4 Features for a Successful B2B Search Strategy

Search plays a vital role in B2B ecommerce. The better your search functions, the easier it is for customers to find the products they need, and the faster the company makes a sale. But what do you need for an effective search function for B2B websites? Let’s explore four key features every company should implement for a robust search experience. 

Right Product, Right Price 

It’s critical for your search to deliver not only the right product, but it needs to be shown at the right price as well. B2B ecommerce pricing can be incredibly complex. It often has a wide variety of products with an array of prices that are influenced by a number of different factors. Depending on your business, different prices may be offered based on customer tier, buying in bulk, or the number of employees.  

The key to offering the right price is to ensure that both the data and accounts are structured in a way so that the right product with the right price is shown.   

Offer the Right Filters  

Filters are very important when considering your search capabilities. Typical B2B companies have an extensive catalog that customers need to sift through. Filters make it easier for customers to find what they need and find it quickly. Whether it’s by color, by date, or any other attribute, all of those filters go into whittling down their search options. And it’s not enough to simply offer filters. B2B businesses need to ensure they’re implementing the right filters. When a customer is searching for a specific product, it’s important that they are able to find the right attributes to filter by.  

Use Synonyms and Misspellings 

It’s best practice for general search to be set up on the back end to offer results for synonyms, variations, misspellings, and autocomplete to help customers find the right product. For example, if someone is searching for paper clips, but spells it as “paper clipps,” the search experience should still deliver the expected results. Or if they search for paper holders, paper clips should still appear as a search result.  

Similarly, products with additional names that are only used internally, should be set to appear in search with the customer search term. Being able to back-end boost search results for products will help deliver the right products.  

Don’t Forget Reorder and Relevance 

Reorder and relevance are incredibly important when it comes to search. Once a user begins a search, the first set of results should be the last purchase and other relevant products can be featured to show that the company knows the customer. This makes it easy for customers to reorder products that they need and find other ones that they may want to buy as well.  

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