YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search allows users to search for products in your shop/website, and it shows the search results in real time.

The search bar is the most common and important tool for any type of website but it’s often not performing enough, it only shows a limited amount of products and it’s slow and hard to use.

Given that’s the landmark for all of the customers that are going to find themselves navigating through your website, you have to make sure you are offering a professional tool that actually helps the navigation, in order to quickly lead your customers towards the product they are after (research says users spend an average of 15 seconds on any website, so hurry up!)

Who works on designing websites knows it well: the most important studies in usability can teach many things about the effectiveness of a search form. In this case, “effectiveness” means the ability to turn a visitor — even a casual one — into a buyer, generating a purchase.

Let’s make an example: today five users will visit your site. Three of them will use the search form on the page, looking for a product. You only have seven seconds to give these users what they want, before they decide to leave your site and search somewhere else.

The features of a great search form are those that make all the catalogue products easy and quick to find, thanks to an immediate search that also allows using tags, categories, and product codes to look for a product.
Plus, great features are also those who transform the search in a marketing tool, letting you show a product preview that perfectly suits to users’ needs, or highlight particular discounts and promotions in the search results.

Researches on customers of online stores show that one of the main reasons that brings customers to abandon their cart before completing the purchase is the difficulty navigating through a website.

We are so used to search bars that we require them to be immediate and promptly provide us with what we are after. Consider Google and Facebook: we use their search bars every day and we take them for granted, but what if they suddenly stopped working and showed no results? Or maybe they would display unrelated results, wouldn’t we be disappointed?

The same things happens in your store in case you don’t have an optimized search bar, and it’s never a good idea to disappoint our customers.