Help your shoppers more easily find products they’ll love by displaying variations across the shopping experience which are most relevant to their current purchase intent.
Searchspring’s new level of control over how variations of products are displayed creates a unique opportunity to evaluate shopper intent in real-time and then dynamically match it with the most relevant experience to ensure that you’re showing the right product, to the right shopper, at the right time.
What are Variants?
A variant can be thought of as a specific version of a product that possesses unique attributes, features, or specifications that differentiate it from other versions of the same product. Typically, a variant is part of a broader family of related products. For instance, a blue shirt in size small may belong to a broader family of shirts, each with a unique combination of size and color.
Variant search enables merchants to customize the details of individual product variations while presenting the search results in an organized manner to shoppers, giving the impression of a single cohesive product. The best-matching variant is then displayed to the shopper when showcasing the entire product family.
Why do I need variants?
Variant search ensures that only relevant product variations are displayed to shoppers. It also improves relevancy in search and filtering.
Let's consider an example. A pair of jeans may come in various colors (product parents), and have specific waist and inseam sizes (product children). Each parent product (jean color) may have its own photo to display, and each waist and inseam size combination will have a specific stock level.
When shoppers search for "jeans", they can see all of the product parents, - each jean in each color it comes in. But shoppers do not want to see the see 30 jean next to the size 32 jean, next to the size 34 jean, this is just clutter.
Hyper-Relevant Search & Filtering
When filtering on that same search, a shopper may want to be specific about their waist and inseam size, and expect that the parent products that are returned are in the size specified, and in stock. At each level of searching & filtering, shoppers want to see the products that match, but don’t want to see products that don’t contain a variant that fits my size.
Shopper Filtering
Imagine you're shopping for shirts, and you filter down for your size and a color you like. Now imagine clicking a product you want to buy, only to find it's not actually available in that color in your size! It’s likely that you'll leave in this unpleasant scenario and take your chances at finding a store with a better shopping experience to spend your money at.
With Searchspring's variants support, we automatically hide products that aren't actually available in combinations selected by shoppers using filters on search or category pages.
Dynamic Display
When shoppers are using filters to find products, they expect to see those versions of the products throughout their shopping experience, while merchants also need a way to optimize which versions of those products they’re highlighting.
Searchspring balances these needs with Dynamic Display: The behavior where each product’s display on search results or category pages can be determined by variant data such as image, name, price, etc.
Automatic for Search & Filtering
When shoppers are browsing for certain types of products, they expect to see their selections reflected on a high level. For instance, a shopper filtering for red will expect the product images in the list to change to show what the red option of each looks like. Similarly, a shopper searching for "polka dot dress" will automatically show the polka dot image for each product that has a polka-dot variation. This behavior comes out-of-the-box for Searchspring once your site has been set up for variants support.
Merchandising: Dynamic Display Rules
Merchants need to be able to optimize their strategy to align with sales, margin goals, or even brands or holidays, all of which can be closely linked to specific variants of products. Dynamic Display Rules for Variants allows you to influence how products appear on your store by adjusting which variant of each product will be chosen to represent it on your search results or category pages.
Read More about Merchandising Rules »
Autocomplete
Variant search is bundled into Autocomplete. This means that the dynamic display and faceting functionality will carry over here.
Getting set up
Interested in getting Variants support for your store?
Read more here »
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