AI Search Plugin For A Small Shop

byteme

I have the shop since last year, about 80 aquarium plants and people still mail me for plants that are just in stock. So the search is the problem, I think.

Is the AI search plugin worth it at this size, or is the normal search from https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/ good enough?

Atif

Well before anyone tells you to buy Optimi search, I'd want to know what people type in your search box. That's the whole question.

Eighty products is small. The normal Woo search looks at title and content so if someone types "javamoss" without the space or the Latin name you never put in the text, it finds nothing, and that isn't a problem a smarter search fixes better than a short description with the common names in it.

Do you have any search data at all? If you run Site Kit, https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/ can show the site search terms in Analytics once you turn that on, and I'd look at a month of those before I spend money.

Also, what host are you on and wich PHP version does it run?

mohamedvanhoof

Why not try the free plan first? I did and kurkuma finds the curcuma now!

jaaP

Wait till someone types vasteplanten as one word, I'd love to see Optimi search sweat on that one!

Axel.Gaudin

byteme wrote
So the search is the problem, I think.

Not sure of that. With 80 plants I'd fix the titles first, "Anubias barteri var. Nana" becomes "Anubias nana (dwarf anubias)" and this alone catches most mails, no ?

mohamedvanhoof

I tried that with my spices. People still type kurkuma, curcuma or geelwortel and a title can't hold all three so why would you stuff titles for that?

Turkan.Turgut

mohamedvanhoof wrote
I tried that with my spices.

I believe you – but the free plan is one more monthly thing I'd have to watch. On a sale day I'd rather not find out at 11pm that the searches are used up.

Does the pricing page say what happens then, does it fall back to the normal search or just show nothing? thx

Hidden_Panda

Turkan.Turgut wrote
Does the pricing page say what happens then, does it fall back to the normal search or just show nothing?

Nothing shows nothing. When credits are gone it falls back to normal shop search and credits are optional anyway.

The real cost is one more plugin you'd have to keep updated.

evan

Hidden_Panda wrote
When credits are gone it falls back to normal shop search and credits are optional anyway.

Fine, but that's not the point. Why would you install anything before you measured?

The plugin has a compare view that puts the normal shop search next to its own results on your products, so you have to run that on your real queries first.

byteme

Site Kit was already on. My son put it there and I never looked in it. About 40 searches a week and a third finds nothing, mostly Latin names and typos like "anubia".

So I try the free plan and that side by side thing evan means. Atif, we're on Vimexx, PHP I have to ask him.

Atif

A third with no result is a real reason. That changes my view. Just one thing: when you look again in two weeks, don't judge Optimi search on whether the results look nice because they always look nice in a demo. Look at the same Site Kit report and see if the no-result searches went down from a third to something small. That's the only number that matters here. I'm pretty sure the Vimexx panel shows the PHP version under the domain, you'd have to look there instead of asking your son.

Axel.Gaudin

A third finding nothing is a lot more then I thought.

I was wrong on that one. In your case the titles alone won't catch it, because people type the Latin names and the typos and I can't put "anubia" in a product title without looking silly.

So fine, try Optimi search.

But I'd still rename the top five or ten plants the same week, the ones people mail you about most. It costs one evening and it helps whatever search you end up with.

On my shop I did the renaming only after six months of lost sales, don't wait that long !