Makeiteasytofind.
Customers who cannot find a product assume you do not sell it. Most of the time the product is there. The search or the menu is not helping.
Four ways this moment breaks.
Search ignores everyday words
A shopper types ‘sneakers’ and you wrote ‘trainers’. The search shows nothing, so the shopper leaves.
One typo, no results
A single wrong letter returns an empty page, with no suggestion of what was meant.
Menus follow your company, not your customers
Categories are named by internal teams, so people look in the wrong place.
Filters that forget
Choosing a filter and going back clears everything the customer just did.
If people cannot find a product, they assume it does not exist. A better search is often the cheapest way to sell more of what you already have.
of online shops have a search experience rated mediocre or worse.
Source: Baymard Institute, 2026 e-commerce search benchmark. Industry figure, not a SystemVale result.How we find the cause.
Read the searches
We study what customers type and what comes back.
Count the empty ones
We find the searches that return nothing, and the words behind them.
Watch people look
We ask real people to find five things, and note where they struggle.
When it is fixed.
A shopper types ‘sofa’ and finds it. Another types ‘couch’ and finds nothing.
- What we would look at
- The most common searches, and which ones return no results.
- What we would do
- Teach the search that these words mean the same thing, and suggest the closest match for typos.
- What would change
- Fewer empty searches, and more searches that end in a purchase.