As a business owner, you can personalize the user experience and get customer insights on how users are interacting with your search bar.

Algolia Recommend is a built-in robust API that helps you build unique product recommendations. It provides customers with the most relevant search results within a <10 millisecond API response time. Algolia offers integrations with Adobe Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Netlify, Zendesk, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. If you use any of these platforms, we highly recommend checking Algolia out.

Key Features

  • Faceting: Algolia’s robust API contains facets based on the search query and the user’s previously selected facets. This information can help you build a faceted and personalized user experience that helps users find available products, preventing the “no results” page.
  • Synonyms: Synonyms tell the Algolia search engine which words and phrases match what products. For example, if a user searches for “trainers” or “running shoes”, the same product will match.
  • Advanced language processing: Algolia provides plenty of language-based options to adjust a search query that contains plurals, prefixes, stop words, optional words, and more.
  • Geo-awareness: A geo-search contains geographic information which displays nearby products, organized by distance. It also allows users to limit their search results to a specific geographic region or radius.
  • Multiple sorting algorithms: Algolia lets you set up several sorting algorithms to allow your users to select their preferred ranking of search results. Sorting algorithms act as a filter, sorting by price, rating, and more.
  • User personalization: Algolia allows you to organize search results based on CRM data to provide a personalized user experience.

Yext

Yext - ecommerce search engine

Yext is a hosted search-as-a-service platform that helps organizations answer every question a user may have about their business. If you’re looking to provide a natural and intuitive search experience on your website, look no further. Yext uses natural language processing (NLP) and multiple sorting algorithms to do so.

Yext’s built-in Answers Platform collects and organizes content from your website onto a Knowledge Graph. This information is then used in the search engine to provide relevant and actionable answers, from products, to listings and beyond. Yext is a great option if your site is used by customers, employees, and partners. Yext is a cutting-edge search experience for your users across all digital platforms.

Key Features

  • Search term clusters: Using AI, the search bar can detect patterns in user intent to rank results based on what users are searching for. This built-in feature normalizes query strings into a list of unique search terms sorted by popularity.
  • Contextual search: Search results are always relevant to the context the user provides.
  • Refinement options: Users can refine their search results by price, availability, colour, and other criteria.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach - ecommerce search engine

Bloomreach offers a suite of products that create a truly personalized user experience. It’s the world’s #1 Commerce Experience Cloud, helping brands drive personalization and ecommerce growth with Discovery, an AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, a headless CMS; and Engagement, a CDP and marketing automation solution.

Combined, these products offer a unified customer experience with the scale and speed of AI. Bloomreach is the ecommerce search engine of choice for over 850 global brands including Puma, Marks & Spencer, and Bosch.

Key Features

  • Product suite: Bloomreach combines AI-optimization, SEO, product merchandising, and relevant recommendations in one powerful search engine.
  • Semantic understanding: Bloomreach offers autocomplete, autocorrect, suggestions, synonyms, and segment-based personalization.
  • Personalized user experience: Bloomreach works like magic, seamlessly personalizing the customer journey across your website to help customers quickly find what they’re looking for.

Searchanise

Searchanise - ecommerce search engine

Searchanise is a cost-effective ecommerce search engine designed to support all major ecommerce platforms. If you use Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, CS-Cart or Wix, this search engine is for you. Searchanise is more than a search engine; it offers the functionality of several web apps. Product previews, suggestions, and speedy performance are all features that make Searchanise a great option.

Key Features

  • Fast loading times: Searchanise crawls the entire website in less than a second to find relevant information.
  • Easy integration: Searchanise is easy to install without any coding necessary. It’s designed to support all major ecommerce platforms.
  • Semantic understanding: Autocomplete, autocorrect, and suggestions help customers find the right information.
  • Faceted search: Searchanise allows users to create and apply filters to organize their search results.
  • Full-text search: Searchanise provides search results for all relevant information across all web pages including blog articles, policies, and contact information.
  • Synonyms: You can add synonyms to a dictionary to tell Searchanise which words and phrases match what products. This prevents the “no results” page from appearing.
  • Merchandising rules: This allows you to define product order in the search bar and on the results page.
  • Analytics: You can track customer insights to find out which terms are most used, which search queries lead to the “no results” page, and what products are being bought through the search engine.
  • Mobile optimization: Searchanise is a great way to optimize for mobile and across all digital platforms.

Coveo

Coveo - ecommerce search engine

Coveo provides relevant recommendations across all customer touchpoints using Coveo Relevance Cloud. This AI-powered feature helps to personalize the user experience with product recommendations, insights, social proof, and product badging.

Coveo is supported by a huge network of global system integrators and implementation partners to power relevant interactions for hundreds of innovative brands worldwide. It can help maximize your business revenue with increased customer satisfaction, reduced customer support costs, website engagement, and improved knowledge management.

Key Features

  • Cloud-based: Coveo is a cloud-based ecommerce search engine with the ability to index business documents from anywhere.
  • Learning algorithm: Coveo uses a learning algorithm to generate suggestions based on context recognition.
  • Search interface builder: With Coveo, you can create a search interface that’s tailored to your business needs using their search interface builder.
  • Suggestions: Coveo offers search query suggestions to help users find the most relevant information based on what other users are searching for. It also uses autocorrect to correct any spelling errors.
  • A/B testing: Coveo lets you conduct A/B tests directly in your search query configuration.

Conclusion: The Top Ecommerce Search Engines

We hope this article covers everything you need to know about ecommerce search engines. They are a great way to grow your business revenue while also increasing customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and personalization. The top ecommerce search engines help to shorten the customer path to purchase by guiding and helping customers on your website.

Unlike other marketing solutions, you can set up and optimize your ecommerce search engine by yourself. The ROI is high and well worth the customer retention and conversion it will give you. If you want to learn more about website design, SEO, or digital marketing, check out the rest of our blog!

Originally published . Last updated .

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