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Search

E-commerce

Changes in customer searching behavior and trends they bring

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Product scaling

Get more clarity on the technology trends that will reshape digital transformation strategies for E-commerce businesses in 2023 and beyond.

Digital transformation strategy for E-commerce: 7 tech trends for 2023

Get more clarity on the technology trends that will reshape digital transformation strategies for E-commerce businesses in the upcoming year.

Digital transformation strategy for E-commerce: 7 trends for 2023

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Look closely at the future of the marketplace industry and identify important online marketplaces trends that will likely have an impact in 2023 and beyond >>

Top-10 strategic online marketplaces trends & forecasts for 2023

Look closely at the future of the marketplace industry and identify the most important trends that will likely have an impact in 2023 and beyond.

Strategic online marketplaces trends & forecasts for 2023

Wise blog graphic_Search performance-03.svg

Site searchers produce up to <a href="https://econsultancy.com/is-site-search-less-important-for-niche-retailers/#i.e6bb0iahterern" target="_blank">14% of overall revenue</a>, and site search optimization increases conversion rates by 43%. Having a site search is not enough though. There is a lot of work behind optimizing its performance to provide the fastest and most accurate match to search queries. There may be various challenges related to performance, such as increased traffic and workloads, search latency, downtime, irrelevant results, and more.

How to understand what component of your system may misbehave, and what would add an excess network hop? As an [Elasticsearch consulting company](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/), we want to share some of our insights. In this article, we've put together some of the best tips from Wise software engineers on how to tune Elasticsearch search performance and what metrics to keep an eye on to know how things are going.

## How to improve Elasticsearch search performance

Configuration of internal site search is a part of [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/). One of the most common tools that can be used to configure site search is Elasticsearch. It is an incredibly powerful analytics engine that is ideal for huge databases with a large catalog and hundreds of real-time customers. It supports multi-tenancy and has the ability to store, search, and analyze document files in diverse formats. There are lots of benefits to configuring site search with Elasticsearch, but the scaling of its performance is a far more challenging task. 

Elasticsearch use cases include multiple situations when sites suffer from poor search performance, and often they remain overlooked. As for reasons why it might happen, there are several aspects to consider. Here are the tips that will help you to discover slow search faster and fix performance issues.

## #1 Keep track of metrics

This piece of advice is related to Elasticsearch monitoring. To ensure efficient work of the site searcg, we need to understand the current performance level. The Elasticsearch system unites multiple components, and each of them affects its overall performance. Here are some of the most crucial indicators to keep an eye on.

- **Cluster health.** This metric provides a quick and simple overview of how well your configuration is done. Cluster health may be used to assess the overall health of a cluster or a specific index or shard. Basically, there are three health statuses: red, yellow, and green: a red state indicates that the specific shard is not allocated in the cluster, a yellow status shows that the primary shard is allocated but not the replicas; and a green status indicates that all shards are allocated.
- **Indexing rate. **This metric represents a measure of how many documents are being added to the index per unit of time. The greater the indexing rate, the greater the chance your infrastructure can keep up with all your demands.
- **Query rate and latency.** The query rate reveals how many requests per second your Elasticsearch installation can process. The query latency, in turn, reveals all the delays in all launched requests. The perfect scenario is when you have a high query rate and a low latency rate.
- **Refresh time.** Time to refresh describes how long it takes for a page to load after being refreshed. Having a shorter refresh time is preferable. A major cause for concern is rises and very long refresh times.
- **CPU usage and disk space.** Over time, more and more information is created, necessitating the allocation of more and more storage space. You'll also need a more powerful computer to process the increased volume of data and requests. Disk space and CPU usage should be tracked to ensure sufficient resources. Additional hardware resources may be required if one of these is insufficient.

To check some of the metrics, set your E-commerce platform to developer mode and begin by analyzing any issues or warnings created by your code. Debug client-side JavaScript issues in your web browser's developer tools using the console, and utilize the network tab to see how quickly (and in what sequence) scripts, pictures, and files are loading on your site.

## #2 Hardware

The important place in search performance tuning is taken up by the choice of your hardware. Adding extra hardware isn't the only solution for scaling Elasticsearch. It goes beyond that. Even the most diligent optimization efforts are useless if you don't have the necessary hardware. When you are dealing with a massive quantity of data and want to provide your customers with speedy access to it, hardware is crucial. 

Here are some suggestions for expanding your current Elasticsearch installation.

- **Basic aspects.** Cache, storage space, CPUs, and RAM are the primary areas to optimize for great use of your hardware and achieve maximum Elasticsearch performance.
- **Scaling.** Scaling Elasticsearch isn’t just a matter of throwing higher-specced hardware at a problem. You should resolve performance issues first to ensure that resources are not wasted. From the technological perspective, success depends on whether you can quickly innovate, scale up your computing powers, and leverage new content delivery channels.
- **Performance testing.** Constantly conduct performance testing to check all of your hardware requirements. Performance testing allows you to understand the way your app will react to increased traffic volumes or slow server speeds or network issues. You can thus make the required changes to the hardware required for your app. This saves you a lot of embarrassment at a later stage if the app does not function properly.
- **Use AWS.** AWS provides a secure, reliable, high-performance hosting infrastructure that can scale with your website – to massive proportions if necessary. AWS charges by the minute for its <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/" target="_blank">Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)</a> and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/rds/" target="_blank">Relational Database Service (RDS)</a> instance, with higher fees for more powerful hardware. Spreading the load across multiple smaller instances can often be more cost-effective and result in better performance.

Make sure you can readily increase hardware resources, such as processor performance, memory capacity, and so on, to respond to unforeseen traffic spikes.

## #3 Load balancing

Every time you start an Elasticsearch instance, you start a node. A cluster is a group of nodes that are all connected to each other. By default, HTTP and transport traffic can be handled by every node in the cluster. As a rule, there may be multiple nodes running in production with a large number of requests being processed, which might add an excess network hop.

**Load balancing** is a straightforward technique to distribute the load coming to an endpoint across multiple nodes. More specifically, it will distribute requests, gather results after processing, and then merge these results to construct and provide a final result. You may also specify the number of load balancers and configure them accordingly. As a result, load balancing decreases the strain on a specific node, enhancing performance.

How to enable load balancing in Elasticsearch? The Elasticsearch cluster includes load balancers by default. When creating an *elasticsearch.url* that refers to all/any coordinating nodes, we also recommend employing a load balancer or round-robin DNS server. A load balancer allows you to switch, add, or delete data nodes and coordinating nodes without having to edit the main configuration file or restart the service, reducing downtime for any changes.

![Improving search performance via Elasticsearch. Part 1](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Improving_search_performance_via_Elasticsearch_1_707fead92d.svg)

## #4 Sharding

Data in an Elasticsearch index can grow to massive proportions. To keep it manageable, Elasticsearch supports the concept of a cluster in which multiple nodes run on one or more host machines, which can be grouped into a cluster with a unique name. These clustered nodes hold up the entire data in the form of documents and provide the functionality of indexing and searching those documents.

Sharding is the process of splitting up the data in an index into numerous smaller pieces for easier querying. All queries in Elasticsearch are processed on a single thread for each shard. However, numerous shards can be run simultaneously. Therefore, many shards would result in several concurrent threads. Having the right number of shards is important for performance.

- **Decrease the number of shards.** _shrink and _split are APIs that allow you to modify the number of shards. This method may be used to maximize the number of fragments produced by a split, and it can be reversed to produce smaller output. Elasticsearch sets up each index with 5 primary shards and 1 copy of each shard by default. There will be 5 main shards for each index, with each shard replicated twice for a total of 10 shards.
- At the same time, you'll need to strike **a balance between having too few or too many shards**. There is no one right answer when deciding how many shards to utilize. The appropriate value for your needs lies within your purview of calculation. Most implementations begin with a single shard and add more as needed to get optimal performance.
- **Replicas.** Making one or more copies of the index’s shards called replica shards or simple replicas. Optimize necessary index settings that play a crucial role in Elasticsearch performance, like the number of shards and replicas. Having additional copies often improves search performance. 
- **Take care of the shard size.** The appropriate number of shards should be determined by the quantity of data in an index. In general, an ideal shard should store 30-50GB of data. For example, if you plan to gather roughly 300GB of application logs every day, having around 10 shards in that index would be reasonable.
- **Eliminate a multitude of small shards.** Search performance may suffer if there are numerous little shards because of the high number of network requests and concurrent threads that may appear.

## #5 Indices
Elasticsearch organizes its data into indices. There is no hard and fast rule about the number of indices you need to save information, but here are some of our recommendations that may help you.

- **Use several indices.** All your data doesn't have to be contained in a single index. Indices can be configured to save information for a month, a day, or even an hour, depending on the requirements of the application. 
- Your **index buffer size should be large** if your nodes are busy indexing a lot of data. The size of the index buffer is the amount of information that may be temporarily kept in a memory location before being permanently recorded on a disk. The default for this value is 10% of the total heap size which may need to be increased if your use case relies heavily on indexes.
- Take into account the fact that **Elasticsearch data cannot be changed** once it is stored. A document is then filed away in an index. However, if you need to make changes to the values in this document, you cannot just edit the values there. When this occurs, Elasticsearch generates a new document that includes the most up-to-date information.
- Elasticsearch also uses version numbers to maintain tabs on the most up-to-date content. Therefore, the most recent version is always the one with the largest number. However, the index now contains both old and new documents, which causes the index size to grow. You can fix this by **reindexing the database**. Reindexing your data ensures that you are using the most up-to-date information while also reducing your data storage needs.

## #6 Interval for refreshing

Elasticsearch takes some time to index new data, so it can't be quickly accessed. In-memory storage is made available when indexing is complete. Whenever a refresh occurs, this information is saved to the segment. Reloading a website would achieve the same effect. The frequency of refreshes is controlled by the refresh interval. Results are automatically updated once per second with a preset refresh period of one second.

The default settings are to refresh the indexes every second for search queries that have been consecutive in the past 30 seconds. If your index is often searched, Elasticsearch will update the index every second. Increase the index if you can afford to increase the period between when a document is indexed and when it becomes visible. Setting the refresh interval to a higher number, such as 300 s (5 minutes), may assist in increasing the indexing speed.

The standard refresh rate should be sufficient in most situations. However, you should consider what is most suitable for you. There is a cost associated with maintaining and regularly updating indexes. A daily refresh is sufficient if you don't want data in near-real-time; for instance, if you only deal with data from the previous day.

![Improving search performance via Elasticsearch. Part 2](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Improving_search_performance_via_Elasticsearch_2_8de735abf0.svg)

## #7 Enhanced queries

- **Requesting in bulk is more efficient than making several separate requests**. Typically, Elasticsearch is put to use for massive data queries. The idea that querying on particular indices may improve speed during request execution is not far-fetched. But that's not the case. If you know that the information you need is only in one index, then you should restrict your search to only that index. If, however, you wish to simultaneously search across all indexes for a certain piece of information, you should do it simultaneously.
- **Use filters to narrow your search for a specific result.** You need specific information from indices or documents. In other words, there is no purpose in retrieving all the data and then using only a subset of it. Instead, you get what you need from a database by doing a simple search. To retrieve the necessary information, you may use the _source keyword, or you can do a term aggregation to obtain one-of-a-kind data. Limit your search to only the information you need by specifying specifics like date range, matching criteria, and search phrases. By limiting your results, filters speed up your workflow.

## #8 Well-formatted documents

Every index stores information in a set of documents. If documents are well-formatted, requests may be fulfilled more quickly. Queries are slowed down by parent-child and nested fields. If you want your queries to return results quickly, you should strive to make the documents as flat as possible. Here are several of our recommendations to do so.

- **Remove documents.** Having a significant number of removed documents in the Elasticsearch index creates search performance concerns. The Force merge API may be used to eliminate a large number of documents and optimize the shards.
- **Instead of always having to calculate the amount, you can just retrieve the sum field.** Raw data is often what makes it into Elasticsearch. Logs, whether they be system or application, are of particular interest. Data processing using ES queries is often unnecessary if data is preprocessed into the appropriate fields. You may also add more fields with commonly used values. If you find yourself regularly needing the sum of five integer values in a document, for instance, you may calculate the sum at document creation time and save it in a specific field.

## #9 Plugins
Some third-party plugins generate a large amount of useless data in your database. If your database transactions become slow, look for large tables and what data is stored in them. Determine the source of the slowness and delete any data that you no longer require.

MySQL is capable of detecting and logging your slowest database requests. Enable this logging to discover the queries that are slowing down your site the most; you may then cache these searches in an in-memory store like Redis or Memcached, or delete the data (and plugin) completely if it is no longer required. If you have influence over the architecture of your database, make sure that columns that are often fetched during site searches are indexed.

## #10 Caching strategy
Decide on a caching technique for your site early on. Caching pages and queries allows your site to fetch them faster, which improves speed. At the same time, it is recommended not to cache out-of-stock levels and other ephemeral data. Doing so would result in a confusing and irritating experience for your clients.

Keep track of the correct quantity of things in stock so that out-of-stock products aren't displayed and cached as available. If you sell through a lot of different channels, you might want to use a centralized stock management system to keep track of all the goods that come in and go out and to automatically clear your site's cache when this system changes. 

![Improving search performance via Elasticsearch_3.svg](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Improving_search_performance_via_Elasticsearch_3_d37c1e21f7.svg)

## Wrapping up

One of the most important aspects of a successful E-commerce project is having a highly-performing search functionality. But, customer expectations nowadays are high. Even if you have an effective site search solution in place, you will always find the need to update and improve search performance to make it flexible enough to meet ever-changing customer requirements. 

Here are key takeaways from our article that will help you to improve Elasticsearch search performance.

- **Keep track of metrics** such as cluster health, indexing rate, query rate, and more to understand the current state of performance.
- Use faster **hardware** that suits your requirements.
- Use **load balancing** to decrease the strain on a specific node and distribute all the load between different nodes.
- Take care of good **sharding and indices**.
- Use **well-formatted documents**.
- Decide on a **caching technique** for your site early on.

Elasticsearch search performance tuning is rather a complex task. So be cautious while adjusting any settings in the production environment. Book [Elasticsearch consulting](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) to figure out what’s best for your case or let us help you configure everything for you. 

Perhaps you've just decided to start using Elasticsearch, or maybe you're currently an Elasticsearch user who envisions a lot of scope for your company, we are ready to help you. The Wise team can assemble a dedicated team to ensure end-to-end Elasticsearch integration and handle all the technical challenges of your case. [Contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to discuss details.

Learn how to tune Elasticsearch search performance and what metrics to keep an eye on in the long run. Handy tips from our development team.

10 Tips to improve Elasticsearch search performance

Learn how to tune site search performance built on Elasticsearch and what metrics to keep an eye on in the long run.

10 tips to improve search performance with Elasticsearch

Wise blog graphic_Top-10 E-Commerce Trends.svg

Startups

The E-commerce industry is rapidly evolving, with new stores and business ideas popping up every day. Global E-commerce revenues hit <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/534123/e-commerce-share-of-retail-sales-worldwide/#statisticContainer" target="_blank">$4.9 trillion</a> in 2021. This number is expected to increase by 50% over the next four years, reaching around $7.4 trillion by 2025. More than ever, owners are creating and improving their E-commerce platforms, and the competition is heating up.

Based on the recent market research and our experience, we have compiled a list of E-commerce trends that are more likely to define the future of custom development in the industry. Knowing such forecasts can help you focus on what's relevant and offer your customers the *ahead-of-the-curve* experience in 2023 and beyond.

## E-commerce development trends overview

There are several tendencies in E-commerce development to keep an eye on in the coming year. Here’s a brief overview of E-commerce trends you need to know in 2023. A more detailed description of each of them will follow.

![E-commerce trends for 2023](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/e_commerce_trends_2023_607a7b463a.svg)

## #1 Mobile commerce

Allowing clients to shop via mobile devices is no longer an exception but a new norm. According to statistics, mobile devices account for <a href="" target="_blank">61% of retail traffic</a>, with <a href="" target="_blank">70 million online users</a> shopping via mobile devices. This figure will definitely increase, so we are convinced that mobile commerce will be one of the primary E-commerce development trends shaping the future.

The reason is simple and clear: mobile shopping is convenient. It enables customers to make purchases from any location, which is essential in today's world. Customers can simply research, compare products, and make payments on the go.

Here are the main aspects to consider in mobile E-commerce development.

- **Visual appearance and UX/UI elements.** When people are browsing or looking for inspiration on their phones, they will often want to view the product in more detail or grab a screenshot of an item that catches their eye. By giving your mobile app a great look and high-quality images of your products, you can take it to the next level and win the appreciation of your customers.
- **Search functionality.** Optimize your customers’ search experience for mobile. Showing their recent searches is a good practice. For example, when a user searches for a product, they see previous searches for comparison or as a reminder. 
- **Checkout process.** Provide a seamless checkout option for mobile shoppers with services like one-click checkout. Make it simple to enter and exit the cart. Obviously, your cart should be highlighted in the main screen. Include a mini cart for mobile devices that shows the contents of the shopping cart as an overlay when users click on the shopping cart icon instead of taking them to an entirely new screen.
- **Push notifications.** Leverage features like in-app push notifications to alert customers of special offers and other reminders. Push alerts are rarely helpful on their own. Combine them with a full understanding of the customer journey, smart personalization, and clever in-app messaging to make a winning strategy for engaging, converting, and keeping mobile customers. 

To learn more about mobile commerce and get inspired by the great examples of how companies implemented it, read our previous article featuring [10 best use cases of mobile commerce apps](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/top-10-mobile-commerce-apps-best-cases/).

## #2 Marketplaces boom

Marketplaces provide a simple paradigm for various suppliers to collaborate on a single system to handle everything, making it easier to reach out to specific groups of people and address specific problems. This model will become more popular in the next few years. According to Forbes, marketplace sales will exceed <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/02/22/the-prevalence-of-the-online-marketplace-model-and-its-impact-on-e-commerce/?sh=1208e3bd78fa" target="_blank">$3.5 trillion</a> by 2024.

How can marketplaces change E-commerce, and what approaches will be noticeable? Here are several of the key predictions.

- **Brand and niche marketplaces.** Small and medium-sized businesses may shift from competing in established ecosystems such as eBay or Amazon towards using niche marketplaces. Personalization and customization will be the main focus for many. In turn, niche marketplaces can help satisfy the needs of experienced buyers who are looking for specific products. It's all because they may offer a more complete set of specialized products and hard-to-find items.
- **Omnichannel strategy. **Thanks to technological advancements, consumers can now shop across channels with little to no difference in buyer experience. As a result, marketplaces must work hard to establish a presence in all possible channels. An omnichannel strategy has benefits like a better customer experience, more sales and traffic, more loyal customers, and a better way to collect data.
- **Cross-border trade.** The massive shift in consumer behavior triggered by the pandemic enabled E-commerce to travel cross-border with almost no geographical constraints. However, to remain relevant and successful, cross-border E-commerce must address a range of challenges, including cross-border banking, taxation, pricing variation across countries, and security concerns.

All-in-all, recent changes in the global E-commerce industry have opened up new chances for growth. Learn about [10 marketplace startup ideas](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/10-marketplace-startups-reversing-e-commerce-trends-in-2022/) that managed to adapt to new challenges and will help you look at this model from a new perspective.

## #3 On-site search personalization

Without a shadow of a doubt, personalization will play a pivotal role in [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) shortly. According to statistics, more than <a href="https://sendgrid.com/blog/the-state-of-personalization-2021/" target="_blank">60% of consumers</a> are more likely to become returning buyers if a company provides a personalized shopping experience. Accordingly, we can expect an even more significant shift towards personalization, especially connected with searching experiences. 

On-site search personalization refers to tailoring search results for each particular customer according to their past behavior on your site, profile data, and many other aspects. Using search engines such as Elasticsearch or Algolia, for example, you can make suggestions on what search results your customers expect to see while they are typing their search queries. 

<a href="https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/03/how-to-use-site-search-to-improve-conversion/" target="_blank">43% of customers</a> use the site's search while making a purchase, so investing in search personalization can be a crucial source for making information accessible all around your site and retaining more customers. To discover more about on-site search personalization, check out our earlier article on what [on-site search personalization](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/site-search-personalization-how-to-configure-use-cases/) is and how to set it up.

## #4 Artificial intelligence (AI)

Most of the cutting-edge technologies, such as smart chatbots, personalized product recommendation engines, and voice searches use artificial intelligence (AI), and in the coming years, they will become essential for the E-commerce sector. With <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175063/ai-help-business-ecommerce-companies-worldwide/" target="_blank">70% of online business owners</a> believing that AI for E-commerce will help them personalize their online shops, there's no doubt that this technology will continue to grow.

Voice-activated payments, virtual conversations, and voice searches are the most common NLP use in E-commerce. Besides, computer vision provides for face detection and identification. During an engagement, chatbots employ deep learning algorithms and NLP to grasp the second party's speech and human words. Besides, expert systems may make decisions and mimic human behavior with the assistance of AI as a key component of fraud prevention and security enhancement in E-commerce.

Here are several possible ways to use Artificial Intelligence in E-commerce in the coming years.

- **Smart recommendation engine** for online shops that works based on user behavior can offer users the products they are looking for. For example, virtual dressing rooms are a type of software that helps consumers digitally try on clothing. 
- **Supply chain planning.** AI algorithms are capable of collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data, assisting E-commerce organizations in detecting logistical issues. According to IBM research, <a href="https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/DGP9YPZV" target="_blank">40% of organizations</a> who participated in the study solved supply chain difficulties with AI.
- **Shopper mood tracking.** AI-powered E-commerce technology can track and recognize specific customer moods and patterns, assisting online retailers in maintaining more accurate product selection. <a href="https://www.theverygroup.com/" target="_blank">The Very Group</a>, for example, effectively used AI mood-tracking technology in its machine-learning chatbot. It identifies the tone of consumers' communications and adapts responses accordingly.
- **Production process control.** By combining artificial intelligence and production process management, cost overheads and downtime can be reduced. According to Capgemini's market analysis, <a href="https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/AI-in-manufacturing-operations.pdf" target="_blank">51% of European manufacturers</a> utilize AI solutions.

As you can see, E-commerce may benefit from AI by using the accumulated company and consumer data for more informed decision-making and accurate predictions for the future.

## #5 Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented reality (AR) is a real game-changer in E-commerce. Statista estimates that the augmented reality industry is worth <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/591181/global-augmented-virtual-reality-market-size/" target="_blank">$30.7 billion</a>, with over 400,000 AR glasses sold by 2021.

This technology uses 3D mapping to allow customers to try on things or preview experiences before purchasing. What challenges does AR commerce solve? It allows you to deliver a more intuitive and engaging visual shopping experience that lets customers interact with products in an immersive way. As a result, AR technology improves customers' ability to visualize products before buying them and make more successful purchases.

That’s why we are expecting a lot more businesses to utilize AR for their products and services, especially in specific industries, such as fashion and home decor, because the customer can get a better feel for the item without seeing them in person.

## #6 More ways to pay

<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/477804/online-shopping-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/" target="_blank">69.8% of shoppers </a> drop off somewhere between filling their cart and making the payment. Let’s face it, typing in a credit card number is not the most user-friendly experience. That’s why offering more payment methods for customers can be in more demand soon. 

If customers can't pay as they want on an E-commerce website, chances are high that they will cancel a possible sale. Offering a range of payment options is an excellent approach to boosting conversion rates. Furthermore, if clients can save their payment information on your website (and this process is secured), they will be able to check out faster the next time they make a purchase.

Consumers are quickly adopting new payment methods, with <a href="https://investor.mastercard.com/investor-news/investor-news-details/2021/Mastercard-New-Payments-Index-Consumer-Appetite-for-Digital-Payments-Takes-Off/default.aspx" target="_blank">93%</a> saying they would consider emerging payment methods such as biometrics, digital currencies, and QR codes. Among the most commonly used payment methods are PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay.

Another growing payment method is cryptocurrency. While this is still a very new trend, it’s hard to predict what will happen next. However, several big players, including Microsoft, Starbucks, PayPal, and Tesla are already accepting <a href="https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/04/paying-with-cryptocurrencies-these-are-the-major-companies-that-accept-cryptos-as-payment" target="_blank">cryptocurrency as a payment method</a>. Besides, <a href="https://investor.mastercard.com/investor-news/investor-news-details/2021/Mastercard-New-Payments-Index-Consumer-Appetite-for-Digital-Payments-Takes-Off/default.aspx" target="_blank">40% of consumers</a> would like to use cryptocurrency in the next year. 

## #7 Sustainability & recommerce

<a href="https://www.gfk.com/blog/how-fmcg-brands-can-capitalize-on-soaring-eco-consumer-spending-power" target="_blank">52% of consumers</a> worldwide admitted that the pandemic has made them value sustainability issues more. Moreover, a survey found that nearly <a href="https://www.cleanlink.com/news/article/Survey-Do-Consumers-Value-Sustainability-Based-Products--28560" target="_blank">80% of customers</a> consider the sustainability of the product, retailer, or brand when making purchases.
 
**What exactly is recommerce?** Recommerce (resale or reverse commerce) is the purchase and selling of previously owned, new or used things. Buyers are increasingly seeking items and companies that correspond with their environmentally conscious attitudes. Brands are already reacting to this. <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/zara-sustainable-fashion-trnd/index.html" target="_blank">Zara</a>, for example, wants all of its brands to utilize entirely organic, sustainable, or recycled materials in its clothes by 2025. Smaller D2C brands are also trending in the same direction. Retailers are making a significant contribution by concentrating on sustainability. At the same time, this allows them to build long-term connections with their consumers while also reaching out to new audiences.

## #8 Omnichannel customer experience

Many companies plan to prioritize omnichannel in the coming years. Indeed, with rising customer acquisition costs (CAC), this can be extremely advantageous. According to a recent study, <a href="https://www.shopify.com/retail/omnichannel-trends" target="_blank">32% of brands</a> want to extend their in-person interactions in 2022, such as by opening pop-up shops or putting items in retail locations.

Customers expect to be able to easily transition between platforms and devices when making a purchase. A recent study shows that <a href="https://segment.com/blog/Twilio-Segment-biggest-innovations-in-2021/" target="_blank">69% of shoppers</a> said they expect a consistent experience across all channels. A tailored shopping experience does not rely solely on one mode of communication. To successfully personalize, merchants must focus on offering a consistent experience across many platforms.

We're also witnessing a significant increase in *showrooming* and *webrooming*. Showrooming takes place when a person visits a physical store to inspect things before purchasing online. Webrooming is the inverse, with customers browsing things online before purchasing in-store. <a href="https://www.shopify.com/research/future-of-commerce/future-of-retail" target="_blank">54% of consumers</a> participate in showrooming and 59% utilize webrooming, therefore companies interested in experimenting with these should focus on creating a consistent experience across channels.

## #9 Social commerce

Buying and selling things or subscribing to services directly through social media is known as social commerce. Unlike in the past, when social media was exclusively used for marketing, several of these platforms now have built-in technology that allows individuals to purchase things directly through their applications — for example, Facebook and Instagram Shops.

In addition to allowing social media to become a direct sales channel, social commerce entails the advertising of items on social media increasing interaction. Furthermore, consumers may now get information, advice, or comments on things right where they buy them.

The social commerce industry is expected to grow steadily <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/05/12/2441684/28124/en/United-States-Social-Commerce-Market-Report-2022-Market-is-Expected-to-Grow-by-27-to-Reach-188-744-6-Million-in-2022-Forecast-to-2028.html" target="_blank">by 22.8%</a> during 2022-2028. According to a recent Accenture estimate, social commerce will expand three times faster than traditional E-commerce solutions, more than surpassing from <a href="https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/social-commerce-brand-trends-marketing-strategies/" target="_blank">$492 billion</a> in 2021 to $1.2 trillion in 2025.

Currently, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook all have their own tools for buying and selling things, and TikTok has unveiled TikTok Shopping. With these rapid upgrades, more firms will use social commerce to influence customers' purchase decisions, giving them increased visibility and bigger conversions.

## #10 Live shopping
Many people were forced to find new methods to make a livelihood as a result of the pandemic. Successful business owners have recognized the advantages of using live video to sell items and engage with consumers.

According to McKinsey, live commerce sales might account for <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/its-showtime-how-live-commerce-is-transforming-the-shopping-experience" target="_blank">up to 20%</a> of total E-commerce by 2026. While live streaming was once only a fun feature for social network users, it is now becoming one of the vital E-commerce solutions. We anticipate that live selling will become a prominent trend in the next decade for small firms that are still looking for leads and developing their consumer base.

## Wrapping up

Technology and people are always advancing, and because E-commerce connects them all, we must always look ahead. As you can see, the landscape is getting more competitive. Customers are currently in charge, and E-commerce companies are adapting to meet their needs. 

Adaptability to shifting market conditions is essential today. However, not every trend is worth jumping on. Some tendencies can be helpful, while others may be irrelevant to your audience. Prior to making any decisions, it is important to evaluate project specifics, analyze user feedback, and focus on goals ahead. 

If on your way to an [advanced E-commerce ecosystem](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/), you are looking for a tech partners who can consult you on what is best for your project, do not hesitate to talk to the Wise team. [Contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to discuss your tech strategy for 2023 and beyond.




Check out 10 fresh E-commerce development trends and build your business strategy for 2023 staying up-to-date with new tendencies in the industry.

Top-10 E-commerce trends for 2023 and beyond

Wise blog_Site search personalization-51.svg

Personalization is a broad topic in E-commerce that includes a variety of components. One of the most critical ones is the configuration of internal site search and tailoring it as per the needs of each unique customer based on their profile data, purchase history, or preferences.

Site search is sometimes underestimated, yet poor or no site search has a direct impact on brand loyalty. Up to <a href="https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/03/how-to-use-site-search-to-improve-conversion/" target="_blank">43% of buyers</a> are using the site's search box. So customizing search results may be a key source for making information available throughout your site and, thus, closing sales more quickly. 

According to Google's research, on-site search rejection costs businesses more than <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/retail/search-abandonment-impacts-retail-sales-brand-loyalty" target="_blank">$300 billion each year</a>. Another research shows that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mC3JyIJ38M" target="_blank">80% of customers</a> will exit a website after having a bad search experience. When done right, personalization of site search helps minimize bounce rate, boost conversion rate, promote brand loyalty, and much more.

However, there are lots of details to figure out before personalization. In this article, we will explain how the personalization of site search works and how your business can benefit from it. Besides, we will take a look at practical ways to personalize the customer experience through site search and mainly analyze one of the leading search engines – via <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/" target="_blank">Elasticsearch integration</a>. 

## What is personalized site search, and why does it matter?

Before we cover best practices, let's define some terms and answer frequently asked questions about personalization.

### What is personalization?

Personalization entails adding user-specific signals on top of all other signals to increase the relevance of your product. It is a set of practices of showing different items to different customers based on demographics, intent, preferences, browsing history, past purchases, how they use their device, and other factors.

The purpose of personalization is to **enhance the customer experience** by anticipating and meeting customers' needs and preferences before they express them. Using data on each individual customer, you can make it simpler for customers to find what they want, based not just on the WHAT of previous purchases or browsing, but also by knowing **the WHY behind their preferences**.

**Relevance** is an important metric of personalization, which is determined by delivering personalization within the context of the digital experience. **Good personalization** is about using the right channel to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

### Why is personalization important today?

Customers love personalization. By providing an advanced customer experience tailored to your client's demands, you make them feel more compelled by your brand and this directly impacts conversions. As a result, personalization is a current trend in many domains, particularly in site search E-commerce, where it has long been a rallying point, and one of the major [E-commerce site search best practices](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/6-e-commerce-site-search-best-practices-for-2022/) as of 2022.

Let's take a look at the statistics:
- <a href="https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-77/Accenture-Pulse-Survey.pdf" target="_blank">91% of customers</a> are more likely to shop with businesses that identify, recall, and provide relevant offers and suggestions.
- Marketers report an average increase in sales by <a href="https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics#:~:text=B2B%20and%20B2C%20personalization%20statistics" target="_blank">20% </a>when implementing personalization. E-commerce enterprises that engage in sophisticated personalization regularly achieve additional <a href="https://www.bcg.com/publications/2019/next-level-personalization-retail" target="_blank">sales increases of 10%</a> or more.
- Businesses that use advanced personalization claim a <a href="https://www.clickz.com/roi-advanced-personalization/255692/" target="_blank">$20 return on investment for every $1 spent</a>.

### What is on-site search and why personalize it? 

The search feature is frequently the first point of contact for visitors to your site. Doing it correctly might be the difference between someone becoming a lifelong customer and leaving your site and going to a competitor. Other than that, customers frequently don't know what they're looking for. They occasionally misspell search queries and require a little nudge in the proper direction.

Personalized search results are more accurate and relevant, allowing customers to quickly obtain the information they require. Search personalization is also known as query understanding. It entails leveraging information about the searcher to either personalize query probability estimation or supplement the question as a signal for query interpretation.

### When to use site search personalization?

Personalizing site search won't magically improve your product, especially when user intent is clear. However, when user intent is broad, and you offer several options, personalizing site search helps connect customers with relevant information. Site search E-commerce allows organizations to look at each click, search, and every item added to a cart to better learn what each consumer appreciates and predict what they’re most likely to buy.

### Known vs unknown visitors

All customers were once unknown visitors to your site. Even if a customer is not logged in or is visiting the site for the first time, a search may be tailored by browser type, IP location, time of day or year, mobile versus desktop, and other criteria. You can advertise items based on their IP location even if you don't know their gender, age, or purchasing history. For example, in Miami, you may promote different winter clothes than in Minnesota.

Customers who log in to their accounts and have a purchasing history, such as pages viewed, items purchased, gender, age, and so on, are considered known visitors. You may tailor results depending on their profile and site behavior. In general, the more information you know about someone, the more customizable results the system can provide.

## Top 5 site search personalization practices

Once you have customers' data, you can evaluate which practical method is the best suited to leverage personalization for your website. There are various approaches you may take to implement intelligent site search and customize search queries for your customers.

![Key approaches to site search personalization](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Key_approaches_to_site_search_personalization_cea6e18c6b.svg)

- **Behavior-based ranking.** According to this model, we build the search that is constantly learning from your customer user experience on your website. In other words, you analyze the behavior of your customers on the website and predict the possible actions they want to make. The user can affect the results with their own choices and browsing history. This model also refers to in-session personalization that seeks to offer relevant experiences from the moment a consumer enters your site. This approach helps us to take into account every action the user performs on the site to learn about their individual search experience. The idea is to determine the user's purpose fast and utilize that knowledge to direct them to the most appropriate product suggestions.

- **Rule-based ranking.** This approach is built by the principle that we first define the audience based on their data such as demographic information, devices, browsers, and similar, and based on such specific parameters we set up rules according to which we show particular products to particular groups of customers that drive search personalization. As a result, customers get results offered based on their profile automatically. This method is also related to history-based personalization which is based on the knowledge of who the customers are and what actions they previously have done on the website. With every new interaction, this model collects information about user intent building its knowledge base. Often, users are added to engagement groups on the guidance or recommendation of the personalization algorithm.

- **Did you mean & You might also like.** This approach allows automated search assistance for each unique customer. First, we analyze user profiles, then make suggestions on what’s better to recommend them, based on the current trends and their profiles. Besides, we can also take into account what other similar user personas are browsing, or purchasing while interacting with the website.

- **Personalized query probabilities.** When the visitors are known, you can use this approach to predict what they will search for. Searchers often repeat queries, and sometimes even within the same session, which then is saved in historical query logs. Using this information, we can analyze a searcher’s interests and personalize query probabilities.

- **Personalization as an intent signal.** Personalization might be used for query rewriting or result ranking. Searchers on a clothing website, for example, are most likely seeking things that they can wear. If we know, or can guess, the gender and measurements of the searcher, we may alter the query to filter or enhance results that fit those criteria.

## How Elasticsearch enhances personalized site search

[Custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) includes a variety of options for implementing site search personalization. Elasticsearch, a well-known and powerful technology for personalizing site search, allows you to add scalable, relevant search experiences to all of your apps and websites. It offers a wide range of search result customizing possibilities right out of the box.

**Technical details behind Elasticsearch**

It is a RESTful search and analytics engine. Released in 2010, Elasticsearch is a Java-based API built on Apache Lucene. Elasticsearch personalization indexes your data using keywords. This makes search queries go quickly because Elasticsearch searches through the keywords instead of the full text (this is called *an inverted index*).

**What Elasticsearch offers for site search personalization**

- Personalized search, superior relevance
- Accurate results
- Leverage machine learning
- Promote your best results
- Refine results during the process

**What Elasticsearch offers for site search personalization**

- **Personalized search, superior relevance.** With excellent out-of-the-box search relevance, Elastic gives all of the tools you need to create compelling search experiences that help people discover precisely what they need. Rich relevance tuning tools and cutting-edge machine learning assist you in further implementation of rule-based and behavior-based ranking.
- **Accurate results.** Elastic's search relevance, as well as plenty of customization options, allows you to curate results based on real-time corporate data. As a result, you better understand customers' demands by providing relevant search results that help them get from where they are to where they want to go. 
- **Leverage machine learning.** Machine learning may complement search and business insights to improve your search applications and customer experience, whether you're introducing new ideas to extend the effect of your search or looking for new methods to increase search accuracy. Improve semantic relevance with vector search, NLP model support, and model management.
- **Promote your best results.** With automatic, data-driven suggestions based on search metrics, you can prioritize your best-performing results. Accept, reject, or implement curation suggestions automatically. Your automatic suggestions grow increasingly relevant over time as a result of machine learning.
- **Refine results during the process.** Precision tuning allows you to easily change the recall of your findings, as well as give weight or boosts to certain data fields. Elasticsearch personalization allows you to add synonyms for frequent search phrases to tailor the search to the needs of the company and the user. There's no need to redeploy because the modifications to search relevancy are live in production as soon as you're ready.

## Best cases of personalized site search in E-commerce
Here are some of the best examples of site search personalization to learn from.

### <a href="https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/nl/" target="_blank">Frans Hals Museum</a>

This website reflects the duality of the classic and contemporary, showcasing a collection of 17th-century art alongside modern pieces and colorful design.

**Challenge**

The website offers plenty of tickets to reserve and buy for exhibition programs in the art museum. The goal is to make it easy for customers to use the website and give them useful recommendations. 

**Solution**

The *Discover* section provides some interesting and unexpected methods to view the museum's collection. Visitors can explore artworks by mood, color, medium, or artist, or they can choose *Random* to be provided with a group of items that are produced casually. A navigation bar on the site helps visitors to find key information, such as the museum's location, opening hours, and daily events, without having to go through the *Visit us* pages.

It is not necessary to register on the site because the Frans Hals Museum uses an in-session personalization model. The site actively analyzes all requests made by each specific user and outputs not only all relevant results but also those that are similar in style to artists, exhibitions, locations, and more. By opening each of these results, the visitor sees another portion of recommendations that match their interests.

### <a href="https://www.zennioptical.com/" target="_blank">Zenni</a>

Zenni, as a pioneer in the eyewear market, provides a one-of-a-kind experience to its clients. Augmented reality (AR) is used in this technology, which lets people try on the glasses on their own devices before buying them. 

**Challenge**

Zenni wanted to create a more engaging customer experience by providing personalized product recommendations through its digital store.

**Solution**

Customers can register and enter their prescription information, such as pupillary distance (single or dual PD) and preferred lens type (single vision, bifocal, progressive, or readers). All search results will be personalized according to the provided parameters.

Other than that, the website offers autocomplete recommendations with visuals by making the search box visible. For example, when users type *kids*, product photos from the Kids category are displayed.

### <a href="https://www.ryanair.com/ua/uk" target="_blank">Ryanair</a>

Ryanair is based in Dublin, and its flights link 37 countries and 225 locations. Ryanair has positioned itself as Europe's greenest airline in recent years.

**Challenge**

Ryanair intends to show customized search results to customers to preserve its competitive edge long-term and to continue providing higher value for customers.

**Solution**

The great feature on the website is pre-flll search options based on past searches, purchases, and locations. When customers use the search function again, Ryanair includes a dropdown of suggestions of appropriate terms and categories. This practice works well both for customers that are browsing and those that have arrived on the site with a specific repeat purchase in mind. Browsing visitors will be able to select from a range of relevant categories while returned customers can quickly select the options they require.

### <a href="https://www.patagonia.com/home/" target="_blank">Patagonia</a>

Patagonia is a manufacturer of outdoor apparel and equipment for the silent sports of climbing, surfing, skiing and snowboarding, fly fishing, and trail running.

**Challenge**

The aim of Patagonia was to offer query predictions for customers that are tailored to the site’s specific content, so users can be confident they’re finding their desired content.

**Solution**

Patagonia provides a great example of personalized autocomplete on E-commerce site search. When a user starts typing, autocomplete displays options in a menu beneath the search. Users can click the recommendation or use the arrow keys to go up and down the suggestion list and choose an alternative.

## Key takeaways
The following are the important conclusions from the article:

- **Personalized customer experiences** are integral to business growth. 
- **Personalization** is the process of understanding your online users' preferences using historical information and prior interactions with your site. Your customers tell you which products they like to buy with every search, click, bounce, add-to-cart, and purchase.
- Customers who use your **on-site search capabilities** are telling you exactly what they're searching for, and it’s important to help them find it promptly before they leave.
- **Site search personalization** is often overlooked but this component is a powerful way to offer better recommendations and help customers find what they’re looking for. The key to success in site search personalization is to use the right algorithms at the right touch point of the customer journey.
- Among **primary methods to personalize site search** are behavior-based and rule-based ranking. Best practices to implement site search include autocompleting, autocorrect, personalized query probabilities, personalization as an intent signal, *did you mean & you might also like*, and more.
- **Elasticsearch personalization** helps to configure all of the mentioned methods of personalization and even more. It puts search power at the heart of the fastest, most reliable, and most scalable E-commerce experiences.

If you are looking for additional guidance on the implementation of site search functionality, the Wise team can provide you with [Elasticsearch consulting](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) or launch an audit of your existing search engine. We can also assemble a dedicated team to ensure end-to-end Elasticsearch integration and handle all tech challenges of your specific case.

At Wise Engineering, we implement advanced personalization that helps deliver real-time recommendations to users based on multiple factors, including purchase history, card additions, and more. [Contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to discuss details.


Check out how you can provide your customers with personalized online shopping experiences with site search personalization.

Site search personalization: How to configure & use cases

Check out how you can provide your customers with personalized online shopping experiences with the help of an internal site search.

Solr_vs_Elasticsearch_preview.svg

Learn about Solr vs Elasticsearch use cases, features, and other critical differences for E-commerce projects offered by both search engines. 

Solr vs Elasticsearch: In-depth comparison for E-commerce [2022]

Learn about use cases, features, and other critical differences for E-commerce projects offered by both search engines.

Solr vs Elasticsearch: In-depth comparison for E-commerce

Wise blog_Custom ecommerce development-46.svg

Check out the top 10 aspects of custom E-commerce development that can help you ensure better UX and contribute the most to your E-commerce business growth. 

Key components in custom E-commerce development

Learn what aspects of a custom E-commerce solution can contribute the most to your business growth.

10marketplaces_preview.svg

It is hard to find another E-commerce format growing today more rapidly than marketplaces. At Wise, we have been launching and scaling marketplace platforms for more than 15 years, but today more than ever, we observe the real boom of cool marketplace startups that help look at E-commerce business from a quite new perspective.
 
In this post, we will look closely at a collection of great startups and see how they approach the marketplace model to implement their business ideas. The way these companies put forward their value proposition, the customer problems they address, and the industries they select to build their businesses are really inspiring. All these factors help them set the tone for E-commerce trends in 2022 and will, for sure, give you some insights to apply for your own marketplace startup.
 
## Major shifts in custom marketplace development
 
Dealing with [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/), we see common patterns in recent years that define directions the whole industry is aiming towards. Sad to acknowledge, but the truth is – no one needs another marketplace selling* everything for everyone*. Marketplace as a business model offers an exclusive opportunity to connect with specific audiences and address specific problems, and now’s the time to use these hidden powers to their fullest potential. Here’s how marketplace development has been changing recently.
 
![5 shifts in custom marketplace development](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/10marketplaces_trends_4b59e2fd0e.svg)
 
Learn more about [online marketplace development trends in 2022](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/5-shifts-defining-marketplace-development-in-2022/) from our previous post, where we analyzed all of the five tendencies above in detail.
 
**Now let’s look closely at the rising branded marketplaces and the trends they are initiating in E-commerce today.**
 
## Fresh start for Livestream shopping
 
We all saw those commercials on television when a vacuum cleaner was miraculously cleaning the sofa, and you could buy it with a special discount while the commercial was running. This was a predecessor of the tendency we observe today – Livestream shopping, or live shopping. It has got its popularity with the development of social media, and brands around the world have started to use it as a new sales channel to promote and sell products.
 
The founders of <a href="https://www.buywith.com/" target="_blank">*buywith*</a>, an online shopping Livestream platform, saw this growing opportunity and used the marketplace model to connect brands, retailers, influencers, and experts. The platform allows hosting live shopping events and automates the sales process. Seeing products live and in action drives sales, plus the credibility of the person performing the Lifestream increases conversion immensely.
 
## Space-as-a-service model
 
A marketplace is a truly unique E-commerce form that allows businesses to think outside the box. A great example of such business thinking is the <a href="https://shearshare.com/" target="_blank">*ShearShare*</a> app. With the mission of becoming the greatest engine of jobs and wealth creation for the barber and beauty industry, *ShearShare's* Co-Founders decided to redefine the way salons and barbershops run their businesses and assisted them with the most valuable asset – the space.
 
The *ShearShare* marketplace allows small businesses to offer the space they do not need at their salons to local professionals and receive one more income channel. Via the new space-as-a-service model and the efficient process automation, the startup ensures that collaboration is flexible and productive for all sides involved.
 
##  Challenging the status quo
 
Challenging the way things are organized is one of the most important traits innovative startuppers should possess and, as the companies below illustrate, a marketplace as a business model allows you to do it across industries and domains.
 
### Reshaping established industries
 
The heavy equipment industry is a big and serious sphere with a set of strict rules and regulations. Yet, there is a startup that pushes the status quo of how heavy equipment is obtained by various companies. <a href="https://www.boomandbucket.com/" target="_blank">*Boom & Bucket*</a>
is a heavy equipment marketplace with a team of industry veterans that know all the specifics of this business and want to change the way used equipment is being reused and resold.
 
On the *Boom & Bucket* marketplace, customers can browse across multiple categories looking for bulldozers, excavators, wheel loaders, and many more machinery. Because of the accurate inspections, the quality of the used equipment is well-monitored, and access to financing warranties and transportation is provided. *Get in a car* is one of the team’s shared values that help them approach customer service with ownership and exceptional attitude.
 
###  Changing common approaches
 
Is there an activity that you can not get a coach and consulting buddy for? No there is not, claims the <a href="https://www.joinleland.com/" target="_blank">*Leland*</a> team that created a marketplace for ambitious people and helps their customers access the coaching and classes to reach career and educational goals. All you need to do to get a coach is to define the skills you need, your budget, and previous experience, and they will recommend the best matching mentors for you.
 
If most similar EdTech marketplaces offer the ability to find a tutor for specific subjects, *Leland* allows you to choose from multiple skills, tests, and domains. The platform connects coaches and students around the globe and builds a really cool community of people helping each other grow.
 
### Introducing new customer behaviors
 
Building a selling new and used shipping containers? However unusual it may sound, you can. <a href="https://boxhub.com/" target="_blank">*Boxhub*</a> is a successful marketplace that allows people to buy and sell containers in their neighborhoods. Containers can be used when moving houses or when simply extra storage space is needed. It can also be turned into a tiny temporary home, farm, office, or storefront.
 
Because the startup introduces a new pattern to using different types of containers for households, right on their homepage, the team explains in detail what shipping containers are, what types of containers exist, and how they can be used. Making an order is simple and intuitive. You need to enter your zip code, and the system will show you the available containers in your location.
 
##  Technology matching sellers and buyers
 
Connecting the right audiences with the right merchants is the ultimate goal of any marketplace. No matter what industry it operates in. To ensure this connection was fast and efficient, some platforms develop unique technologies that become a part of their value proposition later.
 
To illustrate such a case, let’s look closely at <a href="https://repowr.com/" target="_blank">*REPOWR*</a>, a marketplace that enables logistics companies to efficiently source equipment capacity. The team applies Digital Equipment Matching technology that allows transportation companies to have instant on-demand access to available equipment nearby. Your assets are valuable, says the *REPOWR* team, and offers transportation companies a great way to collaborate and use assets effectively.
 
## Presenting innovative product types
 
Also, a way to innovate the marketplace model is to start using it as a selling platform for a variety of digital and unusual types of products and services. No one thought that this is possible, but the companies below saw the problems in their niches and today run successful marketplace businesses.
 
### Selling IP licensing
 
<a href="https://www.layerlicensing.com/" target="_blank">*Layer*</a> is a marketplace platform for IP licensing in the gaming industry. The team's vision is to allow all the global games to collaborate with the best creators: from brands and characters to stories and celebrities. The platform helps to match IP profiles with game profiles based on multiple criteria, including commercial, audience, and objective. *Layer* also simplifies communication between the counterparts on creating proposals and streamlines the overall licensing process.
 
The *Layer’s* Co-Founders say that games were their passion from childhood and they want this industry to function properly, more smoothly, and bring joy to people around the world. Another great example, of how to make a successful business you need to find an activity that you love.
 
### Marketplace of discounts
 
Can you imagine an online platform where you can shop for discounts? No? Then have a look at <a href="https://theconvoy.com/" target="_blank">*the Convoy*</a>. With the mission to help small businesses optimize their spending on various online services, *the Convoy* allows you to select the services your team uses and cut the subscription bills.
 
As for their monetization model, the deal is quite simple: if *the Convoy* team negotiates for discounts for you, they might get a small percentage for themselves. For example, from a 22% overall discount, they will keep something like 2%.
 
## Making an impact
 
Kantar’s recent study says that <a href="https://adage.com/article/agency-news/kantar-study-shows-consumers-expect-brands-be-helpful-during-coronavirus-pandemic/2246361" target="_blank">77% of customers</a> expect companies to be helpful during the covid outbreak, and this tendency is there to stay. While multi-vendor marketplace development is moving towards branded marketplaces, impactful businesses are those that come to the forefront and can build strong brand communication. Supportive consumption is on the rise, which means impactful businesses will continue to receive encouragement from their audiences.
 
### Clean energy at the fingertips
 
How do you like the idea that you could organize all the aspects for your company to use renewable energy in a few steps through an intuitive interface? And what if we tell you that this mind-blowing idea is already implemented? <a href="https://www.renewafi.com/" target="_blank">*RenevaFi*</a> is an online marketplace that allows companies and utilities to buy renewable energy directly from clean power plants.
 
On the website, you can buy renewable energy on a screen in simple four steps: specify energy needs, run a competitive auction based on *RenevaFi’s* patent-pending technology, compare proposals, and download a custom contract as a start to a new eco-friendly energy resource. The company’s mission is to make renewable energy contracting faster, more affordable, and less risky, and it deserves a lot of appreciation.
 
### Starting new cultural movement
 
There is room for improvement in any industry and occupation, even if it comes from centuries ago. A good idea and a brave mission can bring it back to life. As an example, let’s look closely at <a href="https://thecobblers.com/" target="_blank">*the Cobblers*</a> marketplace. The company provides expert repair for premium sneakers and high-quality leather goods, including women’s and men’s shoes, handbags, and leather garments.
 
*The Cobblers* team claims they are setting up a new, more thoughtful, cyclical *up-cycling* approach to expensive shoe wear and leather goods usage. Conscious consumption is very popular today, and the company is rapidly growing its popularity in the USA. To make their point more clear, *the Cobblers* say that with each of the unique items they repair, they also make the memories connected to them live longer.
 
## Tell your story
 
This was a recap of great companies that looked at the marketplace business model from a fresh angle and saw a great opportunity to connect people, change operations within industries, and sell unusual product types and services.
 
**What unites all these ten companies?** Though they operate across industries and engage with different audiences, the unique story behind each marketplace is what all of them have in common. There is a mission behind each marketplace app, and all of them communicate it clearly to explain why they launched their businesses in the first place.
 
Learn more about how to launch a [marketplace MVP](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/mvp-development-for-a-marketplace-platform/), [contact us](https://wise-engineering.com/contacts/) to start discussing the engineering realization of your big idea, and let the world know it!


Let’s look closely at a collection of great startups and see how they approach the marketplace model to implement their business ideas >>

10 marketplace startups reversing E-commerce trends in 2022

Let’s look closely at a collection of great startups and see how they approach the marketplace model to implement their business ideas.

10_mobile_commerce_apps_preview.svg

Check out a list of the best mobile commerce apps, learn how they deliver value, and get some inspiration for your future projects >>

Top 10 Best Mobile Commerce Apps: Best Cases

Check out a list of the best mobile commerce apps, learn how they deliver value, and get some inspiration for your future projects.

Top-10 Mobile Commerce Apps. Best cases

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Over the past 15 years, our company has been collaborating with startups across the globe on launching and scaling their marketplace businesses. Working across industries, we now clearly see how the concept of a marketplace startup has evolved recently. A marketplace platform is no longer a place for selling physical goods exclusively. Custom marketplace-like businesses are now aiming at solving complex problems, allowing vendors to bring their creativity, digital products, and a variety of services to broader audiences.  

This blog is a summary of our thoughts regarding the [MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/mvp-development/) of the marketplace app. From our experience, the MVP step helps to quickly validate the ideas and make necessary product pivots before the actual product development starts. Here’s how you can organize this step for your project more effectively.

## No one needs another marketplace

However sad it sounds, with the shift towards branded marketplaces, only companies with the mission and specific problems they are addressing can count for users’ attention and favor. 

How does this relate to the MVP development phase? The answer is simple. If you’re launching a regular marketplace the same as myriads others out there, what’s the point of developing its MVP? What is there to validate with a minimum viable product? You can select one of the ready-made E-commerce solutions and start a business.

But if you have a specific idea in mind of how you can connect different people and solve challenges they are facing, you need to see if this idea receives traction. For this, analytics data and client feedback would be valuable and help you understand how you should change the initial concept to make it more useful and, hence, profitable. 

The success of marketplace business in the post-covid reality requires more than an easy-to-access shopping destination. A successful marketplace today is no longer a place having *everything for everyone* but rather a platform connecting specific vendors, addressing specific problems aimed at specific audiences. Learn more about the [evolution of marketplace app development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/5-shifts-defining-marketplace-development-in-2022/) from our previous blog post.  

![Marketplace platform development](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_role_badc092520.svg)

To better define the needs of this specific audience and provide better solutions to the problems they are facing, you need a marketplace MVP. 

Consider launching an MVP if you need to:
- Bring your idea to the market quickly to see if it gets traction
- Learn from the audience feedback and introduce customizations
- Build a product within the fixed budget and timeframes
- Showcase platform concept to stakeholders

Check out our recent post on [MVP mindset](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/how-to-develop-a-true-mvp-mindset/) to be more prepared for the planning step.

## Feature set for the marketplace MVP

A minimum viable product, or in the case of marketplace development, a minimum viable platform is a custom solution that solves the core problem of the target audience and meets the key expectations of all the sides of the marketplace – vendors, customers, and business owners. 

The success of any product, and marketplace platform is no exception, is the unique value proposition it offers. With the marketplace model, this value proposition should be formulated for both sellers and buyers. And only after the value proposition is defined the core features set for an MVP can be assembled. For each business, the value propositions, and thus, the unique features set for an MVP will differ, but if to look at this aspect from a very high-level perspective, there are some common patterns.
- **Value propositions for vendors** should contain the ability to market the products or services they produce. Each vendor needs the ability to customize their profile to bring their unique proposal to the platform’s visitors.
- **Value proposition for customers** should include an efficient search experience on the platform that delivers specific product or service variants for a peculiar user. Ability to compare vendors, select the best matching variant and make a purchase quickly. 

As** for business owners (or administrators)**, the key functions will include the moderation of all the counterparts, as well as efficient analytics on how both vendors and customers interact with the platform, at what steps of the UX there are problems, and what workflows work best. 

To sum up, the feature set for the marketplace MVP should allow all the counterparts to fulfill their ultimate goals on the marketplace platform, and depending on the product type, industry, or any other specifics these features will vary. The important thing to understand is that the better you formulate your value proposition for the specific audience, the easier you define the workflows you want to test and definite the features to implement during the MVP development step.

![Feature set for marketplace MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_feature_set_bc41872e75.svg)

## Functionality requiring special engineering expertise

Depending on the main idea behind a custom marketplace, the functionality that would require the most engineering efforts will vary. From our experience, the aspects listed further can become one of them.

### Online payments

Along with the defined problem your business addresses and value proposition for the target audience, at the MVP development for startups it is vital to decide on the business monetization strategy that can be realized via:

- Commission fee
- Subscription plans
- Paid listing
- Advertisement

Besides, to enable purchasing on the marketplace, the platform should be connected to at least one payment gateway. Taxing & invoicing, split and recurring payments, payouts, inventory management, online payment security, and compliance are other aspects to consider in advance and require expertise from the tech team in charge of the MVP development.

### On-site search
E-commerce search is important when your business relates to the user-generated content, digital products, service line, or product catalog that is hard to categorize.

This functionality is beneficial for both end customers and vendors. For the first, the more relevant the search results delivered, the better user experience is provided. <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/14953/what-do-76-of-consumers-want-from-your-website-new-data.aspx" target="_blank">76% of website visitors</a> think that the key UX factor on a website is how easily they can find the necessary information. For vendors, the relevant work of the on-site search engine ensures fair competition on the marketplace platform. 

Of course, all the advanced search customizations of the internal search are out of the question at the MVP development step, but some features require minimum engineering efforts but greatly enhance the customer experience even at the initial steps. They include:

- Autocomplete for the search queries. 
- Sound-like and synonym search. 
- Fuzzy search (ignoring typos, plural and case forms, and more).
- Faceted search and filters. 

Learn how the [E-commerce search](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/e-commerce-search-budgeting--where-to-invest-first-/) can be developed across development iterations.

### Product-specific requirements
A lot of functionality that is developed at the MVP steps depends on the unique business idea. The more complex the products presented on the platform, the better you need to plan the platform's architecture for further scaling.

If you are creating a marketplace for some digital content, videos or podcasts, for example, separate attention should be paid to creating a video upload and playback library and the platform’s infrastructure. If you know that there are some marketing campaigns planned, your tech team should prepare the system for the expected number of visitors and higher system load. With any other business context or requirements list, the tech aspects that would require more attention will vary. 

Learn more about how to approach [tech stack planning for the MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/tech-choices-in-startup-mvp-development/) step.

## Roadmap for marketplace platform MVP development

To bring the expected results, the MVP development step should be thoroughly planned. This phase should contain only the development of functionality that allows users to test the platform from start to the desired state but not with multiple options on their way. This approach is called Minimum marketable user flow and, from our experience, helps to avoid over-engineering and speeds up the launch significantly.

The infographic below summarizes how the marketplace MVP step is usually organized when our team is involved in the engineering process.

![Roadmap for marketplace MVP](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_mvp_workflow_24293304f9.svg)

## Marketplace businesses we helped to launch
Here are some inspiring startups that are based on the multi-vendor marketplace concept – bringing creators closer to their specific audiences. Our team is very proud to be part of their success stories as the mission behind each of them is impactful and inspiring.

### Online auction and events marketplace

One of our clients decided to challenge the regular entertainment opportunities like visiting a concert or sports event and decided to launch a marketplace of exclusive experiences and an online auction. Together with the Wise team, they developed and successfully launched an MVP for a marketplace and now are a fully operational and successful business that managed to survive even the covid pandemic that was devastating for the whole entertainment industry.

Read full [case study on marketplace MVP development](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/granted/).

### All-in-one platform for fitness chain

Another Wise client addressed the challenges the covid pandemics brought to the sports and fitness industry. As people were not able to train offline, the platform creators decided to help fitness trainers adopt new approaches to collaboration with their students. 

The platform was designed to allow trainers to monetize their efforts in creating virtual workouts and online personal training programs. With the tech assistance of the Wise team, our client received the MVP of the digital fitness platform in 3 months and launched the platform’s 1.0 version with significant improvements and extensions in another quarter. The collaboration with the fitness trainers as a focus group throughout the development process contributed greatly to the project's success.

Read full [case study on MVP app development](https://wise-engineering.com/case-studies/core/).

## What is your idea?
Outsourced marketplace app development services open great opportunities for startuppers today. With a clear vision of what you need to validate at the MVP step and the right tech partner at your side, you can test your idea with reasonable investments and within a strict time frame. 

Contact us to discuss the business context for your marketplace business. We’ll help define the core platform functionality and all the tech aspects to consider at the initial steps, including tech stack assembling, team augmentation, and more. 







This blog is a summary of insights on marketplace MVP development we received launching marketplace businesses for our clients during the last 15 years.

MVP development for a marketplace platform

Consider the specifics of the marketplace business when launching its MVP. Our team shares insights based on our experience. 

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E-commerce search is an extensive domain, and the computing efforts to on-site search tuning can be rather intensive. But do all the search functions require the same amount of resources to implement? Where should you start when improving the search experience on your website, and what will bring you the most value at different steps? 

At Wise Engineering, we've been working with E-commerce site search implementation and tuning for 15 years, and here's a general roadmap we recommend to our customers. It will help you approach search budgeting more strategically, see where you're now, and where you're going in the long run.

## How to approach search budgeting strategically

As E-commerce companies begin to realize the benefits of improved search experience to their customers, it is now always clear how to start the optimization process and how much resources will be needed for the configuration of each particular feature or selected optimization. 

We’ve divided the whole process of enterprise search tuning into levels depending on the engineering efforts they require. Though we do not provide the exact numbers, you can clearly see what will cost you the most. The higher on the pyramid you go, the more advanced the task is, and the more budget you will need to allocate.

For us, the pyramid also illustrates the logic roadmap of the improved E-commerce search. You can easily start with the first levels, measure the results and move up the pyramid towards the advanced search experience for your E-commerce platform.

This roadmap is applicable to all existing search engine solutions you might currently use – <a href="https://www.elastic.co/" target="_blank">Elastic search</a>, <a href="https://www.algolia.com/" target="_blank">Algolia</a>, <a href="https://solr.apache.org/" target="_blank">Solr</a>, and others. Some features require a few configurations of the search engine and they are on the initial layers of our pyramid. Some search capabilities will be engineered specifically for your business and are located on the top. 

![E-commerce search budgeting](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Investing_steps_for_internal_site_search_799e3253a6.svg)

Let's analyze each of the levels in detail.

## Level 1 – Basic search

The first level usually starts with UX improvements and functionality available out-of-the-box by most search engines and requires a few simple configurations that don’t take much developer’s time. Before starting any significant and time-consuming configurations, try enabling the autocomplete feature, compose separate thesaurus specific to your E-commerce segment, configure a fuzzy search and stopwords filtering. Measure the performance and decide on further investments.

- **UX improvements**. They can, for example, include: creating a visible search box, changing the search box location, highlighting search results, using microcopy for a search bar, showing the number of results, keeping recent user’s queries, and more. 
- **Autocomplete**. Do not consider this a simple feature that reduces typing efforts for customers. Despite the simplicity in the configuration, autocomplete allows your customers to express their search intent aligned with the query understanding of your online store. This helps you increase the search quality with minimum investments.
- **Synonyms**. For every industry you’re selling products or services to, there is a specific synonym range your on-site search should be able to interpret. You can compose a thesaurus specific to your business and add it to the search engine configurations.
- **Fuzzy search**. This configuration helps to ignore typos, plural forms, case forms and minimize the failed search results.
- **Stopwords filtering.** Stopwords are the common words that do not bring any valuable context in most search cases and only expand the search results. At first, the stopwords list can include articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs. Then it can be filled with the words you would define as non-important as you analyze the queries further.

## Level 2 – Search refinement

When the basic search configurations are made, you can proceed with improving how users browse the search results and refine their searches. People hate any extra work, and your customers are no exception. It is always more pleasurable to click on refinement options than browse through multiple paginated search results.

- **Faceted search** helps users refine the search results once they have a listing in response to their query. This could be done based on numerous additional parameters like size, color, brand, price, and more. With facets configured, search results change between the searches depending on the selected parameters.
- **Filters** do not work this flexibly and help only to eliminate the search results based on initial criteria. For example, users can select either browsing shoes for adults or children, but they can not select both and add more parameters to get the search results changed. 
- **Filter suggestion** feature enabled allows users to search directly within a selected category. This also helps searchers avoid information overload and find what they are looking for faster.
- **Sorting** helps to order search records based on specific attributes like price (from lowest to highest or vice versa), popularity, and other parameters.

If it is relevant to your business, at this step you can also configure a **location-based search** and provide results relevant to your customers from different locations.

## Level 3 – Search ranking

We approached the level that would require some more implementation time, and, thus, resources. We included fine-tuning **textual relevance**, **user-based** and **attribute-based ranking** in this step. All of them are related to the search ranking and aim to show at the top those results that address your business goals.

At this point, the search engineering team should closely collaborate with the product or business development teams. The sample questions they would define at this step are the following:

1. What results should be shown at the top?
2. Does merchants' rating influence the relevance?
3. What role does the price play? Do we show the least expensive goods first?
4. What fields are included in the searching process and what should be added or removed?
5. What fields in a product are the most important?
6. How to evaluate the relevance of each product for different customer personas?

Working with your development team at this level, you can set up rules that drive search relevance based on specific parameters.

- **Attribute-based ranking** helps to match shopper queries with not only product names, but also brand names, product types, descriptions, categories, colors, or several of these at the same time.
- **User-based ranking** will take into account demographics, location, user preferences. All the criteria known about the particular user.  
- **Textual relevance** tuning is especially important for the cases when the complexity of catalogs is combined with user-generated product listings. 

## Level 4 – Relevance tuning

Custom ranking surely matters in search optimization and helps address some business objectives, but it is a search relevance model in its broader sense that we want to achieve. 

We recommend starting this step with an **analysis of zero-result queries** that are usually the best source of insights. Why does your system fail to provide what users are searching for in particular cases? At this point, we help our clients compare successful and failed sessions, look more precisely at searches that return zero results, and find commonalities between them. Ideally, we would divide zero-searches into classes and find solutions to turn them into successful ones.

During the previous step, we defined the ranking rules that can be now neglected for some specific use cases. By defining **query-dependent ranking factors**, you can achieve dynamic ranking. For example, you have the rule to show more expensive products on top of the search results, but if a person types the word free in the search bar this rule should be neglected. At this step, with the right tech team, you can fine-tune your search engine to provide the most relevant search results specific to your business use cases.

Furthermore, to make the search system understand which results are relevant for broad or ambiguous queries, you would need to configure **query expansion**. This is a technique when the original user’s query is expanded by adding additional words that help to narrow the query semantics. Query expansion helps determine the searcher’s intent and route users towards a more refined search query.

## Level 5 – Advanced search

We have to admit, this level is the most complex and resource-consuming, yet once you reach it, there are, really, no limits. At this step, you will have the capabilities to rethink how your search performs on the highest level and optimize the enterprise search engine with the most advanced technology and methods. Instead of focusing on the efficient ranking algorithm, you will have the ability to create an efficient query understanding mechanism, an advanced system that will learn along the way and focus on query performance as a key success metric. 

- **Query refinement analysis** helps to look at the process of refining (narrowing down) the initial user searching item and analyze user behavior after the results were provided. This data will help to provide narrowed down paths to results that your users await.
- **Query understanding** is the process of establishing the searcher's intent before providing any results. Your search engine will be able to automatically determine when a search query is broad or ambiguous and expand it to provide relevant results.
- **AI-based search personalization** allows you to serve users personalized search results based on their previous searches, activities, and purchases. The tech team will need to track and collect users' signals, interpret them, and build relevant user profiles. The search results will be modified based on these profiles but the system won't neglect the textual relevance you've built during the previous steps. 

## Configurations running in parallel

As you move along the steps of E-commerce site search optimization, two aspects should be considered no matter where you are in this roadmap. They are internal search monitoring and performance tuning. You can also learn more [E-commerce site search best practices](https://wise-engineering.com/blog/post/6-e-commerce-site-search-best-practices-for-2022/) from our recent blog post.

### Analytics for internal search

Some queries lead to great performance. Some queries deliver zero results. Without measuring this data, you can not move to optimization at any step. Search analytics provides you with important information on what your customers want, how they describe the products or services they are looking for, and gives you hints on how you can optimize your offers and overall search experience.

For example, you can track:

- Queries users enter
- Most popular results
- Most-bought products after search 
- Most-used filters
- Average position of search result click
- How deep do users go in pagination (do they find good results on the first page?)

Though analytics is a topic that never gets underestimated and is often included in the project scope, setting it up properly is a daunting task for the tech team. Engineers will need to build a data tracking pipeline, normalize queries (taking into account synonyms, typos, word forms), make the analytics privacy compliant, and visualize the results for stakeholders. Analytics also opens a possibility to run A/B tests and evaluate introduced optimizations during and after each level we’ve described above.

### Performance tuning

Because search experience is often the primary path to purchase, making the search for enterprise perform faster even for milliseconds can lead to increased revenue. From day one as you introduced search to your E-commerce store, monitor search for downtimes, speed, and vulnerabilities for the sensitive data you might collect.

When our team deals with on-site performance tuning, we start with tech resources analysis that includes analysis of the computing, memory storage, and network you use to run the search on your platform. After this analysis, we proceed with cluster configuration optimization and index configuration to help the search engine perform faster. All the additional optimizations depend on the business goals set for the internal search.

## Reach us for E-commerce search consulting 

Enterprise search is not something you set and forget. There is always room for investment, and now you have a clear vision of where you might start. You can hire the Wise Engineering team if you're looking for site search experts that can ensure quality, best performance, and scalability for your on-site search.

Learn more about our [Elastic site search expertise](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) and contact us to book a consultation to discuss your specific business context.
 

Approach E-commerce search budgeting more strategically. Check out a roadmap for E-commerce site search optimization and get more search conversions. See blog>>

E-commerce search budgeting: Where to invest first?

Check out a roadmap for E-commerce site search optimization and approach search budgeting more strategically.

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The core strategy of any multi-vendor marketplace is to become an online destination. The E-commerce boom started long before Covid-19 pandemics continues to fuel the competition today. To remain noticeable within their industry segments, companies need to understand what shifts took place recently and quickly adopt changes applicable to their businesses. 

We’ve come up with a list of 5 major approach transformations in marketplace development that should help you shape your E-commerce business strategy for the upcoming year.

## Needs-based vs brand marketplaces

The first and most powerful shift took place in the way customers and marketplace owners see the aim of commerce. Needs-based markets fail to satisfy the present demand. The main principles of convenience, ease, and relevance are no longer about having *everything for everyone in one place*. A positive buyer experience requires more than just a shopping destination. Thus, even mega or niche marketplaces can’t fulfill the consumer’s needs for the buyer (not the product) to be the center of merchants’ attention.

### Brand marketplaces surge

To stand out a marketplace should be more than just a transactional site. And that’s why brand marketplaces are on the rise. Now it’s all about *something for someone anywhere they need it*. And to inject life into commercial operations, marketplaces aim to build strong relationships and gain customer loyalty. That includes **personalization, growing communities, and providing customized service with online shopping**. Thus, the latter turns into a meaningful and united virtual experience. Particular products are targeted to particular customers and create a one-stop-shop.

Another reason for this tendency is that brands try to get rid of the risks of retailers and dealers ruining their brand equity. Thus, any customer at any point has one and only destination for a certain brand. And the popular option is to browse products online, find a physical store location, and *click and collect*, either offline or have it shipped anywhere. Seamlessly integrated buyer experience matters most. 

### What makes a brand marketplace

Brand marketplaces create not just buyer experiences, but membership experiences, and aim to turn into membership economies in the long run. Unbranded search in everything-for-everyone mega marketplaces is replaced with the brand building to provide greater value to the audience. 

To remain relevant in these volatile times, brand marketplaces need to:

- Invest in smart or unexpected collaborations to explore new customer territory and stretch the margins of brand identities. As opposed to outdated brand protectionism.
- Provide overlap between digital and physical brand presence to support multiple touchpoints and hybrid structures.
- Ensure technical maturity across markets to streamline the customer journey.

![Marketplace requirements shift](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_brand_marketplace_requirements_3030a09528.svg)

## Enterprise vs small businesses & localization

Another natural alteration relates to geographical location and its influence on commercial success. In the past, it was all about large enterprises merging (read – swallowing) smaller companies to dominate with the same products and services global-wide. In the post-Covid period when local communities get lots of support, localization is a win-win strategy. Especially for cross-border E-commerce.
 
Successful multi-vendor marketplace development in 2022 requires a powerful localized approach. The latter helps international brands gain more revenue in different geographical areas. What matters is speaking to the shoppers in their language in product descriptions and/or customer support. 

### Localization is not equal to text translation
 
The first distinctive localization feature is attention to cultural distinctions and preferences. To engage your local audiences, make the marketplace relevant to them. And it’s not just about translating the pages of websites or apps into other languages. Localization goes far beyond that. It includes offering payment options popular within the region, presenting prices in native currency, and adjusting imagery to the specific cultural, social, or religious features. <a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-cee/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/cross-bording-shopping-strategies/" target="_blank">73% of consumers</a> are still unwilling to trade a localized website for a price 30% lower, as the International Online Shopping Survey shows.
 
Multi-vendor marketplaces can also benefit from local service bundling. Large platforms may offer local services to make them exclusive and preferable in certain areas.

### Large marketplaces empowering local businesses

One more localization approach is to apply the supply chain consolidation local-wise. You can either use only local suppliers and deny international ones or focus on particular domestic regions.

At the same time, large marketplaces have the power to help local businesses either to emerge or evolve. But this doesn’t mean swallowing or blending them. Effective marketplace development in terms of localization means creating bigger ecosystems where small businesses have their part to play. 

Collaborations of companies of different sizes unlock more value for all stakeholders. They boost the local economies via generating additional jobs directly or as side-effects. Large companies also benefit from better matches for different regions. They can get more from the same amount of effort. Yet, to apply this strategy successfully, you should consider the social environment and competition in the local market.

## Single-channel vs omnichannel strategy

The single-channel strategy may still work for companies with limited budgets or scopes. Yet, technology made it possible for consumers to shop across channels with no or little difference in buyer experience. Thus, marketplaces have to do their best to develop their presence in all possible channels. And that incorporates interactions between a brand, a customer, and a retailer.

The prevalence of the omnichannel strategy among multi-vendor marketplaces proves once again that it’s no longer about the product. The focus is shifted to the customers themselves. Brands create a faultless customer experience and leverage the customer data across all channels. 

After all, it’s worth the effort. Businesses with the omnichannel customer engagement strategy retain about <a href="https://cybra.com/10-omnichannel-retail-statistics-you-cant-avoid/" target="_blank">89% of their customers</a> compared to 33% for those with weak omnichannel customer engagement, as the Cybra research proves.

![Comparing single-channel and omnichannel strategies](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_single_channel_vs_omnichannel_c7250c2249.svg)

### Omnichannel strategy advantages

The benefits of the omnichannel strategy are rather explicit.

- **Better customer experience.** Consumers interact with the marketplace in preferable ways. Synchronized customer information helps provide a personalized customer experience with little or no chance for incorrect data or shipments.
- **Increase in sales and traffic.** Expanded and more agile sale strategies and value-added content drive revenue.
- **Boosted customer loyalty.** Increased customer satisfaction and high-quality content across all channels help retain customers.
- **Better data collection.** The marketplace gets valuable insights on how to generate content and what offers will work better both online and offline.

### Possible challenges

The benefits of this strategy also might generate some challenges, as they call for a lot of attention to detail and consolidated processes. A seamless shopping experience requires perfect knowledge of your audience to create the right strategies in the right channels. Thus, another issue is the selection of channels that matter to your audience and working on a solid strategy for each of them. 

Yet, the most fundamental factor is the cost and accuracy of the strategy for developing all channels in an integrated and interconnected manner. Consistency requires a lot of resources like time, knowledge, and maintenance. And that results in building teams, skills, content, and tools to manage these processes.

### Why switch from B2C to D2C

To ensure a compatible omnichannel policy, B2C marketplaces can’t afford not to have a powerful D2C strategy. This robust approach allows businesses to prevent their overreliance on brick-and-mortar or third-party retailers. Using D2C channels helped blend offline and online presence in a new *clicks and mortar* business model.

The retail disruption during the pandemic proved that proper D2C strategies also help maintain business continuity and satisfy the evolving demand for uninterrupted *no-middlemen* customer experience. The latter gives direct access to valuable customer feedback that can be used to drive sales. Total control over all aspects of customer experience helps build emotional relations and nurture customer loyalty. 

To build decent customer-facing D2C experiences, marketplaces need to optimize their back-office processes. In such straightforward re-designing of the commerce models, you need to focus on business core competencies. Yet, this challenge can be seen as a benefit for your improving business strategy as a whole. To succeed, learn to concentrate on doing what you're best at and what matters most.  Weigh your options and delegate other aspects that can take too much opportunity cost like [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/). 

## Local vs cross-border trade
The immense shift in consumer habits allowed E-commerce to go cross-border with virtually no geographical limitations. This surge doesn’t only apply to certain types of products or services. Consumers make cross-border purchases of everything – from everyday items to luxury. 

And this is not a short-term issue, rather an evolving tendency. Those who converted to online shopping during the pandemic are likely to stay after things go back to normal (well, the new normal). And the predictions are that the bigger part of it will be cross-border.

In a nutshell, despite all the benefits of this marketplace globalization, cross-border E-commerce has no one-size-fits solution. Different marketplaces have multiple options for different markets and regions. Such diversity ensures proper pricing, customer satisfaction, and retention. To stay relevant and profitable, cross-border E-commerce has to tackle several challenges.

### Cross-border banking

Multi-vendor marketplace consumers expect payment options that use local payment networks, their own banks, and new mobile methods. Yet, when a shopper makes a cross-border purchase, the transaction involves not just their bank but the merchant’s bank. It also includes a payment processor, card network, issuing bank, an acquiring bank. Whether the customers select the preferred payment type themselves or follow the merchants’ options, the FX margin may be quite different and, thus, increase the total purchase price. And that’s what your customers need to know in advance.

### Cross-border taxation

Brands selling cross-border need to follow local tax laws, import and export regulations. The outbreak of Covid-19 increased the number of countries that tax foreign exchange payments as well as the tax amount itself.

Failure to understand the nuances in local regulations could result in serious financial penalties and damage to brand reputation. If the consumers bear these additional costs (and they usually do), it’s not the bank, but the merchant who is responsible for all the clarification. Transparency is the only strategy to avoid misunderstanding as to why and what taxes they are charged.

### Price variation across countries

Marketplaces that involve cross-border E-commerce cannot and should not have the same price in different markets and regions. Pricing policy should be elastic locally and internationally. And elasticity is not only about the price but the value as well, both tangible and intangible. 

Price alteration comes in two options.

1. **Cosmetic changes** happen when the merchant only converts the price applying local currency. Earlier, we addressed the importance of localization for gaining trust. Shoppers expect to make a transaction in their local currency (by default or choosing it among other options) regardless of the product’s country of origin. Conversion can still be carried out in different ways. Sometimes it allows the merchant to grasp additional fees and not to let the card issuer benefit from it. 
2. **True price localization** is when the price differs across different markets, countries, and regions. In this case, price (and availability) for goods or services may vary globally or even across one country either due to governmental policies, currency exchange rates, taxes, tariffs, and insurance factors or market individuality like consumption composition, facilities, providers, competitors, brand preferences and local market needs.

In any case, the three major points are: to be transparent with the buyers, to stay within the internal pricing corridor for price differentiation, and to handle the price localization yourself.
 
Thus, to make the price relevant to actual market value, it is possible to use automated monitoring tools. They help keep track of products in different distribution channels, resellers and competitors, inside different countries and markets. Automated monitoring tools save the merchants time and money. And the data you receive prompts how to improve your branding strategy.

### Security issues

Multi-vendor marketplace development also requires reliable and seamless systems to support cross-border payments. Firstly, it’s vital to keep constant track of data protection regulations. These are specific to countries involved in E-commerce and tend to change the terms and compliance dates. Their violation may result in budget and brand reputation loss. 
 
The cross-border trade boom also means a greater number of online crimes. To make cross-border transactions safer and prevent cybercrime, leading payment providers started to introduce or, at least, consider utilizing biometrics and KYC identity verifications. To protect revenue streams and ensure customer security, online marketplaces may also need to involve these technologies. As well as international payment messaging standards like ISO 20022. At present, <a href="https://managedlei.com/blog/the-challenges-of-cross-border-payments/" target="_blank">70 countries</a> across the globe have adopted the latter, and more should join to provide interoperability and online purchasing security.

## Build vs buy in marketplace development

When it comes to marketplace creation, [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) is always the choice. Yet it does not mean that all the functionality will be written from scratch. To launch faster, experienced tech teams opt for ready-made API-level solutions or parts of those to solve some trivial tasks and focus on those parts of the E-commerce platform that brings the most value to the end-users. 

It makes sense if marketplace development is seen not just as a platform creation but as shaping the engine that moves the E-commerce business forward. This option allows instead of reinventing the wheel and diving into troublesome and long-term development, to focus on what makes your business special and constitutes its core competencies. 

For example, if you run a cross-border marketplace, you would obviously need a custom solution for banking, payments, and taxes. At the same time, you can integrate a SaaS product for website analytics or email marketing. If your marketplace possesses a variety of products that are hard to categorize and the integration of the full-text [internal search](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/) is the only way to help users find the necessary goods, this aspect would require the most effort of your development team.

![How to make a build vs buy decision](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/marketplace_development_build_vs_buy_f08f74e319.svg)

## Key takeaways

Recent transformations in the global E-commerce industry create multiple opportunities for marketplace development. Here are the main handy takeaways you can start implementing. 

- In marketplace development, consider buying existing components, many of which have become commodities nowadays, and invest in building what makes your business core value.
- Focus on the brand of your marketplace. The strategy of selling everything to everyone is in the past. It’s all about personalization and customization now.
- Collaborate with small regional businesses to evolve together and create mutual benefits. Apply thorough localization strategies. The commercial success of your marketplace across the globe directly depends on how well you can relate to diverse local communities. 
- When exploring new horizons through cross-border trade, do not underestimate the risks related to banking, taxation, pricing, and security.
- Embrace your customer's attention through multiple channels. Make your brand omnipresent and integrated into offline and online shopping.



Get the list of 5 major approach transformations in marketplace development that should help you shape your E-commerce business strategy for 2022.


5 shifts defining marketplace development in 2022

Get the list of approach transformations in marketplace development that will help you shape your E-commerce strategy for 2022.

site_search_main.svg

Discover customer behavior trends of 2022 and E-commerce site search best practices that will help you meet customer expectations and boost sales. Read more >>

6 E-commerce Site Search Best Practices for 2022

Discover customer behavior trends of 2022 and E-commerce site search best practices that will help you meet customer expectations.

6 E-commerce site search best practices for 2022

security (2).png

Security

Global retail E-commerce sales are expected to reach <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/288487/forecast-of-global-b2c-e-commerce-growth/" target="_blank">$4.13 trillion</a> this year as online buyers converge on their preferred platforms to buy essentials, luxuries, and everything in between.
As online retail continues to gather speed, E-commerce platforms are being targeted by cybercriminals looking to hack sensitive customer information and scam unsuspecting people.
According to the <a href="https://pdf.ic3.gov/2019_IC3Report.pdf" target="_blank">FBI IC3 2019 Internet Crime Report</a>, global E-commerce merchants reported a loss of over $3.5 billion to cyberattacks. This is why online merchants must secure their E-commerce websites and establish robust security measures to safeguard their data.

So, how can you protect your E-commerce platform and protect customer data?

## Know the areas of your platform to fortify

E-commerce merchants need to keep tabs on several channels, including:

### Admin side access

Admin portals shouldn't be easily accessible from just about any IP address.

Ensure you lock down cPanels so only permitted IP addresses can access your servers. Next, check if directories have the correct permissions. For example, you'll need to remove all 777 permissions that allow virtually anyone to read, write, and modify files.

Want to take it a step further? Install panel notifications for unknown IP log-in attempts that will alert you and other admins of any suspicious activity.

### Get a reliable VPN

Financial transactions over public networks are vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks where malicious users attempt to intercept information being transmitted.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers the best security in situations like these. It encrypts connections to secure offsite servers, eliminating the threat of third-party users who may be trying to intercept your data transmissions.

If you are looking to save costs opt for SSL-based VPNs, these are relatively affordable and still offer similar security specifications.

### Infrastructure security

Hackers are employing increasingly sophisticated tools to attack and phish information from online businesses. This means you can't prevent malware attacks by simply installing anti-virus software.

It may be time to invest in powerful application firewalls that let you block communications from unknown domains, and help regulate incoming and outgoing traffic.

Similarly, plugins also help to watch out for and deny unauthorized access to your infrastructure. These tools offer selective permeability that grants permission only to trusted users.

### User data

44% of organizations reported <a href="https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/security/invest-cyber-resilience" target="_blank">over 500,000 customer records</a> stolen over last year alone.

This is cause for concern as losing personal and financial information of your customers can be the reason for a lawsuit and mar your reputation as a responsible business, discouraging others from visiting your site or buying from you.

This is a liability you want to avoid. As a best practice, you should never store customers' credit card information on your servers. In the event of an attack, this leaves their information unprotected and exposed to misuse.

You might expect clients to get frustrated by re-entering their payment information time and time again. However, they'll be more than understanding of this once you take the time to explain that this is crucial to protecting them from fraud.

Likewise, guide your employees on how to manage sensitive customer information, and ensure they adhere to mandated security protocols, like non-disclosure of users' personal data via email.

### Workspace security

Online retailers can (and should) secure their SaaS and cloud-based workspaces against data breaches. Given that your employees access and manage sensitive company data on the cloud, centralizing this information can shield you from data leaks and theft.

To add to that, requiring employees to people to use multifactor authentication can prevent unauthorized access to corporate apps and files - thus strengthening your workspace security.

### Personal training

Simply put, one of the safest ways you can avoid malicious attacks and protect your business is to monitor your site for any suspicious activity.

You can leverage monitoring software that tracks user activity in real-time and notifies you of irregular behavior (in the case of cookied users) as well as questionable transactions.

## Security measures to implement

![E-commerce cybersecurity measures](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/e_commerce_security_measures_9e81be2ddc.svg)

### Internal audit

Regular internal audits can help you investigate red flags and identify phony profiles. They also highlight potential threats to your online business, such as customer information scrapping, malicious attack footprint, business logic abuse, and more.

Some areas you might want to reviews include:

- Security perimeter
- Consumer activity
- Data integrity

### 3rd-party audit

Conduct an inventory of any third-party solutions you run within your business. Continually assess their performance, and if you're not using them, remove their integrations from your systems.

Ideally, you should aim to allow as limited access to your data as possible. If you're not sure where to start, external auditing services can help you assess the value of your inventory - and where you can eliminate threats.

### Employees training

More than <a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/3153707/top-cybersecurity-facts-figures-and-statistics.html" target="_blank">80% of reported security risks</a> are made up of phishing attacks - which are also widely recognized as the top data breach threat to organizations today. It's also one of the easiest ways that malicious users can access your database and misuse both customer and employee data.

If employees can recognize suspicious emails, they'd be less likely to give up sensitive information in the wrong hands. According to Barracuda Networks, spear-phishing emails were <a href="https://blog.barracuda.com/2020/03/26/threat-spotlight-coronavirus-related-phishing/" target="_blank">up by 667% in March alone</a>.

Educate your staff about security best practices and inform them of how to defend themselves against spammy emails and phishing links left in comments on your website. Urge them to alert these IDs to management, who can then take action to identify and eliminate the threat.

### Disaster recovery

In the event of a data breach, the best security measure you can take is to make frequent backups of your E-commerce website and mission-critical data. This way, it becomes easier to retrieve information from your hosting provider and restore normalcy to your platform as soon as possible.

Ensure you have a plan in place for managing customer concerns and securing your business during this time, as you'll need to reassure customers you have things under control.

### Plan testing

As an added safety precaution, perform regular vulnerability scans across your E-commerce website and assess security gaps that hackers can exploit. This is crucial, especially when you're testing out new features and functionality before updates go live.

## Key takeaways

Research states <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/04/28/2023282/0/en/Arkose-Labs-Reveals-20-Spike-in-Fraud-as-Digital-Behavior-Shifts-During-COVID-19.html" target="_blank">approximately 445 million cyberattacks</a> have occurred since the start of 2020.

It only takes one successful attempt to access your database - and your entire business is compromised. Protect your brand and your reputation by evaluating your security measures and consider how each can be optimized to fortify your business against external threats.

Ultimately, offering your clients robust security in the face of data threats will help you build their confidence and gain their loyalty.


Learn ways to boost the security of your E-commerce platform and get handy tips on how to do it fast.

Cybersecurity best practices for E-commerce merchants

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The <a href="https://www.retailresearch.org/online-retail.html" target="_blank">center for Retail Research</a> published a report which suggests that e-commerce is the fastest-growing retail market in Europe. With the Coronavirus pandemic keeping millions of local businesses in lockdown, the global E-commerce market is undoubtedly going to <a href="https://www.statista.com/study/42335/ecommerce-report/" target="_blank">surpass 2 trillion dollars</a> by the end of 2020.

Many successful and aspiring entrepreneurs regard E-commerce as one of the most accelerated and efficient systems for reaching successful outcomes online. And to become a successful E-commerce enterprise, business owners will need to do a lot more than just identifying a product niche, set up a website, or advertising to potential customers.   Therefore,   they will need to improve their search in e-commerce to provide   "almost perfect"   search queries for potential customers looking for a specific need.

With regards to a recent E-commerce search experience report by The Baymard Institute, you'd be surprised by the outcome. Out of the 50-e-commerce website evaluated, 34 percent of search queries on their website don't usually reveal useful results, and 70 percent of those search engines on those websites do not show relevant product similarities.

![Search Query Support Among Top 50 US E-Commerce Sites (1).png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Search_query_support_among_top_50_US_E_commerce_sites_72b947df27.svg)

Whether you manage a small online store or a big E-commerce website, ensuring your e-commerce site search is consistently enhanced to provide frictionless user experience is vital for higher conversion.

All E-commerce website visitors are unique. Some visitors already know what they want to buy, while others look for entertainment - surfing through the latest trends, product images,  description,  or checking out the information.   Nonetheless,   no matter the site visitors, whether browsers or researchers, you can use them to your advantage with your federated search information.

It's important to know that every element on an E-commerce site has a role to play for the success of the site, the same way different shoppers rely on various aspects on the site to shape their user experience. Extensively, online customers can be separated into two transcendent sorts: researchers and browsers.

Researchers are goal-driven shoppers to purchase soon. They already have the idea of what they want but will probably be searching for the most suited option from their search in E-commerce sites.

Researchers may surf through your website multiple times, gathering information before they decide to make a purchase.

On the other hand, browsing shoppers visit an E-commerce site to see what is new, famous, and what's on sale.

They go to their favorite website or a new section to stay up on the latest trends, window-shop for future purchases, or to kill time. Whatever the case may be, having people spend time on your site can be intuitive for your brand. If they are the excellent user experience your site has to offer, they'll be more likely to revisit your site when they are ready to make a   purchase.   While they are busy getting entertained,   you,   the business owner has the opportunity to gather valuable information about your visitor, which can help you turn those browsers into buyers.

Another intense research from the Baymard Institute suggests that E-commerce site search is undoubtedly found to be the preferred product finding strategy by shoppers as they perceive it to be faster than category navigation. In this regard, Effective site search plays a direct, quantifiable role in increasing sales revenue, so working towards improving and optimizing your product inventory will directly affect the success of your search in e-commerce.

When on-site search is compared to other metrics, site search is usually ignored. Business owners prefer to pay attention to optimizing personalized emails or landing pages. In contrast, almost all product-focused buyers use on-site search to hasten their buying journey on an E-commerce website.   And if your website happens to lack the efficiency and accuracy they want, they will look elsewhere.

Your on-site search plays the role of your sales team. Nonetheless, taking the necessary steps to improve your site search can lead to happier customers who eventually convert to real paying clients.

There are three primary ways shoppers can find products on an E-commerce site.

![Jeans_.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Jeans_5cdcfc2aa2.png)

- Category   Browsing:   occurs when shoppers surf through categories and narrow down to see the items they are searching for in the subcategories.
- Keyword Search: happens when a potential shopper uses the on-site search bar to find products using closely related keywords. The keywords can be short tail or long-tail keywords; internal, competitive, and industry-specific.
- Faceted Search occurs when shoppers refine their search by narrowing the results through search filters. For instance, it can be filtered into length, size, brand, or weight; this type of search filters can be searched on the Amazon website. It will be an excellent opportunity to integrate a solution that will help achieve your search goal - such as enterprise search, or database search engine into your faceted Search to produce more search relevant information to your site visitors.

Several factors contribute to whether shoppers can easily find products through on-site search. These factors make it easier to provide the nearest search queries to visitors, which include synonyms, predictive search, misspellings, and type-ahead. Big websites like Amazon have integrated enterprise search as a service software to ensure their on-site search is performing efficiently.

For instance, Amazon tries to find relevant, accessible, and informative content to provide to its customers. The website uses a sophisticated search algorithm that has one primary objective; bring shoppers closer to relevant products as fast as possible. Basically, the Amazon search algorithm works similarly to google search algorithm. It analyses merely search queries for relevant keywords and matches customers' needs with related products in that niche.

Aside from providing engaging value to its customers, Amazon has access to a considerable amount of data to use for search engine results. This benefit is linked to the fact that Amazon is a self-contained platform, gathering data from many sources and storing them within its big data infrastructures.

Amazon uses the A9 ranking algorithm, whose primary purpose is to deliver a spectacular customer experience, thereby leaving the customer hooked on the website. It achieves this by analyzing different pieces of information to determine the most accurate and valuable product to appear in the search queries. The algorithm usually considers the following criteria to rank the product according to search relevance. They include: keywords, customer reviews, performance history, delivery time, and, most importantly, sales conversion.

## Conclusion

Whether you are a small or big E-commerce website, the importance of search in E-commerce cannot be overemphasized. Search is relevant and improving search leads to better conversions and engaging shopper experience.


Learn how optimized internal search leads to better conversions and improves overall user experience.

How search affects sales in E-commerce

search.png

An E-commerce store without an in-house search is like a grocery store without labels. You'd be left wandering down the aisles of the store with the hope of finding what you are "searching" for by chance. For the store owner, this is a bad practice as some customers might get jaded before finding anything, and the outcome of this means no or little business. This case can also be applicable to an E-commerce store if we replace the offline attendants with the online visitors who use the search widget.
 
The efficiency of the internal search has surpassed the need for navigation on the website by users and has also become a great tool for the store owners. It helps to drive sales and increase conversions. 
 
The tech surrounding the functionality of the search widget is beyond the generic search present on most websites as this only gives results based exclusively on the search keyword. For example, if the word "shirt" is typed into the search bar, the search results are not expected to go beyond the word "shirt", and we could say this type of search is based strictly on the search keyword and not influenced by the user experience and the other factors.
 
![Copy of cases-image-1.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Copy_of_cases_image_1_57331e4918.png)
 
Currently, there are two main options that we will describe at a high level in this post. For most CTOs this sounds like "build vs buy" and in many cases. The decision depends not only on what is better but what kind of company you are in: are you a tech-first company or a business-first company.
 
## Building an in-house search for E-commerce

Building an E-commerce search yourself involves the configuration of a search engine, like <a href="https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/elasticsearch-integration/">Elastic site search</a>, ManticoreSearch, or Solr. There are a handful of search features to consider and scope when building an E-commerce search, for example, search types, autosuggest, typo tolerance, and many other built-in features.
 
These solutions provide a very flexible search platform. Setting it up can take a month at most, and this relies upon certain factors, for example, the number of products in the catalog. The need to structure and optimize data for search cannot be left out as it is crucial to the solution functionality. The data should be prepared for the search integration. This might include:
- Normalizing attribute values.
- Configuration of basic and advanced features that would improve user experience.
- Structuring and optimization of data then the ranking of search results based on their relevancy.

Pros and cons of using self-hosted search

![Pros and cons of self-hosted search.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/building_in_house_search_c2cdd352f3.svg)

## Adopting 3rd-party vendor
 
SaaS companies specialize in specific niches and always optimize their products to get excellent results based on the niche the product specializes in. They have focused on creating an efficient site search that possesses features like text auto-complete, spell checker, natural language processing (NLP), advanced stemming, and more.

Pros and cons of using SaaS

![Adopting 3rd-party vendor](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/adopting_3rdparty_vendor_b9503a7048.svg)

## Where to start?

If you are wondering where you should start while doing your research on how to improve search on your site there are a few questions to answer first. Do you know what problem you are solving or what goal you pursue? If so – great. If not, you might want to start by analyzing a few basic metrics to understand how your search performs and how it affects sales.

**Conversion Rate**

Conversion rate is arguably the most important metric, it has a significant impact on your site's profitability. When your website search functions as well as it should, it becomes a salesman that leads users to their desired destination pages. This way, search helps to engage and convert potential customers.

**Bounce Rate**

The bounce rate is the rate at which new visitors open your site and immediately click away without interacting with it. The lower the bounce rate, the better. A high bounce rate can mean several things and common problems include poor design, low usability, or high search time. This metric is a great indicator for improvement.

**Search Page Speed**

Page Speed is the amount of time that it takes for a web page to load. A page's loading speed is determined by several different factors. This issue can be solved by site search providers or the in-house development team.

**How Deep Search Users Go**

A lot of users get jaded after searching the first and second pages, so it's up to the search provider to optimize the search tool to bring results relevant to the keywords up on the search page. This data is very important to analyze while working on improving internal search.

**Relevancy Ranking**

The task of the search engine is to ensure that the best-matched results are shown up first. Search irrelevance turns into poor user experience and this affects sales directly. Constantly improving your data tagging, assessing site search performance, and tweaking your relevance algorithms will be key to search relevancy.

**A/B Testing**

This is an important tool that involves a performance comparison between two versions of software (a search results page, in this case). A/B testing can be used to determine which search changes to launch after monitoring certain metrics like the ones listed above. A/B testing approach will have significant implications for what kinds of changes you need to create, test, and then launch.

**Team Cooperation**

The last but not least significant thing to start with is building an in-house team for E-commerce development or hiring an outsourcing partner. Experienced engineers, data analysts, and marketers are required to work in an across-functional team. Look for people with an expertise-based approach that have experience with internal search integration and optimization specifically.

*** 
To sum up, the pros and cons of both options have to be considered in terms of how it fits the E-commerce store and the budget, among other factors. Choosing how to develop your E-commerce search, shouldn't be a decision to jump into. Start with defining what goals you want to achieve by working on search and evaluating all options carefully.
 
Wise Engineering experts provide consulting services on [custom E-commerce development](https://wise-engineering.com/expertise/e-commerce/) and will gladly discuss your tech challenges and business goals via call or email. 

Get handy tips on how to integrate in-house search to your E-commerce platform and steps to start.

Building an in-house search for E-commerce | Wise Engineering Blog

Get handy tips on how to integrate internal search to your E-commerce platform and steps to start.

Building an in-house search for E-commerce

05_cases-01.svg

## Problem

Nowadays search becomes a primary source of resource discovery. So having a modern search engine that powers it is a vital part of a marketplace or other E-commerce site. E-commerce platforms contain gigabytes of data, usually not well structured and being input by different sellers so searching within it is not a trivial thing.

There are a variety of site search engines and services built on top of them so it is not an easy thing to choose the one that will perfectly fit requirements and be a good platform for further search results optimization and improvements.


## Goals and challenges

- Choose between SaaS and self-hosted engines
- Flexible search results tuning mechanisms
- Relatively low infrastructure maintenance
- Reach search experience features implemented


## How Wise Engineering helped
We have created a list of available search engines and services on a market that fit the required goals. Helped to create an evaluation matrix with a list of required search features and tuning capabilities. Filtered candidates to 2-3 vendors and created a plan for further evaluation of search results, integration efforts and further infrastructure maintenance.


## Results
- Created a finalized list of 2-3 potential vendors to evaluate.
- Listed search features to be added with new search vendor.
- Planned further evaluation process, tools and KPIs.
- List regressions and workarounds if current search implementation has some specific use cases.


## Implementation process

### Evaluation matrix
First, we created a long list of search engines and services and combined them into a matrix where we’ve put features and capabilities we want to have in a new search engine or provider. Each feature has its weight so it sets priorities and helps to evaluate a final result better. Some engines/providers may have features implemented in a different way and not always meet requirements. In this case, additionally to feature weights we created another feature evaluation dimension with three simple states as “doesn’t meet requirements”, “par” and “exceeds requirements”. So if the feature we want to have in search is important (which is defined in its weight) but has “doesn’t meet requirements” value for it we exclude this search engine/provider from the further evaluation process. At this point, we had an evaluation matrix with only 3 engines and services left that met all the requirements we’ve set on the first step. It was a mix of services and engines to be self-hosted so we needed to create different evaluation and implementation plans for them.

### Sales calls and estimation
For services, we scheduled calls with the sales team and went over features we wanted to have, implementation concerns, etc. At this step, it was important to estimate an annual cost of search service according to the features we want, search rates, potential index size, etc. The final price was an important factor in final vendor decision making. For self-hosted engines, we calculated an estimated hardware quantity required to support the search. Also, estimated a potential ops time required to support search infrastructure which also leads to additional cost.

### Demo search results evaluation
There are a few more additional steps we took to help. We created a step by step plan for demo search evaluation. This plan included a mockup of possible search results evaluation tool to run side by side comparison of current search results and demo search setup with new vendors and services. We also created a regression list of features in current search implementation and possible workarounds in new ones. There were some domain-specific search filters and search query expansions that weren’t possible to port to every new search candidate, so we designed a workaround for them to make sure new search candidates didn’t get rid of some search features users may have been used to.

## Results

Evaluation matrix and further vendors evaluation process have been created. We planned tools to be built and KPIs to measure and prepare for a final search engine decision recommendation, regressions, and possible workarounds. A list of new and modern search features has been created, they will be implemented after a new search vendor is chosen and integrated.


Check out the main steps of the site search implementation and how the right tech team can help.

Wise Engineering Blog

Changes in customer searching behavior and trends they bring

Digital transformation strategy for E-commerce: 7 trends for 2023

Strategic online marketplaces trends & forecasts for 2023

10 tips to improve search performance with Elasticsearch

Top-10 E-commerce trends for 2023 and beyond

Site search personalization: How to configure & use cases

Solr vs Elasticsearch: In-depth comparison for E-commerce

Key components in custom E-commerce development

10 marketplace startups reversing E-commerce trends in 2022

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development insights from
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Join our team

Wise Engineering Blog

Changes in customer searching behavior and trends they bring

Digital transformation strategy for E-commerce: 7 trends for 2023

Strategic online marketplaces trends & forecasts for 2023

10 tips to improve search performance with Elasticsearch

Top-10 E-commerce trends for 2023 and beyond

Site search personalization: How to configure & use cases

Solr vs Elasticsearch: In-depth comparison for E-commerce

Key components in custom E-commerce development

10 marketplace startups reversing E-commerce trends in 2022

Get more product development insights from our experts

Get more product
development insights from
our experts