Your products, perfectly presented with PIM

What is searchandizing? When it comes to online shopping, product searches can be a gold mine for retailers. Research by Econsultancy shows that around 30% of shoppers regularly use site search rather than navigation menus. Moreover, visitors who intend to buy something are 91% more likely to use search than those who are just browsing. With effective product searches that provide accurate and tailored results to customers, businesses can quickly advance customers through the sales funnel. This makes product searches a powerful tool in every e-commerce business’s arsenal.

That said, product search tools aren’t powerful sales generators by themselves. Matching products to search terms might produce an accurate list of results. But if your competitors are returning personalized options based on desirable features or prioritizing top-selling products, there’s every chance you’ll miss out on an important sale. To avoid this, businesses need to continually refine their searchandizing to stay ahead of competitors and boost sales.

• What is searchandizing?
• What are the advantages of effective searchandizing?
• What are some of the challenges associated with searchandizing?
• How the inriver PIM can boost your searchandizing

What is searchandizing?

Searchandizing simply means ‘search merchandising’, and it’s far from being a new sales strategy. It’s about how products appear in a search, which ones are recommended, and how tailored the search results are based on the customer’s needs. Anything from which products are recommended to the order in which they’re listed falls under searchandizing.

But while searchandizing bears similarities to discovery – an equally effective way of suggesting products to customers. It is a much more active way of converting traffic. Its success hinges on suggesting tailored shopping choices to customers as opposed to making additional and related product suggestions as customers navigate the sales funnel.

Though searchandizing isn’t new, recent rapid evolutions in product data and digital shelf analytics (DSA) mean that product searches are becoming smarter than ever and driving profitability. Today, searchandizing is a key component of every e-commerce business’s sales strategy – enabling them to monitor customer behavior and recommend complementary products with similar features right through to providing real-time insights into product performance so they can respond and sell with agility.

What are the advantages of effective searchandizing?

With effective searchandizing, businesses can tap into an array of benefits including:

• Creating a seamless omnichannel experience: Successful merchandising in a brick-and-mortar shop means constantly adapting the products and marketing on offer to meet customer needs. Mirroring this same customer-centric approach to search merchandizing means customers will benefit from a seamless shopping experience across all your channels.
• Highly personalized shopping experiences: Showing you know your customers’ preferences is key to helping them through the sales funnel. Bring deeper personalization and tailor-made product searches to your site and reap the rewards of closer alignment with your customers.
• Boosting conversion rates: Effective searchandizing means retailers can better capitalize on what shoppers are looking for, boosting conversion rates and reducing churn.
• Meeting business objectives: Through in-depth data and analytics, searchandizing means businesses can promote key products, whether to manage inventory better or tap into emerging trends.

What are some of the challenges associated with searchandizing?

But while there are many advantages, truly optimized searchandizing needs to be implemented correctly. Here are some of the challenges to watch out for:

• Optimization: Whether displaying products based on specific features, by the date they were brought to the market or by any other category, keeping your searchandizing relevant to customers’ demands requires continuous adjustment and optimization.
• Balancing business objectives with customer needs: While searchandizing can help businesses manage their product inventory, businesses should not overly promote products that align exclusively with their sales strategies. This will help them avoid making their brand seem less appealing to a broader audience owing to a lack in product diversity, missing opportunities by overlooking trending articles, and creating imbalances in their inventory.
• Data management: Successful searchandizing relies on a substantial amount of product data being stored, distributed, and managed efficiently. Without the right processes in place to support such data flows, businesses risk missing out on important sales.

How the inriver PIM can boost your searchandizing

Successful searchandizing hinges on accurate product data and real-time analytics that helps businesses respond and optimize their product searches. But with such vast data flows needing to be managed and distributed across different teams and channels, it can be tricky for many businesses to put in place the foundations of successful searchandizing. But product information management (PIM) can help.

As a single source of truth for product information, PIM is an important asset for businesses looking to drive their searchandizing to the next level. Collecting data across a product’s lifecycle and value chain, and safely storing it so that all of your teams have de-siloed access to it, PIMs act a focal point for your business’s product information, helping you avoid errors and mistakes.

With digital shelf analytics that let you monitor your products performance in real-time, the right PIM will help you continually optimize your search results, helping you respond quickly to trends and consumer behaviors.

The inriver PIM offers the most comprehensive product data management solution on the market. With built-in syndication and digital shelf analytics that help you adapt and update your product’s information when you need, inriver’s cloud-native solution can help boost your profitability. Get in touch to find out more.