When Did You Last Review Your Site Search and Filters?

If you’re like many ecommerce teams we talk with, it may have been a while. Your search returns results, nothing appears to be broken, and other priorities keep moving ahead of it. 

But there’s an important difference between search that works and search that helps buyers move forward. 

People who use your search bar often have a clearer idea of what they need. They may be ready to purchase, compare options, confirm availability, or find a product that meets a specific requirement. When search returns irrelevant results, misses familiar terminology, or prioritizes unavailable products, it creates friction at an important point in the buying process. 

That friction can be difficult to spot. Buyers rarely report a poor search experience. Instead, you may see search sessions that end without action, fewer add-to-carts, or lower conversion rates among visitors who use search. 

Four Site Search Checks Worth Making 

You don’t need to overhaul your analytics to get a better sense of how search is performing. Here’s what we’d look at first: 

• What are your most-searched terms? Review the terms buyers have used over the past month. Do the results feature relevant, available products, or do buyers land on thin category pages and loosely related items? 

• Which searches return no results? A zero-result search can point to several issues: a missing product, an unfamiliar term, a synonym you haven’t mapped, a spelling variation, or a gap in your product data. Each one gives you useful information about how buyers describe what they need. 

• Which search sessions lead to meaningful action? Look at the searches that result in an add-to-cart, quote request, consultation request, or another important conversion. Then compare those paths with searches that end without action. Differences in availability, result relevance, filters, or terminology can help you identify where to focus. 

• How does search-to-purchase compare with browse-to-purchase? Search users often demonstrate stronger intent than visitors who browse alone. If they aren’t converting as expected, it’s worth examining result relevance, product availability, product data, and the overall search experience. 

What We See Across Our Customers’ Sites 

We work with manufacturers, distributors, and specialty retailers across a range of industries. Search and navigation challenges look different depending on the catalog, buyer, and ecommerce platform, but a few useful patterns appear consistently. 

The following examples include both site search and faceted navigation—the filters buyers use to narrow a product list based on attributes such as size, brand, application, availability, or material. 

Neogen: Faceted Navigation Built for a Technical Audience 

Neogen is a food and animal safety company selling highly specialized diagnostic products. Their dairy residues category — products like aflatoxin M1 test kits and lateral flow platforms — is a strong example of faceted navigation tuned to a professional buyer. 

The filter set on this category page includes Subcategory, Analyte, Result Type, Platform, Brand, and Industry. For a lab technician or quality manager searching for a specific compliance test, these attributes are exactly how they think about a purchase. That alignment — between filter structure and buyer decision criteria — is what good faceted navigation looks like. 

A practical next step for Neogen, as with many businesses that manage technical catalogs, is to monitor which filter combinations buyers use most often and which combinations produce empty result sets. With 11 products in this particular category, assortment gaps may be relatively easy to identify. In larger categories, deliberate tracking becomes more important. 

The broader takeaway: Filters should reflect the criteria buyers actually use to evaluate a product—not simply the attributes that happen to be available in the catalog data. 

Norsland Lefse: Consumer Filters That Help Gift Buyers Qualify Fast 

Norsland Lefse is a specialty Scandinavian food retailer — and a Brilliance portfolio company — operating on BigCommerce. Their food catalog has over 100 products spanning fish, cheese, baking mixes, crispbreads, and more. 

Their filters include Food Type—with options such as Fish, Cheese, and Cookies—along with practical choices such as Has Free Shipping, Best Sellers, and In Stock. For a gift buyer who arrives without a particular product in mind, these filters make it easier to narrow a broad assortment. The In Stock filter is especially helpful because it allows buyers to focus on products they can purchase now. 

For catalogs where availability changes frequently, it’s also worth reviewing how unavailable items appear on category pages. When several out-of-stock products appear before available ones, buyers may have to work harder to find a viable option—even when the category contains products they can purchase. 

One useful question is whether the default “Featured” sort order gives enough visibility to in-stock products. Depending on the site’s merchandising goals, adjusting that order may be a relatively straightforward way to reduce friction. 

The broader takeaway: Availability is part of the navigation experience. Filters and sort orders should help buyers reach realistic options sooner. 

Reico Kitchen & Bath: Rich Attribute Filtering for a Visual, High-Consideration Purchase 

Reico sells cabinetry, countertops, appliances, and fixtures through a showroom model across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Their door styles category shows a well-developed faceted navigation system with filters across eight dimensions: ReicoExpress availability, Species (Maple, Cherry, Birch, Red Oak, Laminate), Cabinet Color Group, Cabinet Door Panel type, Cabinet Door Shape, Cabinet Finish, Vendor, Door Style name, and Brand. 

For a buyer making a visual, high-consideration purchase—such as selecting cabinet doors for a kitchen remodel—this level of filter depth makes sense. Buyers can start with a broad design direction, such as a color group, and then refine by species, finish, door shape, or brand instead of manually reviewing every result. 

The next area to examine is filter-path performance. Which combinations—Species and Color Group, for example—are most likely to lead to a showroom consultation? Because Reico’s primary conversion is a consultation rather than an add-to-cart, its most valuable navigation paths may look different from those on a transactional ecommerce site. 

Understanding which filter sequences correspond with qualified lead activity helps the team optimize around the business outcome that matters most. 

The broader takeaway: Navigation performance should be measured against your actual conversion goal, whether that’s a purchase, quote request, consultation, sample request, or another meaningful action. 

Search Doesn’t Need to Be Flashy. It Needs to Be Trustworthy. 

Across all three sites, the basic navigation infrastructure is in place. The difference between a functional experience and a strong one often comes down to ongoing attention: how buyers use search and filters, where they run into dead ends, and whether the results help them make progress. 

Buyers rarely submit feedback when a search result feels irrelevant or a filter path leads nowhere. More often, they continue browsing, leave the site, or look for an easier way to find what they need. That makes search behavior a valuable source of information—even when buyers never contact your team directly. 

The good news is that a search and navigation review often reveals practical improvements. Zero-result queries may be addressed through synonym mapping, spelling support, product-data updates, or catalog changes. Default sort orders can be adjusted. Filters can be renamed, reordered, or refined based on usage data. 

The goal isn’t necessarily to rebuild everything or move to a new ecommerce platform. It’s to identify the changes that will make it easier for buyers to find the right product and take the next step. 

A practical place to start is with your most-searched terms, zero-result searches, and most-used filters. Review what buyers see, identify one or two points of friction, and focus first on the improvements likely to make the biggest difference.