Three myths about on-site product search

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about on-site product search that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

“Our platform handles it”

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.