According to Econsultancy, up to 30% of visitors to ecommerce websites turn to on-site search to find the items on their shopping list.

The challenge wrapped inside this customer experience and sales opportunity is actually being able to provide helpful search results. Too often, the burden is on the shopper to figure out the right spelling or combination of terms that will produce search results that include the items they want. Perhaps shoppers would respond well to a more advanced on-site search tool?

To see if type-ahead search—which serves a drop-down menu of relevant results that update with each letter a visitor types into the search box—would help shoppers more quickly reach the category and product pages of most interest, a retailer decided to take this Monetate Merchandiser feature for a test run.

Just as it did for another client, type-ahead search improved the customer experience and led to an increase in sales. The retailer scored an 18% lift in conversion across all traffic.

In an increasingly mobile world, it seems like typing is becoming a hindrance.