Web retailers can’t forget the basics when it comes to building a better site search application. Retailers can build their own or buy a third-party application that returns information quickly. But many site search engines can be improved if the merchant takes the time to examine—or reexamine—taxonomy, says Johanna Murphy, senior director of user experience and design at GSI Commerce Inc., a provider of e-commerce platforms to about 50 retailers.
Taxonomy is how retailers structure the data—particularly the products, product details and categories—that a site search application uses to return answers to a visitor’s query. “Many retailers can certainly do a better job with site search if they look at the meta-data that supports their engine,” Murphy says. “It’s easy to say, but sometimes hard to keep in mind: sticking to the fundamentals will improve site search performance.”
A good taxonomy that supports a site search application should contain sufficient product detail, which, in turn, supports parametric navigation and sorting and the filtering of products by attributes such as price. “Well-described meta-data improves parametric search,” says Murphy. “It’s easy to get caught up in a new tool when what’s more important is sticking to the basic blocking and tackling of organizing the information.”
Site search can also be improved if web retailers think of organizing their information based on how visitors use the data. For instance, many apparel sites build terms such as “knits” and “wovens” into their product databases and site taxonomy. The terms are very familiar to merchandising managers and marketers who often supply the product and category information that designers and programmers use to build an internal search engine.
But in the online apparel space shoppers don’t usually search a retail web site using common industry terms. Most often they will search on more basic terms such as “sweater”.
“Sometimes the user experience gets lost in site search,” says Murphy. On one chain retailer's hardware site, for example, the sale of electric gadgets that kill insects within a certain radius improved when marketing managers looked at keyword search reports and replaced “electric insect eliminator” with the more term common term: “bug zapper”.
“That was a simple change, but an effective one,” says Murphy. “The original taxonomy was created by the chain’s buyers and merchandising managers and they used the terms that they were most familiar with. By adding ‘bug zapper’ they included a more common definition that mirrors how shoppers were searching the site for certain products.”
Murphy will speak at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 Conference, Jan. 30-Feb. 1 in Miami, in a session titled Eye-tracking: The eyes have it
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