Why Customers Want Faceted Search Capabilities
Every business and website owner can benefit from making their online catalogues easier for customers to navigate, but doing this is not always as obvious as it could be. What is the best way to make sites easier to navigate? What is the point of doing this on the business side of things?
Some of the navigation systems can improve user experience and interaction. Upgrading your search bar to one with faceted search capabilities makes it easier for customers to narrow down search results and navigate through your catalogue faster. What is faceted search?
What is Faceted Search?
You may be well aware of companies that utilize filters on their company websites, but what makes faceted search better than these regular filters that everyone else is using? Faceted search tools allow customers to use multiple filters at once, rather than just one at a time.
So do customers want faceted search capabilities? And if they do, why do site visitors necessarily want them?
Narrow Down Search Results
Customers love faceted search tools, especially on product and eCommerce sites, because they can narrow down search results to only include the items most relevant to what they’re looking for.
While only showing customers exactly what they want may sound less than ideal from a business perspective at first, this isn’t the case. For example, you might want to show customers as many items as possible to get them to buy as many items as possible, but doing this if you have an especially large catalog of items can be overwhelming to potential customers.
Showing off a catalogue that’s too large can cause some serious overwhelm, making it, so customers are so frustrated at having to wade through so many items that they ultimately jump off of your website and decide to shop elsewhere.
So, from a business perspective, it’s much better to have faceted search capabilities for your potential customers and site visitors. Faceted search tools make it so customers are more likely to make a purchase from you in the first place.
Rather than getting bombarded with so many choices that they jump ship and decide to shop elsewhere before purchasing with you, customers who find what they want quickly will be much more likely to find what they want and then return to your website to shop more because of the positive experience faceted search has allowed them to have.
It’s Easier to Interact with the Search Results
Customers are also much more likely to want faceted search tools as an option for another reason. This is because these tools make it easier to interact with the search results that ultimately pop up on their screens. And that’s not just because there will be fewer results on their screen in the first place, though that’s also a significant factor.
Even if they don’t know precisely what one of your filter options means at first, they’ll be able to figure it out pretty quickly based on the results they get after searching. This is especially the case if your website uses language that isn’t immediately obvious to a layperson who is entering your niche industry for the first time.
Additionally, if they realize that they want more than just a few filters applied to your catalog of items, they can quickly go back to the faceted search tool and select a few more to narrow down their results.
For example, suppose your potential customers are looking for a yellow shirt on your fashion website. In that case, they can use a faceted search tool to filter out all non-shirts and non-yellow items, leaving them only with the yellow shirts they were looking for.
However, if too many options still exist, they can filter even further on your website. For example, maybe they wanted a yellow button-down shirt with a checkered pattern. With faceted search, they’ll know quickly if they need to narrow down their search results further, and they can use the applicable tools to find what they need much more rapidly.
Faceted Search is More Mobile Friendly
Depending on your customer base and where they are most likely to be searching on your website, it may be quite useful for your customers to have faceted search options available on their mobile devices specifically.
Phones and other mobile devices will have a much smaller area to work with than a laptop or personal computer, meaning you need to be able to make the most of the space available to you on your mobile website. For customer experience, this is especially crucial.
Faceted search tools are easily navigated on mobile devices, making a mobile experience on your website much more pleasurable for customers than it otherwise would be.