On-site product search: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about on-site product search this quarter, make it the first item below.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Start here

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Then this

Handle typos and synonyms or they leave empty-handed. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

How to tell if yours is fine

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.