^{E-commerce Case Study} Würth Canada's
custom DIY search

Overview

As a leading supplier to the industrial sector, Würth Canada needed a robust search engine for their eCommerce store. Their previous search engine couldn't handle a number of queries, and would return 0 results leading to search abandonments.

They wanted a user-friendly yet reliable eCommerce search function which could successfully manage these ongoing challenges:

• Article numbers;
• Data Import;
• Search relevance;
• Handling thousands of product attributes

Since 2018, Site Search 360 has been addressing all of these search problems to boost Würth Canada's eCommerce operations.

Solutions

Article numbers

Our semantic search capabilities enabled us to extract meaning, and structure Würth's attributes regardless of their formatting. As a result, attributes such as "Article numbers" are suitably categorized.

Data import

We fine-tuned our web crawler to regularly scrape all the data related to Würth products from their website (i.e., including additional features and reviews, etc.) so that we were able to enrich the search logic with both soft (e.g., durable gloves) and hard (e.g., latex-free) facts which were otherwise missing from the data feed.

We're currently working on directly integrating with Würth's PIM and cleaning up the data set with our semantic engine.

Search relevance

Our vast and highly-customizable ontology enabled us to properly categorize every single product. As a result, a query with a brand name such as "Purlogic" would return all types of products, in this case related to sealants.

The search also understands product attributes and pre-filters the results accordingly, e.g., based on color or material.

Filters

We assisted Würth in removing duplicate data over the years, and they removed redundant attributes, common to many products. Instead, they only added the most useful and used filters.

They chose to pin three key filters (category tree, available in-store, and customer rating), so there are always shown on top, followed by other attributes (material, thickness, amperage, length, etc.) which can be displayed or hidden depending on their relevance to the search query. These can also be re-ordered over time based on usage.

Search optimization

Würth Canada's search performance greatly improved through our own search AI optimization as well as Würth's team efforts to further curate results from their top-searched keywords. Besides, our Result Manager tools allows Würth Canada to apply optimizations on the fly with 0 coding skills required:

• Customize results (pin, boost, bury, remove unwanted matches, add related results);
• Redirect customers to popular category pages (fasteners), pre-filtered results, or dedicated landing pages (hot deal, holiday gifts, etc.);
• Rewrite queries (replacing discontinued article numbers with the new ones, etc.)
• Experiment with ranking strategies to allocate different weighting to different product attributes (average rating, number of reviews, availability, etc.)

As a result of these optimizations, Würth Canada's customers are seamlessly guided to the right products and pages, shortening their search journeys.

Search success

Würth Canada can easily monitor their search performance thanks to Site Search 360's built-in Search Success Tracking feature. Over the last 6 months:

• The overall search score has more than doubled (from 109 to 215 -- 250 being the maxmimum), i.e., their on-site search is twice as efficient as 6 months ago;
• The click-through-rate (CTR) went up by 23%, bringing it to almost 60% on all searches. For comparison, the average CTRs for Google search results range from 3% to 30%;
• The Search Abandonment Rate went down by 11% making Würth Canada's search perform better than 91% of all sites;
• Their Search Session Rate continued the growth trend which it has been following over the last years. This indicates that more and more Würth Canada customers rely on their on-site search bar to find what they need (rather than combing through endless categories and subcategories in the search menu).