Before you invest in on-site product search

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Before you spend anything on on-site product search, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• People who use search convert at a much higher rate
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Handle typos and synonyms or they leave empty-handed. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about on-site product search before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Handle typos and synonyms or they leave empty-handed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.