3 Magento Extensions That Will Improve Your Store's Search Results
Unfortunately, Magento search results are not very relevant out of the box, which is bad considering 43% to 50% of e-commerce customers use store search to locate products they want to purchase1. If they cannot locate the products they want quickly, then they will go to another store where they can. Relevant, fast searches means more product sales. In this guest post, John from our partner Extendware discusses three Magento extensions that can help improve your store's overall search experience.
Magento Lucene Search
Lucene search is great at improving search relevancy. High search relevancy means customers can find products quickly and as a result make purchases. It is easy to install, easy to use, and great for customers on our shared hosting plans. If your store has less than 10,000 products, then your store is perfect for using the Lucene search extension. It helps improve relevancy and breadth of search by performing multiple searches for a single search. Each search will progressively broaden the match. As a result, exact matches appear first in the results whereas more fuzzy matches appear last. This also ensure more search results return some results.
Magento Sphinx Search
Sphinx search provides similar result relevancy as Lucene search. The primary difference is in the type of site that uses the search. Sphinx search is meant for customers of any catalog size (even 100,000+ products) who are are on one of our dedicated server plans. Sphinx search uses the Sphinx search engine which is a standalone search server and as a result it will be faster than using mysql to search.
Magento Ajax Search Autocomplete
Improving search relevancy is not the only important thing. Making search easier for your customers can also help them find products faster and make more purchases. Ajax Search Autocomplete will show search results in your search box as customers type. It can show search results from your products, categories, and CMS pages. It will also suggest alternative queries. The combined effect is an overall better and alternative search experience.
Here is what the ajax search looks like:
Improving the technology used by your Magento store is important to stay competitive in e-commerce. Extendware offers a range of Mageneto extensions to help you achieve your e-commerce goals!