4 December 2020
PARFUMS is one of the largest online beauty stores in Ukraine. This category of products is in the top 3 most frequently bought items by Ukrainians on the Internet in 2019.
Only in January 2020, PARFUMS.UA was visited 1.8 million times. On average, each user spent 5.2 minutes on the site, viewing more than 5 pages. Among all Ukrainian retailers, PARFUMS.UA takes 14th place in terms of attendance. Such data is collected monthly by Retailers.ua.
Unsurprisingly, analysts at such a large store tracked internal search and noticed that leads got lost due to inaccurate search results. Therefore, it was necessary to improve the search box. The choice was either to develop their own search or to use a ready product. Check out this article in order to find out why they chose the second option.
Nadezhda Zaitseva, Marketing Director of Parfums:
The search bar was one of our biggest problems. If before everyone had such a problem, then over time, some stores solved it. However, we put it off in the backlog. Only a fortunate user could get relevant search results. As a result, the share of customers using search dropped significantly and became below market share. However, the persistent people who still use it have higher behavior indicators and conversion rates.
We did not have enough resources to optimize the search for a long time. There were developments and an understanding of how we wanted to see this functionality in the end. However, we did not go further than functional requirements and fixing obvious bugs.
Of course, we could build our own intergalactic ship, develop the necessary functionality and endorse it. However, after considering all the pros and cons, we went the other way.
Before deciding to launch a new project (and search is, in fact, a project), it is necessary to work out alternatives to the “head-on” solution, calculate the costs, and estimate the potential profit. When everything is calculated, it is easier to make decisions.
The Multisearch solution was recommended to us by one of our suppliers. Some team members also suggested this service. After seeing how the search works in the online stores, where Multisearch has been already integrated, we decided that we want to cooperate with this company. It took less than a month to integrate the package solution. In general, when the roadmap was already clear we had a few questions. During the implementation process, we encountered only technical problems. Our web team, along with the Multisearch team, quickly found solutions and implemented them.
In the meantime, we identified a list of add-ons that we were ready to integrate straight away after the package. These add-ons we successfully implemented in the next couple of months. It could have been done faster, but the integration time coincided with the Black Friday preparations, so the timing was slightly adjusted. In brief, the decisive factors to start cooperation was the fair price of the product, beneficial conditions for integration, and all-round support.
Clients who use search are more likely to buy
Each site has a different transaction ratio which is the ratio of the total number of search visits to the number of orders from it. According to Multisearch analysts, the maximum transaction rate can reach 20%. To put it simply, 2 out of 10 people who use the search will purchase, while only 3-4 out of 95 users who do not use the search will buy the items.
After the integration of smart search, the relevance of the search results improves, and the growth of income can be noticed already in the early days. For example, for the online store PARFUMS.UA, synonyms were added to the query "eyeliner": eyeliner, kajal, kol, kayal, antimony for the eyes. Not everybody can guess that such strange words can be used to find a simple eyeliner pencil. Yet these are real examples of PARFUMS.UA search queries. Likewise, the "eyeliner" search might look for "eye pencil" or "mascara". Multisearch has an extensive database of synonyms which is constantly updated.
To find all
PARFUMS.UA has more than 530,000 products. Getting into a particular section on the site, the user can get overwhelmed with the search for the desired product due to the abundance of offers. Thus the users go to the search box.
Dmitriy Krivolap, Analyst at PARFUMS:
In February 2019, we made the correct configuration for the search box. In GA reports, we configured request tracking and saw information about further user behavior. By looking at queries with poor traffic quality scores, you can analyze the quality of search results and improve them.
The problems were in the logic of selecting products by a search query and in the rules for their ranking in the search results. Thus, we can say that the problem existed for all products. People could search for a product in a way that is difficult to imagine. The requests that I remember the most are women's toilet waters, beach curls, shaving gel for lice, bad girl, original perfume samples.
Invalid search results were found for queries with the wrong keyboard layout, wrong sequence of words, synonyms, etc. And the result was disappointing as we were losing traffic, conversions, and therefore income.
Thanks to smart search, behavioral metrics (bounce rate, time on site, the number of pages viewed) improved, and CR increased slightly. This happened even despite the fact that during this period major changes were made to the site, which led to oscillation in traffic.
After installing search in the basic integration for the first month, we received an increase in orders by 7.3%, and in terms of revenue, the growth increased by 3.7%. We also connected additional settings and capabilities (filters in the catalog, auto-suggest) for pumping this tool. Today, orders have grown by 11.5%, revenue has grown by 10.28%. With the introduction of filters, the search results page has become more like the catalog page that users are used to. Also, when there are more than 2 pages in the search results, you want to apply a filter, which is now possible.
Integration of filters into the catalog on the PARFUMS.UA website helped users immediately get to the desired section after entering a request. In other words, when a person starts looking for "Lacquer", search shows categories such as nail polish, hair spray, gel polish, etc. This helps the users to significantly save time in finding the right product. PARFUMS.UA has a lot of such examples.
For most stores, the search bar is a sore spot. Creating the right search in-house takes a lot of time, specialists, and constant improvement. With a SaaS product, the customer receives a fully customized and prepared search solution. Tuning and improving algorithms are the tasks of the Multisearch team.
