Having amazing, must-have products doesn’t guarantee that you will get the conversions you want. Sometimes, businesses will need a helping hand to capture those sales leads. Here’s why it’s time to turn to Magento eCommerce Search Extensions.

Many problems that businesses face with conversions, is that their site search or menu navigation can be muddled. Users can’t easily find those awesome goods and services on your site so they go elsewhere. It’s an eCommerce company’s worst nightmare. We are going to take you through the benefits of some of the most popular search extensions on the Magento platform. Are you ready?

Search Extensions: What are they?

Search extensions were developed simply because many customers prefer searching over using product menus or even filtering. Routing through product categories can be time-consuming.

Typically, businesses tend to overlook this feature and instead, focus on optimising menu navigations. Great – only for those customers wanting to search for a specific product, well, not so great.

Generic Benefits of Search Extensions

  • Help to improve overall user shopping experience by de-stressing the search process
  • Reduce the number of abandoned cart rates
  • Increase the number of conversions and hence sales
  • Speed up searching for finding specific products
  • List relevant results related to the search term
  • Toleration of misspellings and will show results with the corrected spelling
  • Instantly autocomplete search queries with product suggestions
  • They can be cheap to install in comparison to the benefits they bring
  • No or little interference with other extensions
  • Some have search analytics implemented to help you monitor and track your customer’s search queries

Our 4 Best Magento eCommerce Search Extensions:

Now we have seen some of the generic benefits an eCommerce store can obtain from search extensions, let’s dive deeper into some of the specific extensions for Magento users.

Useful Link: All of the listed extensions are available to download from the Magento marketplace.

#1 – Algolia

Algolia Search Extension | Magento eCommerce Search Extensions

This is known as one of the most trusted search extensions for a Magento store. So obviously, it’s a number 1 in our eyes. Algolia comes with multiple benefits to enhance your search navigation including:

  • It’s the fastest and most relevant search experience available for Magento
  • It delivers lightning-fast, relevant search results anywhere in the world
  • Results show up immediately as the user types, with no delay, and bring customers to exactly what they’re looking for
  • Ranking options enable you to prioritise results that send customers to your best selling and most popular products
  • Algolia provide a 99.99% SLA: making sure that your search is up and running at all times

If it couldn’t get any better, this clever search extension just so happens to be free for download too!

Price: FREE

Useful Links: For the Instant Search Result page demo, click here. Alternatively, for the Autocomplete Search Result demo, click here.

 

#2 – InstantSearch+

Magento eCommerce Search Extensions | InstantSearch+

This extension boasts lightning-fast search speed, high relevancy and self-learning search results. Like many, InstantSearch+ features autocomplete searches and fancy “did you mean?” functions, to help resolve misspellings in the search queries and show product suggestions that are relevant to the user. The search results page is also highly responsive and is available for use on both Magento platforms: Magento1 and Magento2.

“Use customers’ shopping intent to increase your sales, by matching products they would want to buy. Delight your customers and get up to 30% revenue uplift.” – InstantSearch+

It also comes with analytics to help better understand customer search behaviour. Knowing what, why, when and where customers are searching on your site, can also help you understand their search behaviour on search engines, social media channels and so on. Perfect for helping enhance marketing practices outside of your eCommerce site.

Price: FREE for <250 products

Fancy watching the live demo?

 

#3 – Sphinx Search Suite

Magento eCommerce Search Extensions | Sphinx Search Suite

If you are wanting to give your customers search results straight from the first letter that is entered, you will want to use the Sphinx search service. Not only this, but it is highly accurate, relevant and offers multiple search formats for your potential customers:

  • Product category search
  • Searching via tags
  • Using product SKUs to search

Sphinx cleverly creates a drop-down box of search results with product names and images. For cases when there are no exact search results available, similar products are suggested instead.

Good to Know: Sphinx Search Ultimate uses Ajax to quicken the search process. This is another recommended extension for Magento eCommerce sites.

Price: $99.00

 

#4 – Ajax Search Autocomplete

Magento eCommerce Search Extensions | Ajax Search Autocomplete

As previously mentioned, Ajax Search Autocomplete is another great Magento eCommerce search extension. It has been designed to improve eCommerce store usability by going further than using product categories, tags and SKUs to find a product. The Ajax extension also allows for goods to be found by price and description too.

Good To Know: Businesses are able to customise the search bar appearance to match the store branding.

Search results are shown in real-time as the site visitor types, giving them prompts as they are entering their search query. That makes the search process super speedy – just what we like!

Price: $39.00

Useful Link: There is also an Ajax Search and Suggest extension that is available for download in the Magento Marketplace.

 

Closing Thoughts

There are plenty of Magento eCommerce search extensions out there to download. Our Magento developers find the best results from using the Algolia search extension. But with the hundreds available, we advise looking into what you would like to achieve from your search navigation and researching the extensions that can best deliver this for you.

Talk to us about enhancing your site’s search navigation or other features. We’re always happy to help!

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