Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) continue a webinar about advanced search features by discussing autocomplete in search boxes.

Part 2 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 1)

RON: Let's go ahead and pop forward and start talking about some of those search capabilities on a typical eCommerce of group buying platform. One of these search capabilities is called autofill, autocomplete, whatever you want to do it. I'm going to put it up on the screen here and I'm going to demo a couple different features of that.  

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RON: Here's our eCommerce platform. And in the search box, I butchered the name and I'll just make something up. J h n. But in the results, you can see it comes up and the autocomplete says, “Oh, well, we have some products that we think you're searching for.” And you can see here, I've got an embellished jeans, and then I've got some John Deere products. So J h n from a—they call this fuzzy logic —searching j h n is close to jean, or at least within my product catalog, jean and John were the two things that were closest to that. So it's going to come up and autocomplete and say, “Hey, I don't have an exact match, but are these the things you were potentially looking for?” 

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RON: This can be very helpful, not only because sometimes people typo things, especially when you start getting into multilingual and people don't know how to spell other languages and there's other things like that. The one I gave a minute ago, competitive part numbers, or if they put in a part number and they're off, maybe the model has been upgraded from model 350 to 351 and they're looking for 350. You don't carry it anymore, but you carry the upgraded 351. You'd certainly like that new model to pop up and they go, “Oh, wow, I didn't even know there was a new model.” And then you've got an option to sell. But if you don't carry 350 anymore or you don't have fuzzy logic and you don't have synonyms, they come in and type 350, you don't sell it, they leave and they're going to go off and look for the old model somewhere and buy it from somebody else. 

To have these additional capabilities, especially autocomplete and fuzzy logic, we feel that those are two of the most important ones. Anything else about those two features specifically, Chris, you wanted to add in here before we move on to some of the other features of a buyers group platform

CHRIS: I would say, for both of those, just a couple of nuances. For the autocomplete, one of the interesting things that we do for a lot of clients is, we don’t just set up a product autocomplete. So you'll see that pretty commonly, but depending on the type of results we get, we can present categories and we can promote the categories higher than the products depending on what keyword matching we get. 

They can see a category icon and then they can click on a category if the intent appears to be that they're looking for a category, we can also mix in site content. For example, if you've done a great job, you followed some of our other training material where we talk about building out industry-specific niche content. You might have a lot of meta-information on your site. It's really helpful for users that will help them move into your site higher up the funnel.  

Well, you might have some really great information that's like, let's say you have a buying group for pool supply parts. Okay, if you're doing that in bulk, you might have a lot of training manuals and documents that you want people to be able to search through, but they're not necessarily directly tied to products. How do you know what they're looking for? Typically there's a weighting schema that we can set up both for the autocomplete and for the search results. And this is, Ron, a lot of what you're talking about with just this logic, this being able to fine tune and do things like the fuzzy logic with the J h n example 

And as an example, the other thing that I would say is just, in general, the autocomplete and the search results can have different logic for how we present the results. And we can also do some really interesting things where we're learning about that user and what they're actually clicking on. This is really cool. So basically you can have feedback and typically refer to, this as essentially machine learning for the group buyers platform, that has a feedback loop based on the user's tracking data within the site.  

We have the ability to turn this on, where we can track what the user's clicking on and how long they're on the page. If they're adding something to the cart, they're going to check out all of these things. Well, we can then create a profile for what the user's actually looking for whenever they're doing a search. This is really interesting, it depends on your situation as to how sophisticated it makes sense to be. But I would say, in general, like a very standard use case here that might make a lot of sense is, you have a customer who actually bought an item, and maybe we've had some customers that have very custom vehicles that they produce, and they want their users to be able to conduct their search and filter it within a specific vehicle that they purchased.  

That's another interesting aspect to this, whenever you have this bare metal control with the vendor that you're working with, for example, or what we offer with our platform, you really can do some powerful things that help that, like you were saying, run that 70% intent on our 70% of visitors that are doing a search are ready to buy something. We really want to be able to get them right to what they're looking for. So those are just some interesting aspects that I think are helpful for folks. 

RON: Yeah, I agree. Thanks for bringing those up. And you touched on the next three bullet points, about the capabilities of the search bar displaying those results and then what resources are available for the eCommerce buyers group. For example, I'm going to bring up one example that we did for a large stereo manufacturer. They were one of the top. I remember when I was in high school, the stereo I had in my car, that was the first one I went and bought. Think one of the big players, that's who we built a dealer portal for.

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RON: We customized the search results on a group buyers platform because, when any one of their dealers came to this portal that we designed and built, they had literally thousands of pieces of collateral training videos, installation guides, replacement parts, servicing manuals, warranty repair, exploded view diagrams. They had everything for every stereo that they've ever produced over the last X years in this portal.  

So when a dealer would come in here to service, say—I went in and brought in my car, it's 20 years old with that stereo and it's broken and I want it fixed. They would literally just go type in the model number and then we customize the search results. It actually broke them out—what Chris was saying—we can take categories and move those to the top. In this case, we broke it out almost like a tree view where it said installation guides, and then it would show the results underneath that, and then the next would be videos and it would show any videos under that section. 

The next would be exploded view diagrams, and then it would show links to that. When they would go in and do a search on a model number, they could literally, in one simple search, see every single piece of collateral video guide, warranty, brochure marketing materials, anything for that specific stereo. For them, search was the number one most important feature in the entire portal. 

That had a lot to do with those last three bullets there. So when you provide search on your site, as Chris said, you want to consider the capabilities. When somebody comes in and looks for an OLED TV, are they ready to buy? And do you want to just show them only the TVs, or do you also want to come up and show them the top ten most important whitepapers on how to select which OLED TV is best for you? may that come up as the number one search and they're like, oh my gosh, yes. Because maybe the only thing that's stopping them from buying is there's so many options offered by the buyers platform for groups.  

Now one of the things that you offer, not only within that search are all the TVs that you have, maybe you break out all the ones that you have on sale, and you break out the one document that tells them exactly how to ensure you make the correct OLED TV choice.

Continue to Part 3 to learn about how web browser and platforms change search.