Increase Your Retail Website Conversion Rate by 20 Percent Using Faceted Search
Having taken care of the nitty-gritty details related to search in the previous article Search in E Commerce: The Vital Little Details, it is time to concentrate on some of the other important aspects - ‘faceted search’ being one of them. In this article, we will be explaining how facets can be used to provide relevant search results and thereby increase the conversion rate.
Displaying thousands of search results is not the only way you should be attracting your potential customer, it can also be by helping them to figure out the exact product they require. The right method to achieve this is by introducing ‘Facets’ to your search page.
Categories
Defining categories can be considered as one of the basic foundation of an e-commerce website as these are used to create facets and is presented to the shoppers to filter their search. While determining categories it should be done such that the categories are simple enough for the user to easily navigate through the products. It doesn’t mean that you should add maximum categories. But whatever you add should be simple enough and should easily convey its meaning to the shopper, so that they can use it to filter out the search results.
Deciding categories is usually done during the information architecture building phase. One tip while deciding categories is that, you should not only rely on the generic product filters like price and availability. There should be more product specific filters like style, usage, brand, occasion etc depending up on the products in your site.
Faceted Search
Faceted search is the technique which allows a user to access information organized according to a faceted classification system by applying various filters. The properties of a product can be used as a facet which help the shoppers to get to the exact product they require.
Why faceted search?
Faceted search can be used to control the presentation of search results. It gives shopper the power to drill down using a navigation path and reach the product he or she requires. Faceted search has already become a prominent feature of commerce sites.
When compared to the hierarchy style navigation system, faceted navigation can yield 20% 1increase in conversion rates. Most of the giant e-commerce sites are using this technique to help the shoppers to achieve the same.
The three different facet types are
- Standard facets
- Hierarchical facets
- Range facets
Standard facets as checkboxes
Standard facets as links
Hierarchical facets
Taxonomy values can be displayed retaining hierarchy using hierarchical facets.
Range facets
Price, range, dates etc can be displayed using range facets.
Optimizing faceted search
You should not just blindly add as many facets as you like to your search page. This can cause an adverse effect. While adding faceted navigation to your search,
- You should not over crowd the page with too many facet groups. You should limit this to 5 or 6.
- You should not add too many facet options under a single group, this should be treated using 'Show more links'.
- Putting the most used facets on top rather than displaying facets in alphabetical order will be more effective.
You might have experienced the power of faceted filters first hand. To summarize, here are the benefits of faceted search in writing,
- Faceted search helps shoppers to filter, sort and buy
- Faceted search provides improved user experience
- Faceted search is easy to use and implement
- Faceted search increases the chance of conversion rate of an ecommerce site by 20%
Facets and Drupal
Using Drupal and Apache Solr, it is possible to implement a facet based search system within a short span of time which will be scalable and most adaptable.
In Drupal 8, Search API module along with Facets module can be used to setup faceted search with Apache Solr.
If you’d like to find out how more about how we can integrate your Drupal website with Apache Solr and faceted search to enhance the user experience , get in touch with us!
1. https://searchspring.com/blog/faceted-navigation-converts.html
