FACT-Finder is the European market leader for on-site search and navigation in online shops. Our intelligent search and navigation solution is used worldwide in 24 languages, 26 countries, and in more than 1000 shops. 51 of the Top-100 online retailers in Germany have integrated FACT-Finder's error-tolerant product search into their ecommerce sites, thus increasing their sales by 10% to 33%.
A survey of 600 Internet users revealed that more than half felt that a good auto-complete feature was “important” or even “very important”. As soon as the user begins to type, Suggest offers valid search terms to complete the entry. This error-tolerant feature makes searching much more convenient.
For example, once the user types the first few letters of “cabinet” in the search field, a drop-down box will appear with appropriate articles, such as “TV cabinets”, “floor cabinets”, or “wardrobes”. The user can simply select the appropriate term from this list. Even when typographical errors occur, Suggest always displays the correct terms, and ranks the suggestions intelligently, using a self-learning algorithm according to relevance and conversion rates.

We wanted to know exactly what types of search and navigation behaviour are actually observed with users in online shops having various different search functions. These real-world results may be used to strategically optimise a shop’s success.