The #1 Way Your Customers Can Save Time While Buying Groceries Online

Site search is an integral part of online grocery sites. Something we’ve seen time and again is that on an online grocery site, customers usually have a clear idea of what they want.

A usability study of Australian online supermarkets revealed that, on average, 70% of site users employ a web site’s search engine, and 43% believe that the search engine is the most important feature on a site (Bannister).

In fact, a great shopping experience on a grocery site isn’t dictated by time on site. Quite the opposite actually – if your customers are spending too long on your site, it’s probably because they can’t find what they’re looking for.

Now, there are a multitude of best practices for ecommerce site search but what’s the one thing you should implement today to reduce the amount of time customers spend on your site?

Let them search by their shopping list.

Search by shopping list – Multi-item search

Let me get this out of the way, this isn’t something new. Tesco and mysupermarket.com have been doing it for a while but we still see a number of sites either too ignorant about the feature, or of its results to even try something like this.

So how does it work? Let’s say you’re shopping for groceries online and need to buy 5 items – Milk, bread, grapes, tuna and cereal. With multi-item search, you should be able to input your shopping list and view results for each item in that list, at the same time.

Basically, this saves you the trouble of having to search for every item in your list. Doesn’t seem like much work for 5 items, but 20 or 40 items it can get pretty inconvenient.

Take a look how Mysupermarket.com does this –

Search by shopping list – Protips!

Protip 1: Lets visitors save their shopping list

When shopping for groceries, there are a few fixed items I need every week. Rather than having to search for each item every time I shop (which is extremely inconvenient), it would be brilliant if I could just save my shopping list and reach the search results page in just one or two clicks!

Help your visitors shop faster by allowing them to save a shopping list or reorder items they’ve previously purchased.

Protip 2: Enable cart additions from the search results page

After helping your customers save time by searching for their entire shopping list at the time, it’s a bit counterintuitive if they have to go to multiple product pages to add the product to cart.

Remember, these are items your customers usually buy and they probably have all the information they need to make a decision. Moreover, your search results page will contain (At least I hope it does!) basic information for each product such as the brand, price, ratings etc., to help them choose the right products. Giving them an option to add products to cart from the search results page is a lot faster.

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Do you provide multiple search on your ecommerce site?

Multiple search offers a more efficient and logical shopping experience. Have you implemented multi-item search? How well does it work for you?

I’d love to hear what you think about this tip – Do let me know in the comments below.