Ecommerce search

Search is one of the main pillar of E-commerce website. In the search box, customer enters some thing he wants. He your search does not returns some thing useful, they may immediately return the website. If you think, what a good search function should have. The answers are below

• It should return related/useful results
• Give a flexibility to narrow down from the resulting results. Example: if you are searching for TV's, then in the side bar do display options like  LCD/LED/Plasma/3D
• Auto complete feature is a must
• Add results in breadcrumbs
• Personalise the search results

You can improve your search with Analytics as well. Suppose, for particular search keywords conversation ration is very less or bounce ration is high... then it means either search is not functioning correctly or your do not have those products. Apart from that, you can get learning from search as well. As mentioned above, you can get to know the missing inventory, or out of stock items. Another example is if users are searching few particular items, it may be due to misplacing the product into another category (say you have placed water heater in Kitchen items category rather than electrical items category)

How to build E-commerce Search

You can utilise few open source libraries.  The impotent libraries are

• Lucene 
• Solr 
• Elasticsearch

You can follow more on this at following answers in Quora:

• What is the best open source solution for search functionality on a web site? 
• What are the best ways to approach creating an accurate search engine for an eCommerce web site?
   

B2B Products

If time is a constraint, or you do not have enough resources as of now to build awesome search features, they you can think of taking help of B2B services. Unbxd is one of the very good such service providers.  We are listing few such products.  Please do A/B testing before you use any product.

• Unbxd 

• Searchspring

• Cybersitesearch 

• Nextopia

Reference

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/refine-ecommerce-site-search-and-navigation/
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ecommerce-website-search/