Site search is an integral part of a website for many enterprises - from retailers to information publishers and service providers.
Website Magazine interviewed Sanjay Arora, founder and CEO of Nextopia on why site search is so important, the expectations of business users, the necessary features and where the industry is headed.
Arora: Their expectation is that they'll be able to solve the problems that have led them to us, whether it's a simple desire to increase sales, or a more specific issue such as low conversion rates or a high after-search exit rates. You'd be surprised how many companies come to us with problems they think we can't solve, only to see tremendous results after implementing our technology.
Arora: The most important factor is that your search should be dynamic and automatically adjust to customer behavior. Our system recognizes which items are clicked most often for any given search term, and automatically promotes the most popular items to the top of searches to reflect what customers actually want. Another important feature is to provide a rich, easy-to-use analytics and modification suite to allow for the complete customization of your search results, and an easy overview of which search terms are providing sales and which terms are not. Lastly, features such as autocomplete (with images and fully customizable content pages) and category filter navigation are key to providing customers with the rich shopping experience they have come to expect from today's online retailers.