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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.

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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

![cases-image-3.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/cases_image_3_6515c8a3d1.png)

 

### 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 Takeaway

 

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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Startups

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_1_e6e15eddce.png)

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

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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 relevancies

 
 
Pros and cons of using self-hosted search

![Pros and cons of self-hosted search.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Pros_and_cons_of_self_hosted_search_fe3f1f05f1.png)
 
 
 

## 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

![SaaS.png](https://wise-site.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/Saa_S_7026cdb8f0.png)
 
 

## 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

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# 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

6 E-commerce Site Search Best Practices for 2022

Cybersecurity best practices for E-commerce merchants

How search affects sales in E-commerce

Building an in-house search for E-commerce

Choosing search vendor