A practical checklist for on-site product search

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Run through this the next time on-site product search comes up.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• People who use search convert at a much higher rate
• Handle typos and synonyms or they leave empty-handed
• Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. 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
• People who use search convert at a much higher rate — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.