E-commerce Usability – Search Results
When displaying search results to a users, it’s a good idea to make them aware of how the results have been organised, and of how many results have been displayed. If your search is quite vague such as ‘RAM’ and returns say, 100 results, you wouldn’t want all these products displayed on one page in no order at all. You may want to have it in order of cheapest to most expensive, or perhaps from highest rated to lowest? If you arrange these result son separate pages, it also makes it easier for the user to look through instead of being overwhelmed by too many products at once.
Dabs.com has done this perfectly with their search facility as shown below:
As you can see there’s an option to sort the results by many different filters which is great for a user who wants the latest, cheapest or highest regarded items available. sorting it alphabetically even allows you to find the exact brand. Also notice the ‘items per page’ dropdown box – allowing users to change how many results they have to browse through. This is a very well implemented and easy to use way of displaying internal search results for e-commerce websites.
June 16th, 2008
I work for a company that supplies vending machines, so the average customer coming to our site, has very little knowledge of our products. This makes it all the more important, to give them relevant results. They may just be after the cheapest machine, or perhaps a specific brand like Kenco or PG. We defiantly don’t want them slogging through a list of machines they have never heard of just to find it.
Thanks for tip! We should be setting up a new e-commerce soon, so I will keep it in mind.
January 8th, 2009
Search formatting is a big issue for me when buying things online. There are some really great sites out there that I decided NOT to buy from because their result organisation was weak.
January 21st, 2009
Aside from the good points you mention about the internal result page, I really wonder where the ‘quicklinx’ and ‘mfr#’ stand for? It seems to distract me from the main content on that page: the productnames and their specifications.