Scenario: A customer has landed on your website—you are halfway to making a sale. They do what all customers do when they know what they want: go straight to that search bar, type in what they are looking for, then… they wait. The seconds pass, and the results finally load, but by this time, the customer is long gone. You have lost a sale just because of a slight delay.

This is not an exaggeration of the problem, but in today’s fast-paced world, speed is everything in e-commerce. It’s estimated that a one-second delay in page loading of search results could result in a 7% decrease in conversion. Realistically, this means that for a site earning an average of $100,000 daily, up to $2.5 million in sales could be lost annually over a year due to a one-second delay. These numbers show exactly why investing in a search solution that places high emphasis on speed and performance matters.

With the high standards set by big e-commerce giants like Amazon and Myntra, today’s consumers want search results to appear almost instantly, regardless of how vast amount of catalogs they have. A slow search gives the impression to a user that the website of the business is poorly managed and frustrates him, which has long-term negative side effects. It’s been proven that 80% of customers will not return to the website if they have a bad experience while using search.
That brings us to the role of speed in the search functionality and how BraveOtter is changing what it means to deliver an eCommerce search experience at blazingly fast speeds.

First off, what is BraveOtter? BraveOtter is a search solution designed for eCommerce websites, which is an easy-to-use, fast open-source search engine. With BraveOtter, the goal is to return fast and relevant results with responsive output, to realize higher customer satisfaction, hence driving higher conversion rates within online stores.BraveOtter returns search results in as few as 150 milliseconds. With near-instant response times, customers will never have to hold their breath, making shopping seamless. But how does BraveOtter return search results so rapidly? The answer lies in the sophisticated architecture set in place to deal with huge volumes of data with very minimal latency. We take a closer look at how BraveOtter does this.

In-Memory Search for Instant Results
One of the unique selling points of BraveOtter is that it does in-memory searching. That is on the basis that most search engines available today are based on disk storage, usually causing delays while fetching search results. On the other hand, BraveOtter stores search indices in memory for almost instantaneous result retrieval. This, therefore, means that the customer is never made to wait for his search results to load up. This ensures a more satisfactory user experience—in real-time indexing for up-to-date results.

In a fast-moving world where product nature and prices are changing, BraveOtter takes this challenge head-on with real-time indexing. It consistently reflects every change made within the product catalog in the search results. Hence, customers will get the latest information regarding this all the time, which is a very essential ingredient in building trust and letting your customers make informed buying decisions.

Distributed Architecture for Scalability
Yet one more reason that places BraveOtter head and shoulders over the competition is distributed architecture. Distributed architecture means that a large number of servers share the search workload, easily handling large volumes of search queries all at once without losing a single ounce of speed. That might be more than an optimal solution to answer any eCommerce business, no matter whether it is a small start-up or large high-traffic trouble during peak shopping seasons.

Conclusion
Time is the essence of this competitive world of e-commerce. Every millisecond counts, and it might result in customer losses just because of a slow search engine on your site. On the other hand, a fast-responsive search might keep customers occupied for a longer period, thereby satisfying them. That is where BraveOtter comes into play. The solution resolves problems concerning search latency, thus never keeping customers waiting over results.
With BraveOtter, any eCommerce business can enhance search performance and customer satisfaction enough to raise conversion rates significantly.