RS Components creates a user-centric shopping experience
 

RS Components has operations in 24 countries, and along with third-party distributors, we sell electronic and industrial parts to over 1.5 million customers in over 160 countries.

Recently, our online business grew to more than 35 per cent of total sales, a growth that prompted us to take a look at our eCommerce strategy for our 70 plus transactional sites in 17 languages. One key area that needed change was the user interface of the sites. With over 600,000 products and a million product attributes, search result sets were very large and visitors were having difficulty finding the products they wanted, often abandoning searches mid-way.

After conducting research on how our customers bought online, we realized that they expected the same kind of shopping convenience when buying components as they do when making online purchases for consumer goods.

We also discovered that the diverse nature of our shopping audiences - from hobbyists to electronic design engineers - required a user-centric experience tailored to how each unique audience bought products based on their distinct technical applications and requirements.

To address these challenges, we teamed up with Endeca Technologies, a search application vendor, to provide our customers with a more intuitive and easier experience as they searched, evaluated, and order products. The outcome was impressive, with search abandonment dropping by close to 60 per cent and search-to-order rates increasing by nearly 70 per cent.

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