Search on Gilt

Gilt’s daily flash sales started with a small selection of products in a single Women’s category, but had since grown to hundreds of products and offers across five categories: Women, Men, Kids, Home, and City.

User research revealed that our customers expected the ability to search all products and offers via keyword search, the way that you could on most other e-commerce sites, and that the lack of search made it hard to discover our product and service offerings. The result was a higher than normal drop-off rate as customers quickly became frustrated with their inability to find what they were looking for.

The team developed a taxonomy and accompanying set of product attributes that matched the customer’s mental model of the product and service inventory. This was informed by a user-led card sorting exercise and user co-creation of filtering facets.

From the search field we offered search suggestions as the user typed their query terms, displayed recent searches, and introduced a unique hybrid approach where search meets browse through navigable menus and sub-menus.

For search results we put in place a combination of a navigable categories and selectable filters for attributes like brand, color, size, and price, as well as product-specific facets (e.g., for Dresses show length, neckline, occasion, silhouette, sleeve, etc.).

We eventually grew keyword search usage to 10% of visitors per session, and conversion more than doubled for those whose visit included a keyword search (3% vs. 1.4% for those that did not search).