If you are the owner or the designer of an e-commerce site, do not put all your faith in search. There’s more to it than that.

We see it time and again: Shop owners say, “More than 90% of our sales come from search, so why worry about anything else?” But consider this counterpoint: If you’ve designed your site so that search is the only practical way to navigate it, then doesn’t it make sense that most of your sales come from search?

In our opinion, when you place too much emphasis on search, you’re leaving money on the table. Search is not the only way people shop, online or off.

Consider a trip to a department store to buy socks. Sure, you might ask an employee where the socks are, then go directly to them and make your purchase.

But you also might look for a store directory or signage. And in doing so, you’re still going to find your socks. But maybe something on the directory or signage will remind you that you also need a T-shirt. Might as well pick that up too.

Or maybe you also need a birthday gift for someone, so you wander around, browsing different parts of the store looking for inspiration. If something interesting catches your eye, you make a purchase.

Sometimes you don’t plan on going shopping at all, but you walk past the store and the window display catches your attention. You’ve got time to kill, so you poke around the store for a few minutes and end up walking out with an impulse purchase.

These are all very different, but very common and relatable, shopping behaviors. We all engage in these patterns nearly every day, but we probably don’t spend much time thinking about them.

Does your e-commerce website provide a good user experience for all of these different types of shoppers? Are you merchandising properly? Educating properly? Cross-selling effectively? Is your catalog well organized and easy to digest?

People shop for all sorts of different reasons and in all sorts of different ways. But too often, when it comes to e-commerce design, websites offer a search tool and little else to entice or assist shoppers in their journey.

And how can you tell if that’s the case? Well, numbers don’t lie. If the data says that nearly all of your sales are coming from search, that’s not an indication that your search tool is awesome. It’s an indication that your site is not performing well for other types of shoppers, so they’re going somewhere else. And that’s why we say you’re leaving money on the table when you rely too much on search.

We offer thorough and effective UX audit services for e-commerce website owners. This is a cost-effective way to get an educated, objective review of your website’s effectiveness which can illuminate UX issues that are holding you back. We can give you a roadmap to incremental improvements that don’t require a full site redesign but will help you sell more products.

Contact Code18 Interactive today and let’s talk about improving your website!