Countdown to the Summit: Searching for Profits in the Right Place

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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Today’s Yahoo! Store Blog post comes from Sanjay Arora, founder and CEO of Nextopia, one of our Patron Sponsors for the Chicago Yahoo! Merchant Summit being held on June 11. A Yahoo! Small Business partner, Nextopia’s site search and navigation technology helps more than 1,000 retailers enjoy more online success, including well-known merchants such as American Muscle, Rock Bottom Golf, and Emitations.

The experience for retailers like you, who may be attending the upcoming Yahoo! Merchant Summit, is not too dissimilar from the experience of visitors to your site. Some retailers traveling to Chicago will have an absolutely clear idea what they want to achieve (or learn or buy, etc., depending on the case) by attending. Others may not know exactly what they want to get out of the show, beyond one or two plans established before they arrive. And still others may just attend because they want to share in the warmth of the Yahoo! Merchant community, and share and gain ideas. They’re not arriving with a clear agenda in mind, but are hoping that their trip will have been worthwhile by the time their plane departs from a Midway or O’Hare gate, following the Summit.

In each scenario, their respective objectives are to leave knowing more than when they arrived. Helping them maximize their learning, as well as their investment in attending, will be the efforts of the organizers who’ve worked hard to create a top-notch curriculum. The organizers will try to introduce learning opportunities to every attendee so their attendance ultimately is valuable. This is pretty much what site search technology aims to deliver: opportunities for web site operators to introduce site visitors to opportunities, such as product categories and details, information, subscriptions, and registrations, etc., that will enrich the visit to that site.

By tapping site data that categorize past visitor behaviors, new site search technology helps visitors find what they want – even if they’re not quite sure what they’re seeking. If the site search functionality is well-implemented and integrated into the sales database, and the data is reliable and accurate, good and profitable things can happen. The ideal event will be the introduction of the right product at the right time at the right retail price, which makes you, the retailer, content.

The topic I’ll be covering during the Summit’s site search design panel is how retailers can ensure that site visitors can easily benefit from the site search functionality they’ve so diligently refined. I’ll take you through a more in-depth explanation of the following progression, from the basics, to intermediate, advanced, and guru phases.

Analyze what you’re currently doing (if anything) against some of these best practices:

• Is your search box easy to find on the site, or is it buried somewhere at the bottom of the page?
  Don’t frustrate visitors by making the search box hard to find. It either goes in the upper right corner of the header, or above the fold in the left navigation column.

• Is it clear that your search box is a search box and not an email subscription box?
  The best way to identify your search box is to clearly label it.

• Do you offer auto-suggestions in your search box?
  Make it easier and faster for customers to search your site, without having to worry about whether their keywords are spelled correctly.

• Do you offer product reviews and ratings as part of your search refinements?

• Do you have the ability to merchandise to your customers based on the actual metrics of your search data?
  Automatically present search results that are the best or fastest sellers.

• Do you have the ability to convert your search pages into dynamic landing pages?
  Are you personalizing the data presented to your customers? For example, do you show related searches, or that people who searched for "x" ultimately bought "y"?

To summarize this brief overview, your options to take advantage of site search, and their ease of implementation, will depend on where you are with your design, data, and analytics. I look forward to elaborating on this list later this month.

Nextopia counts many, many Yahoo! merchants as customers. We look forward to meeting old friends and customers, as well as making new ones at the Yahoo! Merchant Summit. We’ll have a booth in the exhibit hall, and my panel is just after lunch. Don’t miss it, and don’t be shy. I look forward to sharing with you a wealth of accumulated knowledge about how retailers like yourself can best implement and refine site search functionality on your own site.

You can catch a bit of this knowledge in advance by reading some recent interviews on our blog with successful Yahoo! merchants eHobbies and Tackle Direct.

Sanjay Arora
Founder and CEO, Nextopia, and Guest Blogger for Yahoo! Small Business
Follow @Nextopia on Twitter
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