What makes Drugstore.com and other top online retail sites best-in-class? Is it big-bucks branding campaigns that lull us into spending submission? What about glossier products, more compelling design or proprietary software that are unattainable for the online-budget challenged? Or could it mainly be well-executed search strategies, that when studied, can benefit even the smallest online business?

Let’s look at Drugstore quickly to illustrate a concept. As Drugstore.com has grown their product offerings, their navigational system has also grown to accommodate the additional departments. What started as several easy-to-read tabs has been a novel in online design terms. While choice is good, too many tabs, links and text can make for an easily overwhelmed consumer. The solution? Make the search box the easiest feature to find and use: search is the first feature consumers look for at a site.

The design folks at Drugstore.com and other top retailers know that search is vitally important to the probability of an online business. Understanding that only 45% of consumers know what they will purchase when they go online to research a Web purchase, savvy retailers know they have a tremendous opportunity to influence consumer decisions. Yet, most stores are missing out on loyalty and profits by not following best practices.

For instance, many online businesses have not yet made search universally accessible to their visitors; nor do they concentrate on presenting search results in an intuitive format (including interactive options) with customer-friendly language. Most retailers simply aren’t listening to the voices and browsing patterns of consumers. While consumers have reported that search refinement options, such as search by price, brand or style, would be their most-used search feature, only 55% of top retailers offer this capability.

Despite what other businesses are missing out on, you can achieve similarly positive results as top retailers. Employ these best practices to make search more efficient for your customers – and yield cream of the crop results for your business:

Showcase the search box on every page of your site
Start with search results presented in a simple
design – and -
Upgrade to search refinement features (“search by,” enhanced navigation and dynamically generated products, etc.) once you’ve mastered the basics.
Use simple, yet descriptive customer-friendly language to describe products in search results. Show prices in results when applicable.
Test your results: make sure best matches to search queries are present and properly ranked.
Focus on relevancy: fewer results that are highly relevant is better than many results that don ’t quite hit the mark.
Refine results often. Assign members of your team to regularly checking and updating results with fresh content.

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