Among the most important elements of a website is its search functionality, as it has a direct impact on the end-user experience.
In fact, having good search functionality is especially vital for ecommerce sites because shoppers cannot purchase what they cannot find. This means that a search feature that turns up no results, irrelevant results or isn't personalized may be negatively impacting a merchant's bottom line. But with a variety of ecommerce site search solutions available on the Web, what makes one platform stand apart from the rest? Find out with this head-to-head comparison:
Company: Monetate
Standout Feature: Visual Search
Platform Overview: Monetate offers a Visual Search product that makes it easy for customers to discover the correct items in the search results. Additionally, the platform features robust targeting features that can be used to personalize search results based on factors like top sellers, overall newest products and most viewed. Merchants can also optimize search results by syncing Visual Search with other Monetate products, such as Recommendations, Personalization, Badging and Targeting.
Company: Nextopia
Standout Feature: Advanced Search Refinement
Platform Overview: More than 1,500 retailers leverage Nextopia's site search platform, which offers a variety of features, including Advanced Search Refinement. This feature allows shoppers to filter their search results by fields like size, color or brand. Moreover, Nextopia offers autocomplete, partial term matching and "sounds like" matching to assist customers in finding the right products during their search inqueries. While the Nextopia platform also comes with numerous other features, such as analytics, product comparisons and the ability to incorporate ratings and reviews into search results, perhaps the most unique offering from Nextopia is the ability to integrate audio messages into search with the Audio Voice-Over Merchandising feature.
Company: SLI Systems
Standout Feature: Social Integrations
Platform Overview: SLI System's site search for ecommerce solution constantly learns from past site search activity in order to better optimize results for consumers. That said, the platform also comes with many other features, including search suggestions, autocomplete, mouse-over pop-ups, filtering capabilities, analytics and the ability for merchants to promote items within the search results. Furthermore, SLI Systems' search solution includes multiple social features, such as hosted search on Facebook, the ability to display social buttons within search results and the ability to include social content within the results as well.
Company: SearchSpring
Standout Feature: IntelliSuggest
Platform Overview: The Search Spring platform features IntelliSuggest, which is a technology that monitors shoppers and analyzes their behavior in order to provide more relevant results to shoppers in real-time. Additionally, SearchSpring comes with robust filtering features, autocomplete, mobile search, a Facebook app, merchandising options, quick view, product comparisons and recommendations and analytic reports.
Company: Google Commerce Search
Standout Feature: Stemming Dictionary
Platform Overview: Google's Commerce Search platform automatically seeds a list of synonyms for a merchant's catalog with its Stemming Dictionary feature. Moreover, this platform comes with search as you type technology, customized ranking options, filtering capabilities and automatic spellcheck. Merchants can also use Attribute Boosting to increase visibility for specific vendors, categories and other attributes.
