This Doofinder review takes a critical assessment of the search tool. All the fundamental features and functionalities that you would consider important to your online store’s strategy.
It’s now official. That by 2020, product and price will finally be overtaken by customer experience as the principal brand differentiator.
Yeah, you’re dead right. It’ll be easier to beat a cheaper competitor by simply optimizing your online store’s overall user experience.
Now, here’s something everyone knows about designing a website for increased customer experience. We love a crisp and minimalistic layout. And of course, we don’t want to get lost trying to find our way around. The navigation procedure should also be pleasantly simple and straightforward.
But, that’s not all. Especially when it comes to ecommerce sites. As a matter of fact, they introduce a whole new complex element to the equation- the product list.
We are always seeking ways to expand and diversify our inventories in a bid to boost overall revenue. But each new additional product pretty much translates to one more hurdle for customers to sort through as they shop.
That said, here’s a rather interesting fact. Despite hosting an exceptionally extensive database of products, Amazon is still a favorite to the bulk of online shoppers when it comes to seeking specific products. According to BloomReach’s State of Amazon study, 90% of US-based online shoppers peep into the retailer even after finding their target products in other online stores.
Of course, you could argue that Amazon has one hell of a marketing machine. But that’s barely enough to retain customers.
All things considered, Amazon fundamentally relies on customer experience. Even with a forest of many products across a wide array of different categories, finding your target product is as easy as typing in a few words on the search panel.
And that’s essentially the secret here. Quite simple, to say the least.
So, how can you make the whole process of sorting through the product list easier for your customers? And most importantly, is this achievable by a small business that cannot afford even a fraction of what Amazon spends on its website?
Well, before we get into the precise details, what do you know about Doofinder?
Doofinder Review: Overview
Even when they are accessing relatively small online stores, 86% of potential customers want information about the products as soon as they land on the homepage. And no, they are not going to go through the entire inventory. That might take ages.
That’s why it’s critically important to build a search tool into your site.
Now, let me take a wild guess. I presume you’ve come across one of these incredibly annoying search tools that are seemingly placed on sites as vestigial accessories. They might take an entire fortnight to crawl through the product list, only to relay irrelevant results. And that’s if you’re even lucky to get them to work.
So, of course, you don’t provide just any typical search function. Your customers need one that’s basically as powerful as Google.
But developing such a comprehensive system of complex algorithms could take a lot of time and resources.
Now, that’s precisely where Doofinder comes in. Instead of taking time off your business to worry about that one feature, Doofinder gives you a way to embed search into your store right off the bat.
The on-site search service was developed to integrate to pretty much any site with minimal coding. According to its team of developers, all the tool needs is your underlying data feed then it subsequently conveys a bit of java coding for integration.
The result?
It’s supposed to act as your Store’s little Google. Essentially crawl through your entire catalog to quickly relay search results with the accuracy of a high-level search engine. Ultimately, you’re able to provide your visitors with exactly what they need, consequently improving the store’s conversion rate.
Ok, that’s how the team at Doofinder describes their product. To sum it up, they market it using the phrase “Those who search, find.”
Quite solid it seems. But enough with the pleasantries. Let’s get into the intricate details.
This Doofinder review takes a critical assessment of the search tool. All the fundamental features and functionalities that you would consider important to your online store’s strategy.
So, without further ado, let’s jump straight to the meatiest parts…
Doofinder Review: Features
Dynamic Advanced Search
The underlying principle behind the search function is helping web visitors locate items more conveniently and much faster compared to standard navigation. Many store owners have always thought of it as something that’s entirely user-defined. The final results are principally generated from user-defined keywords.
It turns out Doofinder takes a rather clever approach to this. While the results are usually defined by users, the keyword is not the only determinant.
The service is seemingly not just built to relay keyword results. It goes further to help you sell exactly what matters through its advanced feature.
To achieve this, it leverages an AI engine that automatically tracks users to analyze their behaviors. This then forms a basis for establishing their chief individual interests.
In the end, the engine picks out relevant items that your individual visitors are most likely to purchase, and displays them as priorities right in the results list.
Search Geo-Location
Let me jog your mind for a minute. It’s no secret that the United States is pretty strict about the maximum allowable carbon emission quantities from vehicles.
As a result, we’ve seen quite a substantial number of car models blocked from accessing their domestic market. It has, on several occasions, even affected brands that are already famous globally.
So, imagine this. A US-based prospect is surfing through a foreign car dealer seeking to import an exotic vehicle into the country. He then runs a random search on a brand that has already sold a number of models in the US, but has also had its fair share of failed emission tests on some of its models.
How should the subsequent result list look?
A standard search tool would probably analyze the keywords to generate all relevant products from the inventory.
Doofinder, on the other hand, can be set up to consider the specific models blocked off from the US market. Using the user’s location info, therefore, it prioritizes on the legal models, then ultimately displays vehicles that are particularly popular among US-based buyers.
That’s how you can leverage Doofinder’s search geo-location feature to expedite the whole conversion process.
Phonetic Search Technology
The sad truth about phonetics is that we are not as good as we assume we are. Think about it. How many times have you frantically tried to stop a misspelled text from delivery? Most of the time we don’t even notice a spelling mistake. We unknowingly make it and simply carry on with our lives.
And you know what? This trend is replicated across the web, especially within the search field. That’s why Google is fond of always correcting you with “Did You Mean”.
According to a study by Unbxd, a quarter of all ecommerce site search queries have typographical errors. And the funniest thing about it is the fact that shoppers don’t even commonly misspell the difficult terms. The bulk of the errors usually apply to very simple words. Something like “bodysuit” was wrongly spelled by sampled users in 223 different ways.
That said, it would be pretty unfortunate if this cost you sales opportunities from genuinely interested customers. Because, even after making typos, 73% of customers usually bounce in less than 120 seconds if they fail to find items they are seeking.
Thankfully, Doofinder has taken this into consideration. Their phonetic search technology is quite sensitive to spelling and phonetic errors. It corrects any spelling errors and consequently generates results that your customers actually want.
A word like “fillips” for instance, should rather generate results that are relevant to “Philips”.
Custom Results
I bet you’ve seen one of these situations.
A customer walks into a store looking for a specific item. As they offer help, the attendant drops one of these “Sure…it’s a great product. But have you considered the alternative we have here?”
And boom! They end up selling a different item that’s possibly even way costlier than the original one, with a much greater profit margin. The luckiest sales attendants even win over repeat customers form new product trials.
Now, picture that from an online store’s perspective. You prefer selling a specific product but customers, somehow, are seemingly not thinking about it. What do you do?
Well, you could try hard selling. But that would probably come off as desperate, consequently losing you a couple of solid prospects.
Or you could capitalize on Doofinder’s thoughtful feature of tweaking the search results to prioritize on the products you want to sell fast.
Doofinder’s Search Tweaks tab allows you to configure multiple parameters to generate custom results when users search specific terms.
Synonyms Smart Search
Picture this. Your store’s inventory might have something like “Female Jogging Shoes”.
That’s fairly descriptive, and shoppers would easily understand the term if they came across it. But, of course, this doesn’t guarantee that everyone would use those specific words on the search tool.
While “Female Jogging Shoes” is universally acceptable, some people prefer calling them “Lady Running Shoes”, while others would go with “Exercise Sneakers For Women”.
They are all correct because they pretty much refer to the same item. But your store has listed it under only one name- “Female Jogging Shoes”
To avoid losing the latter two sets of customers, Doofinder also provides synonyms smart search. This feature acts as your site’s thesaurus by analyzing and identifying synonymous terms then matches them with the corresponding products in the catalog.
As a result, you can comfortably sell an item to customers from different locations, who use varying words to describe the same thing.
Banners
Leveraging custom results is one way of waving to your customers and directing them towards specific products.
But, that’s not all there is to promoting selected items.
Doofinder also offers Banners to get more customers noticing the products you’re marketing. It works pretty much the same way as Google Ads.
Basically, banners display images and brief details about promoted products within the search results. They are then noticed much faster compared to regular ad banners in other standard site sections.
And the best part? You can edit them further to run different promotions selectively according to the corresponding search terms. It also allows users to determine selected periods to display the respective banners.
Analytics
To make informed decisions on future strategies, you need to understand exactly how your site is performing.
I found the Doofinder analytics tool to be quite handy when it comes to this. It tracks multiple metrics and subsequently displays the statistical results graphically for optimal analysis.
Some of the key elements you’ll be able to view include number of searches, click-through rate, conversion rate, top clicked products, top-ranked items, top opportunities, etc.
That’s how you get to know what your customers are buying, how they are responding to various search tweaks, possible sales opportunities, and the overall search tool ROI.
Integrations
Fortunately, Doofinder is not limited to one or two platforms. The service has expanded to multiple ecommerce platforms to facilitate online stores across the board and it's able to integrate with virtually all plattforms or websites.
It can be integrated into:
- Magento
- WordPress
- Prestashop
- Shopware
- Shopify
- xt:Commerce
- JTL-Shop
- WooCommerce
- OSCommerce
- OpenCart
- VirtueMart
- ZenCart
- Drupal
Overall Features
All things considered, here is the list of features that come with Doofinder:
- Full technical support
- Consistent service upgrades
- Detailed statistics
- Quick installation
- Labels and synonyms support
- Search results filtering
- Synonyms smart search
- Instant search results
- Phonetic search technology
- Misspellings support
- Automatic user behavior assessment
- Multi-index search
- API
- Geographic search
- Promotional banners
- Custom results
- Facets navigation
- Autocomplete
- Multi-language support
Doofinder Review: Pricing
To begin with, Doofinder grants you full access to all its features completely free of charge for 30 days after signing up.
Well, you can still use it without paying a dime past the free-trial period. However, the available features are a bit limited in the free plan. Take into account that you only be able to arrange 1000 requests with the free plan.
Beyond that, paid subscription is offered through four different plans, which come with all the service’s features. Instead of limiting product offering, Doofinder chooses to charge users according to the number of search queries in a month.
The smallest websites should be comfortable with the S plan, which costs €29 per month, plus an additional €6 for mobile support. This is open to 10,000 search requests every month.
If your site is fortunate enough to host more traffic, you could go for the M plan at €49 per month, plus an additional €9 for mobile support. The allowed search traffic here is 50,000 requests per month.
Past that we go into the mid-sized business zone. The L plan costs €69 per month, and the corresponding mobile version is only available after paying an additional €14. This supports 100,000 search queries each month.
Finally, we have the biggest of them all. For 200,000 search requests on a monthly basis, the XL plan would cost you €99 per month. If you’d like to extend to the service to mobile users, you’re required to top up an additional €19.
Come to think of it, I like the fact that all user levels are able to capitalize on the service’s full list of features.
But, I was rather surprised that mobile support comes as an additional feature at an extra cost. Going by recent trends in the mobile space, this provision should not even be negotiable. Doofinder should instead consider including it in all their packages, and possibly readjust the individual prices slightly.
Who Should Use Doofinder?
To recap:
- Doofinder leverages an AI engine that automatically tracks users to analyze their behaviors. This then forms a basis for establishing their chief individual interests. In the end, the engine picks out relevant items that your individual visitors are most likely to purchase, and displays them as priorities right in the results list.
- Doofinder can be set up to consider and prioritize the specific products based on location.
- Doofinder’s phonetic search technology is quite sensitive to spelling and phonetic errors. It corrects any spelling errors and consequently generates results that your customers actually want.
- Doofinder’s Search Tweaks tab allows you to configure multiple parameters to generate custom results when users search specific terms.
- Doofinder also provides synonyms smart search. This feature acts as your site’s thesaurus by analyzing and identifying synonymous terms then matches them with the corresponding products in the catalogue.
- Doofinder also offers Banners to get more customers noticing the products you’re marketing. It works pretty much the same way as Google Ads.
- Doofinder tracks multiple metrics and subsequently displays the statistical results graphically for optimal analysis.
- Fortunately, Doofinder is not limited to one or two platforms. The service has expanded to multiple ecommerce platforms to facilitate online stores across the board.
All in all, Doofinder is certainly worth considering if your ecommerce site offers a range of products. It really is that simple.
So, feel free to share your experience in the comments section.
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