FusioNBot vs SearchSpring: eCommerce Site Search Solutions
No online retailer wants to hear that customers are having a
hard time navigating their site, or that searching for products yields them no
results. Enabling a powerful, advanced, and customizable site search solution
on your online store is vital for maintaining good conversion rates and keeping
customers happy. Obviously, there’s a lot of site search solutions
out there to choose from, so we’re going to pit two against each other today to
see who comes out on top for your eCommerce business: FusioNBot and
SearchSpring.
FusioNBot
Started in 1998, FusioNBot
is a Chicago-based hosted software application that provides site search
solutions for any website. Some of their most notable customers are American
Electric Power, Covenant Health Products, and Battery Clerk.
Pricing
FusioNBot offers three tiered plans at varying costs and
feature sets, and does not offer a free trial. The details of their plans are
as follows:
·
Silver
Plan: $60 a month, includes 1,500 pages indexed, up to daily auto-index
frequency, 8 on-demand indexes per month, and email technical support.
·
Gold Plan:
$200 a month, includes 5,000 pages indexed, up to daily auto-index frequency,
unlimited on-demand indexes, and phone technical support.
·
Platinum
Plan: $350 a month, includes more than 25,000 pages indexed, custom
auto-index frequency, unlimited on-demand indexes, and phone technical support.
Site Search Features
The most standout aspect of FusioNBot’s service is,
naturally, their extremely customizable selection of site search features. With
FusioNBot, your site search can utilize synonym matching and word stemming,
stop words, spell check logic (“Did you mean?” suggestions), and autocomplete
for keywords and SKUs; all of which are totally customizable. You also have the
power to add a custom product comparison modal, quick search for the top 5
matches of a keyword, and a custom product finder that includes dynamic
multi-drop-down menu selectors based on custom attributes.
FusioNBot’s site search isn’t just limited to products
either; you can use their search to index any pages on your website, as well as
documents including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and RTF file formats. You’re
also able to enable keyword highlighting and bolded matching terms on search
result pages, making the searching experience on your site much smoother. You
can even control search results context, which means that you can customize
which product listing elements your site search pulls from when looking for
keywords (title, description, body, rank, URL, size, date, icon, nearest anchor
tag, cache, preview). Best of all, these features are scalable to over 1
million SKUs.
Navigation Features
FusioNBot has the basic necessary navigation features that
you’d want in an eCommerce site search solution. You’re able to enable custom
filters, or facets, that apply to products based on assigned attributes. The
service also allows you to control the sorting options you can give to your
users, allowing products to be sorted by rank, date, name, price, and more.
Merchandising Tools
When it comes to features meant for merchandising or
promotions, FusioNBot is relatively limited in what it offers. The main
merchandising tools that you’ll get with FusioNBot are highlighted promoted
results, custom page ranks, custom landing pages, and the ability to add in
premade promotional banners.
Reporting & Analytics
FusioNBot’s service includes a long list of advanced
analytics reports to help you dig deep into the data of your site search.
You’ll have access to a variety of basic reporting features, including a
summary report for monitoring visitor activity and keywords, an hourly traffic
report, an index log report that tracks indexed pages and changes, and a weekly
search activity email summary. You also have the ability to generate search reports
for specific IP addresses or without specific IP addresses.
Also included is FusioNBot’s extensive reporting features,
which include reports on the most frequent visitors, daily traffic and search
activity, no matches or zero results occurrences, and the following advanced
reports:
·
Directory
Page Count Report: Determine page counts by directory and sub-directory for
each site in your index.
·
User
Behavior Report: Track specific users per IP address, all the way from
search to click-through.
·
Recent Searches
Report: Shows the 20 most recently searched terms on your site.
·
Keywords
Report: Shows the most popular search terms and number of searches over a
specific period.
·
Click-Through
Report: Shows which pages are clicked most often within search results;
sub-report shows the total number of clicks by unique IP addresses and the
search terms used by visitors when a link was clicked.
·
Search
Hits Report: Displays daily unique search terms and number of hits,
including zero result searches.
·
Region
Report: Shows query volume by unique search boxes configured and by
individual search menu item; this report is useful if you have multiple search
boxes and menu selection items.
Unique Features
FusioNBot offers a variety of unique features to its site
search users that you won’t find with SearchSpring. Possibly the feature that
they discuss the most is their transparent
DNS feature, which enables searches to be executed remotely on FusioNBot
servers, meanwhile the URL the searcher is on remains the same as your site’s
domain. This feature is most likely helpful for avoiding confusion in customers
who may become concerned by a change in website URLs.
Another unique feature that FusioNBot offers is their mini-portal, which is a feature that
aggregates related content into your site search from your own site and related
sites, providing users with valuable resources directly from your online store.
Each tiered plan denotes the amount of sites you can include in your
mini-portal, ranging from 100 sites to an unlimited amount.
SearchSpring
Based in Colorado, SearchSpring
is an eCommerce site search and merchandising solution for online retailers. A
few of their biggest clients are Kate Somerville, Bethesda Game Studios, and
Alternative.
Pricing
SearchSpring offers one pricing plan to customers that
starts at 499.95 a month, which is more expensive than FusioNBot’s most
expensive plan, and offers no free trial. However, this amount may change
depending on the size of your business, so you’ll have to submit for a
personalized quote to see exactly how much your plan will cost.
Site Search Features
SearchSpring has a lot of the same site search features that
FusioNBot has, with a few notable additions. You’ll find synonyms and stemming,
query replacements/ignored terms, typo tolerance for fuzzy search, predictive
visual autocomplete, “Did you mean?” suggestions, and partial term or SKU product
matching. SearchSpring also has their own way of determining search results
context with their definable searchable fields, allowing you to choose which
pieces of product listings can be searchable.
With SearchSpring, you’re also able to add custom no result
pages, landing pages, and non-product redirects with your own custom content.
What SearchSpring brings to the table that FusioNBot doesn’t, however, is its
advanced natural language processing algorithm and IntelliSuggest algorithm,
both of which are able to determine customer search intent and push 10 products
to the top of results based on shopper engagement, respectively.
Navigation Features
SearchSpring also has the necessary navigation features
you’d need in a site search, but adds onto these as well with a few important
extras. You’ll find custom sorting options (price, date, size) that you can
enable, as well as facets and filters that you can manually order. However,
SearchSpring’s facets are smart-sorted, meaning they will dynamically order
their fields depending on the context of the shopper’s page. SearchSpring also
auto-eliminates empty facets, only shows relevant facets, and gives you the
option to pin custom facets.
Merchandising Tools
Now, where SearchSpring really stands out from FusioNBot is
with its wide array of merchandising tools that you can utilize for your online
store’s site search. Like FusioNBot, you can create custom landing pages for
promotions, customize page rank order to promote certain products, and add in
promotional campaign banners into any page. However, SearchSpring takes it a
step further by enabling you to schedule landing pages and campaigns, set up
boosting rules that dynamically re-order products globally or in specific
campaigns, and customize triggers for campaigns to take effect in specific
complex shopper scenarios. You can also hide specific products from results,
use a drag-and-drop editor to customize product order, manually override facets
on category pages, and entirely customize the look and behavior of specific
search pages.
Reporting & Analytics
While SearchSpring does have a select few of the same types
of reports with its service, for the most part they utilize their own unique
reports and are lacking many of the ones that FusioNBot uses. Alongside the
same reports for search activity, zero results, keywords, and specific user
behavior, SearchSpring offers the following reports:
·
Popular
Searches with Automatic Search Downgrade: Shows how often secondary matches
occur when a search results in zero matches.
·
Filter
and Sort Reports: Gives information on how filters and sorting are being
used.
·
“Did you
mean?” Report: Displays how often users get a suggestion when searching,
and for which terms.
·
Referral
Report: Shows how much traffic your store is getting due to search results
in an outside search engine, such as Google.
·
Product
Performance and Insights: Gives you high level and granular views of how
products are performing, how shoppers are interacting with them, and suggested
action steps to make improvements.
·
Revenue
Impact: Shows how much each SearchSpring feature is contributing to
purchases.
·
Category
Insights: Allows you to analyze how shoppers are interacting with category
pages.
Unique Features
Involved in almost every aspect of SearchSpring’s service is
their unique IntelliSuggest Algorithm,
which they state is a powerfully smart search algorithm that assists in
tracking, merchandising, product recommendations, and product insights. Their
algorithm assists you in advanced ways, allowing you to record interactions on
yours tore, push dynamically chosen and user behavior-based products on result
pages, enable automatic upselling and cross-selling, and give you advanced
views of product performance. However, it’s important to note that their
IntelliSuggest Product Recommendations and Product Insights features come at an
extra cost.
Other unique features that SearchSpring offers are their Product Discovery Tools, Product Finder, and Guided Selling, all of which are
designed to help users find products they most likely will buy. With these
tools, you can show customers products that others have views or bought and ask
customers questions to narrow down what it is they’re looking for on your site.
Takeaway
When it comes down to comparing FusioNBot and SearchSpring,
the determining factor for which you should use is what your business’s size
and needs are. If your business is smaller with the potential to scale, and you
prioritize being able to have a transparent DNS, mini-portal, or reports on
multiple search boxes, then FusioNBot may be the best decision for you.
However, if you run an enterprise-level business that prioritizes a variety of
merchandising tools at your disposal, then SearchSpring may be a better option.
At the end of the day, the site search solution you decide on will depend on
exactly what your business is looking for from such a solution, and how much
you’re willing to pay for it. But, if you’re a small-medium sized business
looking for a site search that doesn’t break the bank, comes with all of the
necessary features, and gives you a long list of customization capabilities,
then FusioNBot is our recommendation.