Even something as simple as a spelling mistake has its own set of consequences. If you’re on your favorite e-commerce site searching for a red sweater, for example, and you type “red swaeter,” your ability to find a product that’s right for you can be severely stunted. As a result, you’re not going to get the sweater you’re looking for and you’ll likely have to shop elsewhere. If only you didn’t type that spelling mistake, right?
While it might be an inconvenience to you, the shopper, if your spelling error hampers you from finding the product you’re looking for online, consider it from the retailer standpoint. If you own an e-commerce site that relies on a search function to get people the products they’re looking for, imagine how many sales and dollars you’re losing to something as simple as a spelling mistake! Not accounting for human error could be costing you hugely every day.
Natural Language Processing
The question for many e-commerce site owners when it comes to their on-site search function is one of preventative action. How do you anticipate human error and overcome it, even when you’re not dealing with a specific example?
The answer lies in natural language processing (NLP) and its ability to be predictive, without being presumptuous. With NLP powering your on-site search, “red swaeter” returns red sweater results, ambiguous details are translated into applicable search results, and random queries — which might include a bevy of human errors including misspellings and full sentences — give customers the product they’re looking for, instead of an error code.
Since the dawn of retail commerce, convenience has absolutely been key in conversions. Natural language processing is the pinnacle of convenience in today’s digital age of shopping and it’s absolutely proven to fuel e-commerce conversions.
The seamless shopper experience
The reasons NLP is so profound are many, but at its core, NLP boils down to giving customers seamlessness in their shopping experience. With NLP at the helm, the search box is a direct link to what they’re looking for when they’re shopping on your website, which means offering up convenience at its height.
The alternative — text-based searches and keyword matching algorithms — don’t have the capacity to handle human error. As a result, they’re left matching syntax and lining up keywords in a way that rarely accommodates the human at the other end of the process.
Within a text-based search — even when spelled right — you’re liable to get results that match the individual keywords “red” and “sweater,” which means making potential customers sift through page after page of red products and sweaters, which are rarely inclusive to what they actually want to see. By the time they might’ve found a red sweater buried on page three of the search results, they’re already gone — they’ve left your site to shop elsewhere.
NLP streamlines the shopper experience by connecting people to products intelligently, and it doesn’t get more seamless than that.
Driving conversions, not confusion
In catching searches that might fall through the cracks — like misspellings or those not “keyword rich” — and further refining the results via interpreting what the customer is actually looking for in a singular sense, NLP drives e-commerce conversions in a way that antiquated text-based searches simply can’t hope to.
If your e-commerce website’s on-site search isn’t using NLP to drive better search results, you have to ask yourself this: how is it helping your customers? Without being able to account for human error, like something as simple as a spelling mistake, your on-site search might be hindering far more than its helping.
