However, what is personalization? eCommerce personalization means showing individualized offers,
product recommendations, and other content to your visitors based on their previous actions, demographics, and other personal data. In other words, it provides customers with offers that are relevant to them.
Nowadays retailers often use personalization in their homepage or on their landing page (36% and 29%) but there is one area that is usually neglected – personalized search. The relative rarity of it is a huge missed opportunity, as, according to Econsultancy, visitors using this convert at a 1.8 times higher rate than the average visitor. Personalized search allows forming specific product suggestions for each customer based on product views.
The mechanism works in the following way: whenever a customer visits a product page in your store the system tracks its category and type tags. The personalized search starts affecting suggestions when the total number of product views with a specific tag exceeds five.
It is known that today's customers are expecting more than just similar products. They expect each click to offer them an experience customized to their taste. The feature successfully fulfills the task: recommendations relevant for a customer will be shown higher in the search list. The more products are viewed, the higher the relevance of the similar products will be.
Recently Smart Search & Instant Search got updated: we added the search personalization function. It means that now along with many other functions you have an instrument to form search suggestions right in our search engine.