Smart Discovery FAQ

What is Smart Discovery?
How does Smart Discovery work?
What are the benefits of Smart Discovery?
What kind of sites is Smart Discovery for?
What kind of results can we expect from Smart Discovery?
Where in the customer journey should we use Smart Discovery?
My site already has a search facility. Do I still need Smart Discovery?
How will Smart Discovery impact the look & feel of my site?

What is Smart Discovery?

It’s very difficult to predict exactly which product to recommend to a given customer. This is especially true on mobile, where screen real estate is limited and the users’ attention span is even shorter than on desktop. In addition, on mobile, searching is cumbersome and the search box often covers most of the screen.

Smart Discovery is a visual search solution that dynamically recommends visitors what to search. Based on a visitor’s Super Affinity profile, their current location on the site, and what’s currently popular on the site, Smart Discovery shows the visitor a personalized selection of recommended searches, or Smart Discovery suggestions. After clicking or tapping on a Smart Discovery, the visitor is shown a curated collection of products (or other items, such as games or articles) matching their search and their interests.

In a normal search scenario, the customer is expected to actively search for products or other items. With Smart Discovery, the Frosmo Platform performs the search on behalf of the customer, doing most of the work.

How does Smart Discovery work?

When a visitor enters your site and views a page containing a Smart Discovery:

1. The Frosmo Platform performs a search and sorts the search results based on the visitor’s affinities.
2. Based on the search results, the platform dynamically displays personalized Smart Discovery suggestions (such as text buttons or images) on the page.
3. When the visitor clicks or taps a suggestion, they’ll see a filtered collection of products matching their search and interests.

To find out exactly how Search & Smart Discovery works, see Frosmo Documentation.

What are the benefits of Smart Discovery?

Smart Discovery provides several benefits for the site business performance and customer experience:

• Boost findability and discovery. Smart Discovery essentially performs searches for your customers, which allows them to effectively find and discover items that are relevant to them in their current customer journey phase.
• Improve search accuracy on mobile. Since searching on mobile is prone to errors and you can often only fit one or two search results on the screen at a time, it’s more efficient to show a curated collection or products instead.
• Search visually without having to type. Selecting from visually represented product collections makes for a faster and more accessible search experience than typing in search terms in a search box, especially when on a mobile device.
• Reduce bounce rate while boosting conversion. Keep visitors on your site and drive them towards conversion by helping them to effortlessly find and purchase relevant items, resulting in increased average order value for the site.
• Reduce choice overload. On sites where a visitor faces an abundance of choices, Smart Discovery helps the visitor navigate those choices by bundling them into more manageable chunks: by reducing a large number of items into relevant collections of items.

What kind of sites is Smart Discovery for?

Any commercial site with a search function (think web stores, gaming sites, media sites) can benefit from Smart Discovery. However, the solution is especially useful on sites with:

• A large variety and number of products (or other items, such as games or media articles), which increases the risk of choice overload and makes searching harder
• Several similar product categories and brands, which may make it hard to find items for comparison
• A large portion of mobile visitors for whom searching may be cumbersome

What kind of results can we expect from Smart Discovery?

On an ecommerce site, Smart Discovery improves most of the main KPIs, such as:

• Site revenue
• Conversion rate
• Average order value
• Bounce rate

You can expect significant improvements on the bounce rate and AOV specifically.

Where in the customer journey should we use Smart Discovery?

Smart Discovery is especially useful on the product discovery stage, when the customer does not quite know what they want or what search terms to use, or when they are looking for ideas and options.

Technically, Smart Discoveries can be placed on any page on your site. However, for a typical web store customer journey, we recommend placing Smart Discoveries on the home page and category pages. If the customer is on the home page, the Smart Discovery displays product collections for the entire site. If the customer is on a category page, the discovery only displays product collections relevant to that category.

On the home page, Smart Discovery immediately provides the customer with relevant suggestions without any actions required on their part. On category pages, it helps the customer to narrow down and optimize products for a comparison as well as find new products with similar charasteristics.

Smart Discoveries can also be placed on a search results page where they can help the customer make sense of the search results. The customer doesn’t necessarily need to browse through page after page of search results – instead they can just click a button to see a curated collection.

My site already has a search engine. Do I still need Smart Discovery?

Smart Discovery works differently from other ecommerce search engines in that it has been especially designed to target the bottlenecks in mobile user experience. Smart Discovery complements any search engine. As far as we know, there is no comparable solution available from anywhere else at this point.

You can think of search and Smart Discovery as two sides of the same search experience coin:

• Search: The visitor actively searches for items by trying out different search terms. The visitor does most of the work. This is a good solution when the visitor knows what they want and what terms to use.
• Smart Discovery: The Frosmo Platform actively recommends the visitor relevant search terms (Smart Discovery suggestions). The platform does most of the work. This is a good solution when the visitor does not quite know what they want or what terms to use, when they are looking for ideas and options, or when it’s inconvenient for them to type in search terms, such as on a mobile device

How will Smart Discovery impact the look & feel of my site?

The buttons can be placed basically anywhere in a page layout, and their look & feel can be modified to match your style and branding requirements.