Once you get people to your website, the aim is to convert them into paying customers. How will they find the item they want to buy? By searching for it. The Search feature in your online store is a simple but powerful tool. When customers search for items, it means they want to buy something that they already have it in mind.
Studies show that customers who use the search tool have higher conversion rates. This is in comparison to those who just come to browse. When a customer uses a search tool, they want fast and intuitive results. And Elasticsearch in Magento® online store is the way to achieve this.
Elasticsearch Explanation
Elasticsearch is a search engine for your online store. It is an open-source tool that uses Lucene’s information retrieval software library. Elasticsearch is built for scalability and can be used to search all types of documents. It offers an almost real-time search and offers a distributed search which gives the customer very fast results.
Elasticsearch Feature List
Let’s take an overall look at some of Elasticsearch key features.
Stop Words Support
These are small supporting words for the search phrase (e.g. “the,” “for, “and”). It also supports synonyms and several languages. It makes your searches more instinctive, like the way natural language processing works. It enables Elasticsearch to understand what you want to search. This might differ a bit from what you typed.
Indexed Search Techniques
This eliminates the need for SQL queries which has a significant effect on speed. The result is very quick search speeds.
Standard Configuration
It works well even without customizations. It is also quite easy to scale horizontally.
Additional Applications
Elasticsearch offers other applications in its framework that go beyond mere searching. There are useful reporting, personalization, and storage options.
Autocomplete Function
It starts analyzing the customer’s search for the first character they type. As they continue typing, results that don’t match the search bar get eliminated. The customer is eventually left with the right product. This also extends to matching categories and related products, not just product descriptions.
Typo Correction
When words are mistyped, Elasticsearch assist customers with possible corrections to what they might have meant in the search bar. It uses a “Did you mean …” message. The suggestions given are based on actual products that can be found in the online store.
Relevant Search
It shows results that have an exact match to what the customer searched for. This smart feature incorporates past customer behavior when determining relevancy. This means that Elasticsearch considers consumer behavior when determining relevancy to that customer. Demographics and previous purchases are also considered.
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Faceted Search
This allows for all kinds of product specifications to be met first and focusses the customer’s search by using different facets and filters. So, only related items will be displayed. The customer gets to cut everything that does not meet his exact needs. This is quite useful for stores that sell items in several brands, colors or sizes.
How Will It Affect My Store Search?
The main advantage of Elasticsearch is it almost reads your customer’s intentions. Your customers will be able to search massive product lists at blistering speeds. The searches are very reliable and quite easy to manage.
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Magento Elasticsearch Extension
So, how does Elasticsearch make Magento online stores, in particular, work better? Let’s look at a few Elasticsearch extensions, built for Magento online stores.
Elasticsearch Ultimate for Magento 2
Elasticsearch Ultimate is an extension available for Magento 2 online stores. Their goal is to create the ultimate search experience for customers. This will naturally lead to an increase in conversion rates. Searches are completed within milliseconds. The additional search features are all built into the search engine. So, the customer does not need to fiddle with numerous settings.
Elasticsearch Ultimate also speeds up your store catalog pages. You can search through several different content types, and all languages are supported. Incorrect spellings autocorrected, as the customer types in the search bar. It also fully supports searches where keywords contain stop words, hyphens, and slashes.
Elasticsearch Ultimate Community Edition costs $249, and the Enterprise Edition costs $448. There is a separate installation fee of $49, which is optional.
Magento 2 Elasticsearch
Magento 2 Elasticsearch is also available for Magento 2 online stores. It is the preferred choice for online stores that need a highly scalable search engine. It can handle massive amounts of data in very little time. It is powerful enough to replace MySQL search engines. Magento 2 Elasticsearch also support multi-match and simple-match queries. As expected, it also features a clever auto-correct feature for misspelled words.
It is available in 3 editions: Community, Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud. The Community Edition costs $99. The Enterprise and Edition Cloud Editions each cost $198. All three editions come with a free 3-month support period. 6-Month and 1-year options are available at an extra price. There is a separate installation fee of $19-80, which is optional.
Bubbleshop Elasticsearch
Extension for Elasticsearch is a distributed real-time search solution, built for the cloud. Indexing is lightning fast. It integrates well with other hosted services like Found, Bonsai, and others.
This Magento Elasticsearch extension has the highly-demanded autocomplete and autocorrect features. Related suggestions are also offered when an inconsistent search phrase is entered. This extension has received great reviews from online store owners. They cite wonderful customer support for this product.
It is available for €95. There is a 3-month free upgrade service. 6-Month and 12-month options available at an extra rate. There is a separate installation fee of €40, which is optional.
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