As an ecommerce professional, you may struggle with meeting your conversion and revenue goals. You know you would benefit from a robust personalization strategy but the lack of resources or tools is stressing you out. 

So, let’s start with a small calming exercise. Sit back, close your eyes for a minute, and visualize what website personalization means to you. Go on!

Hopefully you’ve now opened your eyes and continued reading. 

If your mind was filled with images of recommendation carousels promoting most viewed and trending products, or product recommendations displayed on a category page, you’re definitely not wrong. But you might have forgotten an important, still often overlooked, aspect of personalization: product discovery through search.

Read on to find out why personalized search is such a crucial part of your personalization strategy and how Frosmo can help you make your product discovery dreams come true. For example, for a customer in consumer electronics ecommerce, implementing Frosmo Search increased purchases by more than 300% and revenue by more than 40% during a three-week period.

Product discovery, simply put, is the process of ensuring that your visitors find relevant products easily and smoothly in order to convert to paying customers. This includes both serving them with products they came looking for and introducing them to new, relevant products they might like. The more your site has different brands, categories, and products, the more important it is to excel at product discovery to avoid choice overload.

Online, product discovery starts with search engine optimization and continues all the way to the emails you send to your customers. It includes multiple aspects, such as:

In this article, we’ll focus on the aspects of product discovery that can be improved with personalization, especially search.

We’d like to add a disclaimer here. You may argue that product discovery and search are, in fact, different beasts. According to a common definition, search is an active pursuit for something you know you want. Discovery, on the other hand, may happen passively while you’re just browsing a category or, indeed, searching for something else.

However, personalized search blurs this line. Using an AI-driven, smart search means that while you’re actively searching for a specific brand or product, you’ll get suggestions for search terms, brands, categories, and products based not only on your search queries but your affinity and recent interactions on the site.

Consumers expect sites to remember their preferences and history. In fact, already in 2018, 91% of consumers said they are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations. In a Google study from 2021, 84 % of consumers said they will purchase from a brand that provides helpful information when they’re exploring options.

More numbers, you say?

Search is the first, and often the most important, touchpoint between consumers and ecommerce sites. Visitors who search are, depending on the source, at least 1.8 more likely to convert and when they do, they create more revenue than those who only navigate. On the other hand, up to 68% of visitors abandon a site after a poor search experience.

So, in short, you need personalized search because:

While recommendation engines use an algorithm to retrieve and display products based on past interactions on the site, such as product views and purchases, search engines retrieve products and information based on search queries users enter to the search field. Personalized search combines both, adding a merchandizing layer on top of the search. 

A robust search solution includes:

At Frosmo, we know the positive impact a suitable personalization strategy makes in each part of the customer journey and how important it is to continually optimize the strategies. The Frosmo Platform provides solutions for every aspect of personalization with automatics affinity tracking and self-optimizing recommendation algorithms.

Frosmo Search is an AI-powered solution designed to improve the customer experience regardless of your current search engine setup. For example:

For a customer in consumer electronics ecommerce, we A/B tested Frosmo Instant Search against their previous search solution, and the results were impressive. During a three-week period: