When on-site product search is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. On-site product search is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is worth it

People who use search convert at a much higher rate. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How to decide

Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

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
• Log zero-result searches, they are a product roadmap — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.