What to ask your agency about on-site product search

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on on-site product search, these questions are worth asking early.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

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

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