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by John Almberg, Identry, LLC, August 2007

“Okay, okay!” a dealer emailed me the other day.  “I've been reading your column and following your website marketing advice, and I'm getting loads of new visitors to my site. Now I want improve my conversion rate. What do I need to do to turn those visitors into customers?”

As Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today noted in a recent column, the performance gap between successful and unsuccessful online business profitability becomes greater every year.

What makes the difference? Lots of small things. Successful dealers tend to work continuously to improve their websites and their results, month after month. Unsuccessful dealers tend to take a passive, “I don't have time to work on my website” approach.

If you're reading this column, you're probably one of those active, successful dealers, so for the next few issues, I'm going to look at website features that can boost your conversion rate and put more money in your pocket.

Site Search

My company, Identry, is working on the second generation of our Top Seller website system, and one of the areas we've been focusing on is it's Site Search capabilities. Site Search is the ability for visitors to search your site for stamps they want to buy.

Why is Site Search important?

• 30% of all activity on websites is search.
• Visitors who use Site Search convert better than non-searchers. Why? Because searchers are buyers.
• Visitors can only buy what they can find.

Search is especially important for stamp dealers because they typically stock thousands or even tens of thousands of items. That's a lot of stamps to dig through by hand. Search isn't a luxury on your site, its a basic requirement.

How Site Search Should Work

According to studies, users expect Site Search to work the same way it works on major search engines:

• The Site Search should consist of a single Search box and button.
• The search box and button should be located near the upper-right corner of the page, because thats where users expect to find it
• It should be displayed on every page of your website so it's always there when a visitor is ready to search.
• It should 30 characters wide so a visitor can edit or modify his search.

Why a single box? Many dealer use multi-box search on their websites. That is, instead of just one search box, their search form has several boxes, for example labeled 'Scott #', 'Format', and 'Price Range'.

So-called parameterized search can be helpful, but it doesn't fit today's mental model for 'Search'. So if you provide parameterized search, put it on its own page and call it 'Advanced Search'.

The Results Users Expect

When a visitor searches, she should get back an easily scanned list of results that:

• Consist of an image, clickable headline, 2 or 3 line description, and price.
• List the most relevant results on top.

Showing relevant results first is critical, because most users will only scan the first few items. If they don't see what they're looking for, they'll give up.

What's relevant? The same things that are relevant to your customers:

• If a user types something that looks like one of your SKU or lot numbers, he probably knows the item he's looking for and you should put that item at the top of the list.
• If a user types something that looks like a Scott #, then you should put items with those Scott #s at the top of the result list.
• If a user types one of your category names, you should list items in that category.

And so on. In other words, your Site Search should be as smart as a good clerk. It should know enough about stamps and your business to make intelligent guesses about what visitors are searching for.

Additionally, it should be smart enough to know what a user means, not just what she types. For example, if a user searches for “Scot #232” or “Catalog #232” it shouldn't say “no items found” if you have ten “Scott #232”s in stock. It should be smart enough to ignore simple spelling mistakes and to know that different collectors use different words to say the same thing.

Beyond the Basics

If your Site Search does all this, it's better than 99% of the websites out there. However, Site Search can do much more for your business. How about:

• showing you (the dealer) what visitors are searching for, in real time
• showing visitors related items for cross-selling
• showing visitors from Google or other search engines what they were searching for  -- as soon as they arrive on your site, auto-magically!

Next issue we will get into more cool site search features. In the meantime, have a great month, Selling Stamps On The Web!