Why You Should Not Manipulate Search Results

So you get your Clerk.io search engine up and running in your website!

As a plug’n’play solution, you just needed to install it and then let your users (soon to be customers!) use it. Since then, you haven’t probably tuned it anymore.

But you’ve got a new batch of products from a new collection, or from a new supplier. And you want to show them in the live search and/or in the search page as soon as possible, in order to generate sales.

As you know, it is technically possible to manipulate our automatic sorting rule and, as a result, push one or more products to the top of the search query (check how to here).

The question is: sales-wise, is it something recommendable?

As you know, our Search functionality produces search results and lists them almost exclusively basing on how well those products sell for that search query.

That means that when a customer searches for “jeans”

the Search functionality shows all the products compatible with the query “jeans” but first prompts the customers with the products selling better for the query " jeans".

That means our search functionality is able - through the access to the sales statistics - to provide results very close to the so-called “search intention” of each query.

In other words, the Search functionality will always show to your customers the results more likely to be purchased. Right now. In the same navigation session. All updated automatically.

But your new products have no sales, so of course new jeans will not show on the top of search results… correct?

Not at all! Search is one of the many sales channels of your website.

I am sure that you run a number of off-site campaigns like AdWords, FB social shopping, email marketing ( with our Email functionality?) plus the on-site ordinary tools like recommendation sliders and of course category pages and highlights sections (banners, popups and similar things).

So, even your newer products are generating sales and, then, will be ranking among the many search results soon.

But this is not all.

We know that there is an additional negative downside to pushing your newer products to the top of your search results: you will automatically push your bestsellers down the results.

Meaning that your customers will have a harder time finding the popular jeans they are looking for. That could mean that the stable sellers like a pair of Levi’s 501’s (a long standing design classic), would be much harder for your customers to find even though they likely are some of the most popular jeans you have and there is a good chance the customers will buy them if they see them.

Do you see why we want the built-in sorting rule to stay as it is? :)