Last week, I wrote about how online grocery retailers can implement the option to search by shopping list and help their customers save time.

Now, why is time on site such a critical factor for e-grocers? Well, think about it, customers buying their groceries online are obviously technologically savvy and prefer to save time by shopping online.

Now as an e-grocer, isn’t it your responsibility to cultivate an experience that helps your customers shop faster and more accurately?

Make your customers convert in just 1 click

We came across an astoundingly simple way to help your customers convert in a couple of clicks and wanted to share it with you – Simply show an ‘add to cart' button within your autocomplete.

There are a couple of fundamental reasons we believe this tactic can enhance the shopping experience for customers.

1. Customers buying groceries online know exactly what they need and have pre-defined brand preferences
2. They prefer to search rather than use the website avigation to find the products they need. The data supports this – As much as 77% of products on grocery sites were located by searching. (Source – Methods of Online Grocery Shopping: Linking and Searching)Therefore, it makes sense to allow customers to add products right from the search box, saving them the extra clicks (and a few extra seconds) it takes to go to the search results page and then the product page to add products to the cart.

Therefore, it makes sense to allow customers to add products right from the search box, saving them the extra clicks (and a few extra seconds) it takes to go to the search results page and then the product page in order to add products to cart.

Here’s an example of the “add to cart" button being included in the autocomplete dropdown on the Indian grocery site Bigbasket.com:

The time test – Bigbasket vs Honeyville!

Through a time test to see how fast one could add a product to a cart on Bigbasket.com and Honeyville.com.

On both sites the search term was milk and my colleagues were instructed to select the first item in the dropdown (to keep things fair). We judged two things:

1. The number of clicks
2. The number of seconds taken to add a product to the cart.

Apart from adding the 'add to cart' button within autocomplete, there are a couple of usability techniques that can make this experience even superior.

Pro tip 1: Give Customers an option to alter the quantity:

Allow customers to edit quantity from within the autocomplete dropdown. This will make sure they don’t suffer the frustration of having to go to a product page to change quantity.

Pro tip 2: Show personalized/popular products on top of your autocomplete suggestions:

This is a fantastic trick to enhance the relevancy of autosuggestions: The idea is that your repeat visitors tend to add the same products to their carts time and again. For your new customers, you can show popular products in the dropdown list. Popular products usually have a greater probability of being added to the cart.

Do You Use the ‘Add to cart button’ Within Your Autocomplete?

This call to action within your sites autocomplete can help customers save time and do wonders for the user experience of your site.

We'd love to hear what you think about this post. Do you know of any other ways online grocery stores can improve their search user experience? Do let me know in the comments below.