29 December 2020
Good search brings the lion's share of revenue to an online store. We never get tired of repeating this and right now we will share with you an impressive case study that confirms it.
The "hottest" and the most ready-to-buy audience goes to the search bar. If online store search is functional and easy to use, all key commercial metrics such as search conversions, transaction rate, and revenue improve. Results of using Multisearch on our client's site are the best proof of this.
What Was The Situation Before Cooperation With Multisearch?
TEA.ru is a large online retailer which actively grows and scales. Initially the founders did not plan to expand into an online hypermarket. The idea was to create a niche online store for tea, coffee, and sweets. Over time, the assortment increased to the level of a store with FMCG products (Fast Moving Consumer Goods). These are everyday goods that we buy regularly, namely food, drinks, cosmetics, household chemicals, hygiene products, and children's goods.
Now the company is about to reach the level of a major online retailer. The number of suppliers, categories, and products continues to increase every month. In the near future the catalog will include electronics, household appliances, sporting goods, flowers, vegetables, and fruit.
TEA.ru positions itself as a marketplace and actively attracts partners for cooperation. About 2.5 million clients visit the site per month. The catalog includes more than 2,000 categories and 70,000 items. For example, here is a scope of options the store offers in the category “Tea”. It looks like a paradise for tea drinkers, doesn't it?
A convenient and quick search on the site is a must have for marketplaces. Without it users would simply get lost in the navigation, sections, and filters no matter how convenient and well-thought-out they are.
Vasily Ignatovich
Chief Technology Officer TEA.ru
Before Multisearch integration, the standard 1C-Bitrix search worked in our online store. This created a lot of problems. Customers struggled finding the right product, there were no search tips, direct clicks, and search did not understand synonyms. Queries by category went unanswered. You could say it was a standard document search without any UX solutions.
Of course, for most customers this is not enough. As a result, 30% of orders were simply lost. It's definitely not cool.
The client contacted us with a request to maximize the functionality of the search bar and implement Multisearch smart search features that are relevant for the store.
What Did We Implement?
After Multisearch integration, TEA.ru store got the following functions:
1. Autotips. All the user has to do is to enter the first letter and search will continue instead of the client.
2. Default autotips. A client puts the cursor in the search line and immediately sees the most popular queries.
3. Direct clicks. When a visitor enters an exact query, he or she goes to the page of the brand, category or product skipping the search engine results. This is important for SEO because this increases the number of views of the directory pages, not the output pages which are not indexed.
4. ID assignment. By assigning an ID, a store can manually influence the ranking and bring specific products to the top for specific search queries.
5. Manual management of tips. Managers of the store can themselves set tips that will appear on a specific client request.
6. Dynamic filters. Groups of filters are instantly generated in response to a search query. Filters are based on relevant product characteristics and are not bound to categories. Such filtering narrows down the results but never leads to empty results.
7. Regionality. Along with a search query the user's current region is used to define the results.
Additionally, we configured the option to delete products from the query history, to display the wholesale price, and to mark the category "Adult Goods" with 18+.
How Did We Analyze and What Results Did We Get?
We compared the website`s original search performance from March 2019 to February 2020 (March 7, 2019 - February 29, 2020) and Multisearch on TEA.ru from June 2020 to May 2021 (06.06.2020 - 05.31.2021). This way, in both cases we had data of almost a year to analyze.
What results did we get? Get ready to be surprised!
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The growth in search traffic was 532%. This is twice as much as the site traffic as a whole (traffic from the blog search was excluded). The design of the search bar and its location did not change which means the increase in search traffic was not due to UX design innovations. This suggests that visitors are more willing to use search.
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The number of visitors who use search almost doubled and reached 4.9% from 2.8%.
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The transaction rate increased up to 95%.
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The number of transactions in search increased 12-fold (without search it increased only 3-fold).
This brings about the conclusion that great search helps sell. And no other metric demonstrates this better than revenue from search audiences which increased 24-fold!
The share of revenue that search audiences bring to the store increased from 14% to 44% of total revenue. Now, if you've been following the numbers closely, we present the striking conclusion.
Search is used by the hottest customers. They know exactly what they want and go right away to the search bar. That's why website search should be convenient, smart, and fast. Multisearch always knows what the clients need, understands them in half-word, and sometimes even reads their minds. It's a nice touch, don't you agree?
Queries have also grown impressively. Of course, one can argue that traffic has increased, and respectively, the number of queries has increased too. But this is not the case. The figures are quite different. The number of requests increased by 6 times, while the traffic grew by 2.5 times. The report below illustrates the situation.
By the way, reports on internal search queries help store managers keep track of demand and expand the assortment with popular products.
Yury Kalinogorsky
Head of the SEO department of the TEA.ru online store
We use data on internal inquiries to determine the products in demand. If they are on the site, the procurement team maintains them in sufficient quantity. If there are no such products, we try to find suppliers and expand the assortment. For example, a certain brand of olive oil is popular this year and we are now actively looking for a supplier.
Many metrics have improved since we installed smart search. For example, zero results are now only 3%. That's a great metric. The number of refinements has also decreased. Users don't have to add to their queries because the search instantly understands what they mean and provides relevant products.
This case once again confirms that the quality and functionality of the website search matters, especially if your business is actively scaling.
Large online stores and marketplaces have a huge to-do list. That's why an out-of-the-box smart search for a website is a great solution to speed up and quickly increase conversion rates. No need to reinvent the wheel. It`s a great idea to use Multisearch to implement search in an online store or marketplace.
Do you want to see the same amazing performance in your analytics? Try Multisearch for free for 14 days.
