Motivated customers looking to make purchases are twice as likely to convert if they easily find what they are searching for when landing on an e-commerce page. If you have got a website with a large product catalog, you need to make sure your customers find what they are looking for easily and without much guess work. Faceted search is the ideal solution that is designed to make the search experience more engaging and quicker for users.
Faceted search, also known as guided navigation or faceted browsing enables users to evaluate, organize, and filter large groups of products using filters for attributes such as size, color, price, and brand. This search type utilizes “facets”; or dimensional attributes that correlate to each information element of a product to add specific, relevant options to your search results pages or category listings. Site visitors get refined results in a few clicks at a granular level and do not need to scroll through long product lists or click through multiple pages.
A faceted search is an integral component of product data management to ensure rich product content. As part of content services for B2B e-commerce, it especially works much more effectively for industrial products that typically have multiple specifications or large volume product catalog schema. If you need a size #2 steel hex screw, this type of search can scour over 100 results to give you exactly what you are looking for instead of a broad filter search result on all kinds of screws. As facets provide a detailed or granular search result, they are more suitable for use in databases or catalogues where broad-based filtering is not sufficient to help users find the content, they are looking for.
Filtering typically offers narrowed down search results based on pre-defined, one-size-fits-all categories based on a single product feature. These filters do not change between searches unlike facet filters that help to refine searches using multiple product attribution elements at the same time. Like the layout of filter searches, a faceted search typically includes left-hand navigation and checkboxes to select specific parameters.
Faceted search is not only a fast and effective way of filtering a product attribution, but also an excellent solution to organize data for accelerate user engagement, conversion rates and provide a robust user search experience.