Convermax vs Doofinder: Site Search Solutions for Your eCommerce Business

No matter the size of your online store, an optimized site search solution is crucial to keep customers happy and finding what they’re looking for. If a customer has a hard time navigating the products on your site, that can spell disaster for your conversion rates. There’s a large amount of site search solutions out there for eCommerce businesses with a variety of features to compare, but we’re looking at two popular options today to see which comes out on top: Convermax and Doofinder.

Convermax

Based in New York, but originating in Russia since 2011, Convermax is a site search solution built for eCommerce businesses. Some of their biggest clients are Duralee, WeGotLites, and Stage 3 Motorsports.

Pricing

Convermax splits up its service cost into 3 tiered plans, separated by the size of your business and how many visitors you have in a month. Before you pay, you have the option to start with a 30-day free trial. Here’s the different priced plans:

·         Small Business: $150 per month for 15,000 visitors per month, one site, cloud hosting, and email support.

·         Advanced: $250 per month for 25,000 visitors per month, two sites, cloud hosting, and both email and phone support.

·         Enterprise: $750 per month for 75,000 visitors per month, four sites, cloud or on-prem hosting, and priority email and phone support.

Site Search Features

Convermax’s main selling point is, obviously, it’s variety of advanced site search features. It’s got everything you’d need out of a site search solution, including a rich autocomplete feature that suggests typical queries and becomes smarter as it collects more data, and an autosuggest feature that corrects misspellings, typos, incorrect word breaking, and sorts out irrelevant words. You also have access to custom correction rules so that you can optimize your search for complicated cases, in addition to synonyms and subjective qualifiers that you can customize to fit your customer’s language.

One of the more notable aspects of the Convermax site search toolset is the algorithm’s ability to extract attributes from queries with its natural language search. This feature enables the search engine to understand different parts of a query and show results accordingly, such as understanding that a user typing in “red shirt under $50” means that they want to see a selection that is in that exact price range. Their engine is also able to extract attributes and filter values from semi-structured data, such as tables or bulleted lists. It can also split up long product names into separate components so that it’s able to assign categories automatically, making the search experience easier for you and your customers.

Navigation Features

With Convermax, you’ll be getting a decent variety of advanced filtering tools for your site’s search. You have the option to enable several different types of filters, such as multi-select checkboxes, sliders, price ranges, star ratings, and even custom-coded widgets that fit your business needs. But, Convermax goes even further by utilizing contextual filters, which means that the filter panel can show or hide certain facets based on the selected category or condition. These filters can be reordered dynamically to best fit the specific product category as well.

Merchandising Tools

You have a lot of options for merchandising products with Convermax’s promotional tools. Their main tool is product recommendations, which present products in a “You may also like” section on product pages to promote companion products, accessories, best sellers, top-ranked products, specific brands or collections, new releases, on-sale items, or any custom set of products you’d like to promote. Their algorithm uses machine learning backed by product trends, customer behavior logs, and buyer profiles to accurately predict what each specific customer may be interested in buying. You can also tag a product as part of a collection, increasing upsells and cross-sells.

You’ll also be able to create custom promotions filled with your own choice of boosted products, as well as a choice of alternate products to suggest in the case of an out-of-stock item. Convermax also allows you to set up your own redirects for landing pages, non-product searches, and more.

Reporting & Analytics

Convermax comes with a built-in reporting panel that’s equipped with a variety of insights into your business’s search and user behavior. You’ll be able to see data for popular search queries, bad performing search queries, filter option usage, session reports, and general usage statistics. All of the data provided by Convermax is generated in real time, and can be exported as a CSV file for easier access if preferred.

Unique Features

The main feature that sets Convermax’s site search solution apart from the rest is its natural language search functionality. The fact that it’s algorithm is able to determine and apply filters directly from query inputs is impressive, and can be extremely helpful for boosting a customer’s productivity on your site. However, aside from this feature, Convermax offers a lot of the same typical features you’ll find in most other site search solutions.

Doofinder

Also started in 2011, Doofinder is a smart search engine designed for eCommerce websites. Their most notable clients are HP, Volkswagen, and Decathalon.

Pricing

Doofinder’s service comes under 4 tiered pricing plans, differing only in the amount of requests it supports in a month; you also have the option to start with a 30-day free trial and to continue with a free plan limited to 1,000 requests a month and manual indexing. Something different about Doofinder’s service, however, is that they charge extra for mobile support; something that Convermax and most other site search solutions include in their service at no additional costs. Here’s the breakdown of paid plans:

·         S Plan: $29 a month for 10,000 requests; additional $6 for the mobile version. (Total: $35 a month)

·         M Plan: $49 a month for 50,000 requests; additional $9 for the mobile version. (Total: $58 a month)

·         L Plan: $69 a month for 100,000 requests; additional $14 for the mobile version. (Total: $83 a month)

·         XL Plan: $99 a month for 200,000 requests; additional $19 for the mobile version. (Total: $118 a month)

Site Search Features

Doofinder comes enabled with a rich selection of site search tools that you can use to optimize your store’s search solution. Their self-learning AI search algorithm comes equipped with advanced autocomplete, synonyms, and phonetic search technology that corrects spelling errors and returns results that customers were looking for. You also have the option to add on search history, customize suggested searches, and schedule indexing for up to 6 times per day; however, Doofinder may incur additional costs for these features.

You’re also able to utilize multi-index search, which allows your site search to show different data sources simultaneously on the same layer or results page. This is especially useful for non-product searches, such as articles or resources, and can be entirely customized to add additional data types and combined data feeds. Doofinder also supports up to 30 different languages, including Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. It’s unclear whether Convermax also supports multiple languages, so this is a plus for Doofinder for sure.

Another feature that Doofinder uniquely has is its geo-located search functionality, which uses your customer’s geo-location to optimize search results. This can be useful if, for example, your store carries certain products that only ship to a specific country, so the engine will show only users in that country those products when they search.

Navigation Features

In the realm of navigation features, Doofinder’s offering is relatively limited when compared to Convermax. While they do include the basic necessary faceted search navigation function, complete with filters and attributes like price, color, size, brand, etc., they don’t include any contextual or dynamic filtering like Convermax does. Doofinder’s mobile search also includes filters and banners, but you’ll have to pay extra for the mobile service.

Merchandising Tools

Doofinder comes with a lot of useful tools that you can use to merchandise your products via your on-site search engine. You’re able to customize product positioning on search result pages for every search term, displaying the exact products that you want customers to see when they search. You can also alter your site’s search algorithm through boosting to give more relevance and weight to specific products you’re more interested in selling, meaning you don’t have to manually position products.

In addition to boosting and custom results, you can also show keyword-specific banners and promotions when a user searches for certain terms on your site. You also have the ability to create custom keyword-based redirects to landing pages and additional data types on your site, such as resource pages or articles.

Reporting & Analytics

Doofinder’s reports and statistics features seem to be slightly more advanced and detailed than Convermax’s, offering more of a variety of data types to keep track of. Tracked in real time, you’ll be able to analyze top searches, top clicked products, opportunities, number of searches, click-through rate, conversion rate, top-ranked items, and an automatic user behavior assessment. Their tracking also goes back an entire year, giving you more historical data to work with to determine trends and changes. However, keep in mind that all of these advanced reporting features are limited to paid plans.

Unique Features

The two standout unique features that Doofinder has over Convermax are its geo-located search and multi-language support. So, if your business puts an emphasis on global eCommerce, and supports shopping from all around the world in a variety of countries, you may be more pleased with Doofinder’s search capabilities.

Takeaway

When comparing Convermax and Doofinder, the most obvious difference there is the price points. Doofinder’s cheapest monthly paid plan is $29, and it’s most expensive is $99. When you compare this to Convermax’s cheapest monthly plan being $150, and it’s most expensive being $750, you can see a clear disparity in who these solutions are targeted towards. But, it’s not necessarily true that you’re losing out on features with the cheaper alternative; Doofinder has most of the same features that Convermax has in the way of site search, merchandising, and reporting. Doofinder even has some added features that Convermax doesn’t have, such as geo-located search. On the other hand, Convermax’s navigation and facet features seem to be more advanced.

The decision for your business really comes down to whether you own a smaller store in need of a plan that goes by number of searches, or a medium to large-sized store that needs a plan based on number of visitors. One drawback that we see with Doofinder is the fact that it charges extra for mobile support, but, since the base prices for the plans are so little compared to most search solutions on the market, this isn’t a deal-breaking issue. If you’re looking for an inexpensive site search solution for your small business that still has all of the necessary site search features, then we recommend Doofinder.