What is searchandising, i.e. search merchandising ?
In typical physical store environment, retailers can arrange the store displays and layouts to promote their high selling items, or high margin items or simply improve customer experience and their interaction with the brand - depending upon the business goals and the envrionment. Translating that same thing to online world of ecommerce it becomes visual merchandising which empowers the business to implement boost and bury rules based on margin, availability or any other attribute.
Taking that same concept one step further and applying these merchandising rules to the dynamic search results on the ecommerce website is called searchandising. You can adapt your site search relevance to align with your business goals, campaigns, KPIs and possibly even aesthetic purposes as well.
How does it work ?
In principle, searchandising is about using the standard search techniques - faceted navigation, autocomplete, recommended products, recent searches and manually promote the products as an additional layer on top of the internal search engine relevance.
After getting good hang of it, you can take it a notch further - you can do a deep dive into Search Analytics and optimize the search results for non-performing keywords as well as the most trending topics / products. This empowers you to merchandise the search terms to drive users to the products that are more aligned to your business and to your customers as well.
How to setup the rules
- Go to Merchandising > Searchandising
- Enter the search term that you would like to merchandise.
- The platform shows the search results as they would show on the website
- You can now drag / drop and arrange the products as per business needs.
- You can also include additional products in the search result that would not appear otherwise.
To implement a well rounded searchandising strategy, you should also use additional capabilities like - keyword redirection, synonym dictionary in addition to the steps defined above.