Search Inside a Small Store

A small catalogue, a big assumption

An online store with two hundred products can feel too small to need a search box. The categories fit in one menu, and the owner can find anything in two clicks.

The owner knows what everything is called. Customers do not, and many of them never open the menu at all.

On a phone, a category of sixty products is a long scroll of small photographs. Typing a word is quicker, so that is what people do.

Which makes search the most important feature in the store for a visitor who already knows what they want, and often the least tested.

What customers actually type

• Misspellings of names that are hard to spell.
• Plurals, when the product is titled in the singular.
• Other names for the same product, from other regions and languages.
• Apostrophes and accents typed differently, or left out.
• Two words where the title has one, or the other way round.
• A use rather than a product, such as something for pickling.

The third is the one a specialist store meets most. Its customers bring the names they grew up with, and the product page uses only one of them.

Why a small store's search fails

Most store software comes with a basic search. It looks for the exact letters typed, usually in product titles and descriptions, and returns whatever contains them.

It does not know that two spellings mean one thing, or that a misspelling is one letter from a real word. It ignores tags and categories unless somebody sets it to read them.

Some themes put WordPress's general search in the header instead of the store's product search. Results then mix blog posts and pages with products, shown as excerpts with no prices or photographs.

Phones add a twist. Some keyboards swap a straight apostrophe for a curly one as you type, and a search matching exact characters treats the two as different.

A box people can see

On many store themes, the search box shrinks on phones to a small magnifying glass beside the menu icon. Visitors looking for a box see none and assume the store has no search.

A full-width box at the top of store pages, visible without tapping anything, is worth the space.

Testing the box

The test takes an hour and needs no special tools. Write down twenty searches a real customer would type, run each one on a phone, and note what comes back.

Take them from real sources: words customers use in emails and on the phone, the site search report in Analytics if it is on, and the products people ask about most.

Include each bestseller by its usual name, then misspelled, then in the plural. Add the other names it goes by, a two-word version, a use, and one thing you do not sell.

Mark each result found, buried or missing. Buried counts as a failure: a product on the third screen of results might as well be missing.

Keep the list, and run it again after every theme change, plugin update or batch of new products.

A worked example

A two-person online spice shop in Surrey sells about two hundred products: whole and ground spices, blends, chilies and salts, packed in a small warehouse unit.

Many of its customers cook Indian and Punjabi food. The owners noticed that emails asked for jeera, haldi and methi far more often than for cumin, turmeric and fenugreek.

The search knew only the English names. A search for jeera returned nothing. So did tumeric, the common misspelling, and za'atar typed on an iPhone, whose curly apostrophe matched nothing.

Chili brought up a dozen blends before any of the chilies themselves, because the word appeared in every blend's description and the results were sorted by date.

The store moved to a search that tolerates small misspellings and reads tags, and each product gained its other names as tags: jeera on cumin, haldi on turmeric, kalonji on nigella seed.

Title matches now come first in the results, and the twenty-search list is run again whenever products are added.

Synonyms are a list, not a setting

Most of the fixing is a list of equivalent words, kept somewhere the search can read it.

Some search tools take a synonym list directly; others read tags, so the other names go on each product. Either way, the list should be written by somebody who talks to customers.

Start from the failed searches and the questions staff hear. Add regional and family names, common misspellings, and both singular and plural where the search cannot handle both.

Keep the list in one place and add to it every month. It grows with the store.

Results in a sensible order

Finding the right product is half the job. Showing it first is the other half.

Some basic searches sort by date or alphabetically rather than by how well a product matches, so pepper lists every blend containing pepper before the peppercorns. Products with the word in their title should come first.

Suggestions that appear as the visitor types help on a phone. A few product names with small photographs, showing after three or four letters, catch a misspelling before it is finished.

When nothing matches

Some searches will fail however good the search is, so the page that appears next matters.

Say plainly that nothing matched, and offer the spelling suggestion if a close one exists. Then show the main categories and the bestsellers, so the visitor has somewhere to go.

Add a short line inviting the visitor to say what they were looking for. In a small store somebody can read every reply, and the requests that repeat are suggestions for what to stock.

The counter-case

A store selling a dozen products, all visible on one page, does not need a search box. It needs clear photographs and plain names.

And no search can rescue product pages that never say what the product is. Titles and descriptions in plain words come first, because every search tool depends on them.

Past a few dozen products, though, test the box with real searches and fix what fails, starting with the names customers actually use.

The test

1. Write twenty searches real customers would type.
2. Run them on a phone, not the office computer.
3. Mark each one found, buried or missing.
4. Add other names as synonyms or tags.
5. Put title matches first in the results.
6. Make the no-results page point somewhere useful.
7. Repeat the test after every update.

Step one is the part only the business can do. Any developer can change how search matches words, but only the people who talk to customers know which words to test.

Another job a small store cannot skip is covered in card fraud and chargebacks for a small store.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.