Cruiser Customizing Upgrades its Site Search to Grow Revenues

For niche online retailer Cruiser Customizing, a seller of motorcycle parts and accessories, an easily navigable site is critical to its success. Riders come to CruiserCustomizing.com looking for specific parts or accessories exclusive to their particular bike. Finding them quickly and easily enhances their likelihood to buy. For that reason, Cruiser Customizing has invested resources in upgrading its site search.

At the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago earlier this month, Tammie McKenzie, Cruiser Customizing's director of marketing, led a session where she detailed how site search has helped the motorcycle retailer grow its bottom line. Joining McKenzie was Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, a provider of site search, site navigation and user-generated SEO services for online retailers, whose firm handles Cruiser Customizing's site search.

Visitors to Cruiser Customizing's homepage are greeted with a drop-down menu that allows them to choose their specific bike model, ensuring they'll see the right products on the site. This information is cookied, so the next time they visit the site they don't have to re-enter this information. Here are some other ways that Cruiser Customizing makes its site search as user friendly as possible:

• auto complete for search suggestions, so when consumers begin typing a certain search term, suggestions appear below that they can click on without having to type all the information;
• rich auto completes, which shows products as you begin typing in the search box;
• search results pages (SRPs) refined by product categories, special offers, price, brand, among other segments;
• related searches posted on the top of SRPs and below the list of products;
• ratings and reviews embedded within search results;
• prices included in all search results, with products on sale highlighted; and
• best-sellers listed in the right-hand columns of SRPs.

Cruiser Customizing also includes nonproduct-related content — e..g., blogs, videos — in its site search results. This improves engagement with customers and builds loyalty, said McKenzie, adding that this content should always relate back to your products. The related videos have proven particularly effective. In fact, the conversion rate for consumers who have viewed a video are 45 percent higher than those who haven't.

The videos aren't professionally done, said McKenzie, with Cruiser Customizing opting for real-life bikers to be the stars. This adds to their authenticity, she added.

Social Media Meets Site Search
Cruiser Customizing includes relevant content from its social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube within its SRPs. This has a twofold effect, said McKenzie: it helps with conversion by providing relevant content for consumers, while building brand awareness for Cruiser Customizing's social media efforts.

Along with social media, Cruiser Customizing is active in mobile. The retailer's mobile site places a high value on site search as well. In fact, effective site search is even more critical on mobile because of the medium's lack of space, said McKenzie. Both Cruiser Customizing's mobile and regular website include a search box at the bottom of SRPs in case consumers get to the bottom of the page, haven't found what they're looking for and want to search again without having to scroll to the top of the page.

Test to Find the Best View
Use A/B split tests to find which works best for your SRPs, list view or grid view, said McKenzie. Cruiser Customizing uses both, and sees advantages to each. List views allow room for more product copy, while grid view provides images. Cruiser Customizing's grid view SRPs enable consumers to see pop-up images of products by simply mousing over them, providing a faster path to purchase, McKenzie said.

The company has also tested a new “Tire Finder” tool on its site. Struggling with return rates of up to 45 percent for its tires, Cruiser Customizing set up a search for tires based on tire measurements. The results served up to consumers were better targeted, helping to reduce returns to 2 percent of tire sales — and increasing overall sales of tires.

Landing Pages, Microsites
These are two more tools that Cruiser Customizing has in its arsenal to optimize search. Landing pages work hand-in-hand with the company's paid search campaigns. Cruiser Customizing researches top keywords within a product category, creates landing pages with those keywords in headers, and populates the categories with appropriate merchandise.

Cruiser Customizing uses microsites to introduce new brands or products. The retailer includes the name of a new brand or product in a microsite's URL, helping to improve organic search rankings.

Metrics Improve
Cruiser Customizing has seen a nice return on investment from its site search upgrades, in addition to seeing increased customer loyalty, said McKenzie. Consider the following:

• consumers who use Cruiser Customizing's site search are converting at a 64 percent higher clip than those who don't;
• 85 percent of its customers now use site search;
• site search has a 4 percent cost per sale, the lowest of any channel for Cruiser Customizing; and
• the average order value for site search users are 45 percent higher vs. those who don't use site search.