Search, admin and frontend
Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 7:08 pm
I don't think I have ever really complained about anything, but I have had enough. And if I am wrong, please shut me up, tell me what I am missing, where to stick it, and I will have learned my lesson. So here we go...Why cant the search pull up anything that I am looking for? On the admin side, I type in a sku, no results, I type in part of the title, no results. So I find the product on the front end, copy and paste the exact title on the backend, search....no results because there is a " in the title. So then I copy just the beginning before the quote. Finally get it. What is the issue here? Why is it so difficult to get search working?
"But you arent searching correctly", you say. Type it in quotes, or do this or do that. Give me a break. This isn't 1995, and no customer is going to "search correctly", they are going to search just like they do on any other ecommerce site that makes any money, and expect a relevant result.
On the front end, full text search enabled or not, if someone types in a sku, it should search all the sku's and part numbers and the sku's of variants to find a match. Why is it necessitated that I type it in quotes, with all the dashes and spaces exactly in the correct place? Considering that when someone first comes to an ecommerce site, they generally 80-95% of the time enter something in search. But if they cant find what they want however because the results are nothing even relative to what they search for, they leave. Imagine if you went to Amazon.com typed in the SKU of a book, without quotes (because that's how most ecommerce sites and search engines work, they are user friendly), and you got back books with those numbers in the title. It makes no sense. So, instead of leaving like most people would, you decided to search the title of the book, 'Fishing the Alaska Rivers', and got back a full page of results on fishing in Alaska, or rivers in Saudi Arabia. Well, then you are leaving the site for sure.
I don't think anyone has really taken this issue seriously, but it is the MOST serious of issues and problems with this software!! Any current bugs..are just that, bugs. This however is a much larger issue.
The average conversion rates of retail sites is barely 3% (Forrester). Yet, with effective tactics, retailers can achieve a much higher conversion rate. For instance, the top 10 visitor-to-buyer conversion rates ranged from 16% to 45% (Nielsen Online). Effective search can bridge this gap considerably: customers who use the search box on e-commerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers (MarketingSherpa).
How can AbleCommerce, or any ecommerce software for that matter, really claim to be any good at all without an effective search. It is the most basic necessity of any ecommerce site, yet it is something that seems to have little to no attention paid to it. If funds were diverted away from other features and enhancements that aren't needed, and spent instead on making a search that actually works, the core navigation feature of an ecommerce site both on the front-end and backend ...then I think you would REALLY have something, and make multiples of the cost of development back.
Just my 2 cents, take it for what it is. As a side note to this, I would like to say this is by far the best ecommerce software out there, and I do love everything about it, just this one issue has me a little bothered.
"But you arent searching correctly", you say. Type it in quotes, or do this or do that. Give me a break. This isn't 1995, and no customer is going to "search correctly", they are going to search just like they do on any other ecommerce site that makes any money, and expect a relevant result.
On the front end, full text search enabled or not, if someone types in a sku, it should search all the sku's and part numbers and the sku's of variants to find a match. Why is it necessitated that I type it in quotes, with all the dashes and spaces exactly in the correct place? Considering that when someone first comes to an ecommerce site, they generally 80-95% of the time enter something in search. But if they cant find what they want however because the results are nothing even relative to what they search for, they leave. Imagine if you went to Amazon.com typed in the SKU of a book, without quotes (because that's how most ecommerce sites and search engines work, they are user friendly), and you got back books with those numbers in the title. It makes no sense. So, instead of leaving like most people would, you decided to search the title of the book, 'Fishing the Alaska Rivers', and got back a full page of results on fishing in Alaska, or rivers in Saudi Arabia. Well, then you are leaving the site for sure.
I don't think anyone has really taken this issue seriously, but it is the MOST serious of issues and problems with this software!! Any current bugs..are just that, bugs. This however is a much larger issue.
The average conversion rates of retail sites is barely 3% (Forrester). Yet, with effective tactics, retailers can achieve a much higher conversion rate. For instance, the top 10 visitor-to-buyer conversion rates ranged from 16% to 45% (Nielsen Online). Effective search can bridge this gap considerably: customers who use the search box on e-commerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers (MarketingSherpa).
How can AbleCommerce, or any ecommerce software for that matter, really claim to be any good at all without an effective search. It is the most basic necessity of any ecommerce site, yet it is something that seems to have little to no attention paid to it. If funds were diverted away from other features and enhancements that aren't needed, and spent instead on making a search that actually works, the core navigation feature of an ecommerce site both on the front-end and backend ...then I think you would REALLY have something, and make multiples of the cost of development back.
Just my 2 cents, take it for what it is. As a side note to this, I would like to say this is by far the best ecommerce software out there, and I do love everything about it, just this one issue has me a little bothered.