On-site product search for small teams

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Most advice about on-site product search assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to keep

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

What good looks like

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

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
• 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 you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.