Think about mega brands, like Pepsi. Sure, Pepsi and Diet Pepsi are the clear breadwinners for this brand, but options like Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper and Vitamin Water are no slouches in the ledger. Pepsi relies on these product lines to keep the brand going strong, even when the main products—Pepsi and Diet Pepsi—might be locked in a stalemate with Coca Cola and Diet Coca Cola.
While your top three or five best selling products are usually the bread and butter of your ecommerce operation, without secondary sellers to support them, your business is vulnerable—vulnerable to things like lack of demand for these products or loss of business to competition for specific product segments. Your secondary sellers are the bedrock of your business, which means you not only need to identify them, you also need to properly merchandise them.
Calling out your winners
Figuring out your secondary products isn’t as easy as looking at sales data, however. Sure, sales data is going to tell you which products are selling at different volumes, but this might only be a representation of the products your customers are able to find… not actually what they’re looking for! How many lost sales aren’t being represented in that data—conversions that might’ve occurred if a customer could find exactly what they were looking for?
The real data you should be combing through to find your secondary sellers is your on-site search data! It’s here that you’re going to see what people are searching for most on your website and, when paired up against sales data, you’ll be able to see where gaps exist in your inventory. Here’s an example:
Sally checks her sales over the past six months and sees that her best selling product was a red shirt—1000 units sold in that time frame. Somewhere in the middle of the pack are blue shirts, which she sold 600 of during her six-month span. Finally, near the bottom of the list are yellow shirts, which only sold 300 units. However, when Sally compares sales data to search data from the same time period, she finds that searches for “yellow shirts” and related terms were more than three times that of blue shirts!
What we can infer from the data above is this: firstly, that customers are not finding what they want when they search for it and secondly, that the perceived secondary seller in this case isn’t actually the product with the most potential!
Bridging the gap
The solution to shining a light on your true secondary products and boost conversions of these products is simple: implement semantic site search and analyze the data recorded through it. Semantic site search is going to yield two specific remedies to sites where secondary products are not fully realized:
- Semantic search is smart enough to get customers to the products they’re looking for, even if there are errors or misgivings in the search box. You’ll be eliminating human error and giving your customers a direct route to what they’re actually looking for.
- You’ll have the ability to mine and analyze a bevy of search data, allowing you to recognize high volume search terms on-site and use these to create customer funnels that end in conversions.
While it’s always ideal to know what your movers and shakers are, it’s also critically important to know what your supplementary products are. Using semantic search to pinpoint, optimize and convert on these products will raise your ecommerce to a new level of stability and sustainability.
