Prepopulated search bars can significantly boost online sales, says marketing study

"The study found that automatically prepopulating the search bar with trending keywords, such as popular product categories, increased purchase incidence by 10.4% and overall spending by 8.8% compared with an empty search bar. When the search bar was prepopulated with personalized keywords, reflecting items the user had recently browsed, purchase incidence rose by 21% and spending by 17%. Prepopulating with niche keywords, unrelated to the user's search history or patterns, had little to no measurable effect on consumer behavior."

"The research is based on a randomized field experiment involving 72,587 consumers on a major Asian e-commerce platform. Each user was randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions or a control group. In the treatment conditions, the platform's mobile app displayed a search bar that was prefilled with either a trending category keyword, a personalized keyword based on the user's browsing history, or a niche product keyword. The control group saw the default empty search bar."

"The study, titled "How Does Prepopulating Search Bars with Keywords Affect Online Consumer Behavior? A Field Experiment," was authored by Chenshuo Sun of the Business School of Renmin University of China. "Search bars are the starting point of most e-commerce journeys," said Sun. "The findings show that a simple change, pre-filling a search bar with relevant, trending, or personalized terms, can meaningfully influence what people discover and buy online.""

Automatically prepopulating mobile app search bars with trending keywords increased purchase incidence by 10.4% and overall spending by 8.8% compared with an empty search bar. Prepopulating with personalized keywords reflecting users' recently browsed items raised purchase incidence by 21% and spending by 17%. Prepopulating with niche keywords unrelated to users' history produced little or no measurable effect. The experiment randomly assigned 72,587 consumers on a major Asian e-commerce platform to one of three treatment conditions or a control. Treatments displayed a prefilled trending category keyword, a personalized keyword from browsing history, or a niche product keyword; control showed an empty search bar.

Read at Phys