Nextopia vs SearchSpring: Best Enterprise Site Search Solutions
Enabling an advanced site search on your eCommerce website
is vital for maintaining a good conversion rate and making the user experience
on your store the best that it can be. When it comes to deciding on a site
search solution for your enterprise-level online store, two of the
most popular options are Nextopia and SearchSpring. So, how do these two
solutions stack up against each other, and which should you choose for your
online store? Let’s take a look at their full lists of features and determine
the best option for your business.
Nextopia
Based in Toronto since 1999, Nextopia is an enterprise-level
eCommere site search solution that brings search, navigation, and merchandising
solutions to internet retailers. Some of their most notable clients are Gerber,
Noritake, and BenQ.
Pricing
Nextopia offers one
pricing plan at $395 a month, and
offers no free trial. However, you can get a personalized quote for your
business that may change this monthly amount. Although there is no free trial,
you can apply for a free demo of the service.
Site Search Features
Nextopia’s site search offers a wide variety of “smart”
features that are meant to optimize and enhance searching on your online store.
Their adaptive search algorithm is able to automatically rank your best
performing results based on consumer behavior, and brings searchers optimized
results that include products, blogs, videos, and user-guide information if you
so choose. Nextopia also uses dynamic filters that include fully customizable
attributes and refinements, such as size, color, brand, ratings, and reviews.
In the realm of autocomplete, Nextopia offers an enhanced
version that shows the searcher visual product matches as they’re typing, as
well as partial term and SKU matching. Their search also has “Sounds like” or
“Did you mean” suggestions to prevent a zero results page, enabled with
error-tolerant fuzzy matching so even typos will garner search results. In the
same vein, Nextopia gives you the option to customize synonym matching and to
create custom synonym maps, establishing equivalences between words that should
bring up the same results when searched.
Navigation Features
Nextopia comes with all of the basic necessary navigation
features that you may want in a site search. This includes fully customizable
dynamic filters on any page, custom sorting based on any metric, and sorting by
price, color, brand, category, ratings, gender, sizes, styles, and more.
Merchandising Tools
For visual merchandising, Nextopia provides you with a good
amount of tools at your disposal to get the most out of your products in search
results. You’re able to control product promotions and which products are shown
first in search results with merchandising rules, promoting by keyword
triggers, specific categories, SKU, attributes, and geographic location.
Geo-merchandising actually can go further than that, allowing you to create
rules for geographically oriented search results, communications, and product
promotions. Additionally, you can control redirects for non-product searches,
directing visitors to the URL of your choice (contact page, shipping
information, checkout, etc.).
Nextopia comes equipped with a landing page builder,
allowing you to create customized landing pages for keyword-driven product
promotions, emails, PPC campaigns, and more via a drag-and-drop interface. You
can also create custom promotional banners that are keyword-triggered, letting
you add graphics and custom HTML to campaigns with a WYSIWYG (what you see is
what you get) editor. On top of this, you also have the option to add
promotional badges to products to highlight items with graphics that say “hot,”
“new,” or other merchandising terms of your choice.
Reporting & Analytics
Nextopia’s offering for reporting and analytics is
relatively limited, only offering about four main categories of insights.
You’re able to see top searches, zero results found searches, poorly performing
results, and keyword discovery reports. While these features are helpful to
guide you towards any strategic changes you should make, they’re not expansive
enough to compete with the likes of Google Analytics, so you might as well use Google’s
feature for site search insights as well if you decide to go with Nextopia.
Unique Features
While Nextopia may be slightly lacking in a few features,
that isn’t to say that they don’t have unique aspects that make them stand out
from other site search solutions. Nextopia offers a personalized 1:1 search results and product recommendations
feature, which uses an individual searcher’s browsing history and shopping
behavior to give them unique results and recommendations. As we’ve already
discussed, Nextopia’s geo-targeting
feature is a notable unique asset, allowing you to not only serve search
results that are based on geographic location, but also give users
fully-customizable location based messaging, campaigns, banners, and regional
promotions.
SearchSpring
Designed for enterprise-level online stores, SearchSpring
is an eCommerce site search solution that focusses on automating and
simplifying all business processes related to on-site search, from analytics to
merchandising. Some of their biggest clients include Bethesda Game Studies,
Volcom, and Alternative.
Pricing
SearchSpring costs more than Nextopia, starting at $499.95 a month. However, you can get a
custom quote that may change this amount depending on the size of your
business. Like Nextopia, there is no free trial, but you can apply for a free
demo to check out the service.
Site Search Features
SearchSpring offers a lot of the same site search solutions
that Nextopia does, but with their own particular twist on a few features. Their
service is equipped with “Did you mean” suggestions, in addition to search
suggestions that suggest the most popular queries on your site that partially
match the current search. SearchSpring also offers customized synonym and
stemming maps, query replacements for typos, fuzzy search typo tolerance, and
natural language processing to determine customer search intent and context.
All of these features operate in an effort to garner the most relevant results
and avoid the “no results” page. If a searcher does happen upon a zero results
page, you can customize that to say whatever you’d like, or to redirect to a
custom landing page.
For autocomplete, SearchSpring offers a similar feature to
Nextopia, where users will see a predictive visual autocomplete module that
pops up as they’re typing their search term. Their search also will suggest any
products with names or SKUs that partially match the current search, and allows
you to define which product fields can be searchable. SearchSpring’s program is
quite advanced and open, with the ability to analyze product information to
determine its attributes, and access to a search preview to see how their
algorithm works and how it ranks products.
Navigation Features
SearchSpring has a much more comprehensive list of
navigation features available when compared to Nextopia. You’re able to
manually set facet orders, choose from a variety of facet types (multi-select,
grid boxes, palette options, sliders, images), utilize dynamically ordered
facet fields depending on the page context, and give shoppers the necessary
sorting options (price, date, size) that you can customize.
However, SearchSpring gets more advanced by enabling
auto-eliminating empty facets, only showing relevant facets, giving you the
ability to drag and drop facet order, and allowing you to manage custom pinned
facets.
Merchandising Tools
SearchSpring offers a decent amount of merchandising tools
that you can use and customize for various promotional purposes related to your
site search. Like Nextopia, you have the ability to create custom landing pages
that are made from hand-picked product listings, as well as add a rich banner
at the top of the page. However, landing pages are unique with SearchSpring in
that you can schedule them to only appear at a certain date and time, and to
last for a specific amount of time. You can also customize redirect pages, deciding
which pages certain keywords will redirect the searcher to (contact, checkout,
shipping).
Campaigns can be highly edited and customized to fit your
needs with SearchSpring, allowing you to customize product positions with a
drag-and-drop editor or enable dynamic re-ordering based on merchandising
rules. You can bulk upload products to your campaign pages, schedule campaigns
for a specific date and time, and set up custom campaign triggers that take
effect in various shopper scenarios. Facets can also be manually set, shown, or
hidden based on specific category pages, just like you can do with specific
products on result pages.
Reporting & Analytics
SearchSpring’s reporting and analytics features are much
beefier than Nextopia’s, offering a wider range of specific reports to get to
the bottom of what’s working and what isn’t with your store’s search. You can
analyze overall search activity, which breaks down which queries came from
shoppers, search engines, or custom IP address groups. You can also generate a
number of highly specific reports, including:
·
Zero Results Reports
·
Keywords Reports
·
Filters Reports
·
Sorts Reports
·
“Did you mean” Reports
·
Referral Reports
·
Product Performance Overview and Insights
·
Category Insights
·
Search Insights
·
Popular Searches with Automatic Search Downgrade
Triggers
SearchSpring also lets you look at revenue impact, which
shows you how much each SearchSpring feature contributes to purchases and
conversions. Additionally, SearchSpring can hold up to 2 years’ worth of
insights and reporting data for you to analyze and gain information from.
Unique Features
The most unique feature that SearchSpring boasts about is
it’s IntelliSuggest Algorithm, which
has a hand in each of its feature categories.
·
IntelliSuggest
Tracking records clicks, views, items added to cart, and purchases that
happen on your store.
·
IntelliSuggest
Elevations pushes 10 products to the top of the results page of your 5,000
most popular search terms based on product engagement for each specific query,
all based on customers’ actions.
·
IntelliSuggest
Product Recommendations enable automatic upselling and cross-selling.
·
IntelliSuggest
Product Insights gives you high level and granular views of how products
are performing.
Note: IntelliSuggest Product Recommendations and Product
Insights are both add-on features that come at an extra cost.
SearchSpring also offers a unique feature in their offering
of Product Discovery Tools, which
are designed to help customers find products that they may be interested in
based on products they’re looking at already. These tools include products that
other customers have also viewed or bought, which may be related and have high
chances of conversion. You have the additional option to use the Product Finder, which asks customers
questions or gives them facets to help them what they’re looking for.
Similarly, you can enable Guided Selling,
which asks questions to narrow down a filtered group of choices that are
appropriate for the specific customer.
Takeaway
Both Nextopia and SearchSpring are extremely competent on-site
search solutions designed for enterprise online stores that have
over 500 products and make around $2 million and $5 million in yearly revenue.
Obviously, SearchSpring is more expensive than Nextopia, but this is most
likely due to the fact that it’s service offers more robust options in several
categories. You can see this in SearchSpring’s wider variety of facet options
for navigation, and it’s clearly more advanced reporting and analytics feature
set. Both Nextopia and SearchSpring have their own unique features that may or
may not make your decision easier; if your store absolutely needs
geographically-based search results and targeting, your best bet would be
Nextopia. On the other hand, if you’re pulled to the advanced IntelliSuggest
algorithm and Product Discovery Tools of SearchSpring, you may be willing to
spend the extra money on their program.
At the end of the day, these two programs are very similar
in site search capabilities, and you get what you pay for with either one. If
your enterprise business can budget to spend a little more on a search
solution, we recommend SearchSpring due to its more robust selection of
features and powerfully advanced algorithms.