All Ecommerce stores provide basic search engine functionality out-of-box to filter through products, articles and pages. As a store’s catalog begins to expand on non-product content, the need to filter out certain results and deliver search results quickly and efficiently becomes necessary. Not to mention the need to simply analyze searches and make better business decisions. Oh yeah, and the need to make sure there is never a blank “no results” page on your site (I mean, can you imagine someone searches for a product, doesn’t find anything and then leaves, that is a “marketing crime.”)

This is where a third-party search tool can help minimize friction and ultimately increase on-site conversion. Think about it, a user arrives on your site and misspells a product within your search box. With a basic search functionality, the customer will more than likely receive a “no results” return, causing them to become frustrated and quickly bounce your store.

The simple truth is that consumers have little attention spans; optimizing your in-search engine to provide simple functions like typo tolerance, autocomplete, spell check and synonym search can drastically lower bounce rates and improve the overall shopping experience.