How Misspelled Searches Are Killing Your Sales and How to Fix It

However, most e-commerce websites fail to deliver a great search experience. Poor search results are plentiful and not that surprising to consumers. One common mistake that companies often make in e-commerce search is weak (or even no) typo tolerance.

Misspelling in e-commerce site search

Misspelling is a much broader and bigger problem than what most e-commerce companies anticipate 🚨.

In general, there’re two types of shoppers in your webshop – the browser and the searcher. Between these two, searchers have a higher potential to convert because they already have a product in mind to purchase. So, if you succeed in presenting them the right product, they will turn into paying customers and make a purchase from you.

In most cases, conversion rates nearly doubled from customers who used on-site search and found what they were looking for. As for Amazon, its conversion rate shoots up 6x when visitors do a search (2% → 12).

However, if a customer misspells their search query and your webshop fails at showing relevant search results (or even any result), it will irritate them and make them leave your store immediately. Just like that, you lost a sale!

In fact, Google's latest report points out that 1 out of 10 search queries is misspelled every day. The number is even higher on e-commerce websites - approximately 25% of all site search queries are misspelled 😱!

The solution: Using typo tolerance with Clerk Search

10 years ago, business professionals advised webshop owners to manually map all the common misspellings 😵.

The good news today is that Clerk has the technology to save you from the dreadful hassle of completing this impossible task 💪.

Powered by industry-leading AI and machine learning technologies, Clerk’s intelligent search engine enables your e-commerce site to always deliver the correct search result every time even when customers misspell or create typos 🌟. Here's an example of how Clerk Search still presents right results when a customer misspells "truffle":

With intelligent autocorrection, Clerk Search ensures that although your searchers mistype or have a hard time spelling, their intent is understood properly and presented with the correct result. In doing so, you can save a ton of sales by still converting the shoppers who have high intent to purchase but misspell their search queries.

The benefits don’t just stop there. By ensuring customers who misspell their search queries still get relevant results, you can retain them in your webshop and successfully extend their shopping journey by preventing them from running into a dead-end 😎.

Saved misspelled searches = saved revenue 💰

Here’s a case study from Natural Baby Shower, a British store specializing in eco-friendly baby products. Before implementing Clerk, Natural Baby Shower didn't realize that customers were misspelling query words when using the site's search function. Surprisingly, as current data shows, more than 10% of site searches are consistently misspelled. At that time, the business was missing out on sales by letting customers’ misspelled searches slip away 😢.

After using Clerk Search, Natural Baby Shower quickly realized the value in the software's typo tolerance feature. As the following example exhibits, when a customer misspells "stroller," when using the site's search, Clerk can still deliver the correct search result with intelligent autocorrect. Now, Natural Baby Shower doesn't have to worry about potentially losing sales when customers misspell items or create typos.

As a result, Natural Baby Shower has been able to increase its search conversion rate significantly, gaining hundreds of new customers who otherwise could have been lost. To be exact, the likelihood of customers converting increases 5.7x once they interact with Clerk Search 💸 !

If you want to know more about Clerk’s intelligent search engine built particularly for e-commerce, schedule a meeting with one of our specialists today 🙋.