I have a small challenge for you today. It should take about five minutes, and if you run an online store, it might be one of the more interesting things you do this week.
Open your store and pretend you’re a customer who doesn’t know much about your products.
Someone who doesn’t know every brand name or understand how you’ve organized your categories. Just an ordinary person trying to find something.
With that person in mind, try these three searches.
Test #1: Get the name wrong.
Pick a product you know is available in your store, then misspell its name in the search bar. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of mistake someone might make when typing quickly on their phone.
Does your store still find the product, or does it show no results?
Test #2: Describe the need, not the product.
This time, imagine you know what you need help with, but you don’t know which product to look for.
If you sell outdoor clothing, instead of searching for “waterproof hiking jacket,” try:
“Something lightweight to wear when hiking in the rain.”
If you sell electronics, you could try:
“Something that will help me work from my laptop while traveling.”
Choose something relevant to your own products. The important part is to describe what you want to accomplish without using the exact product name.
Run that search and look at what comes back. Do the results make sense for the person asking?
Test #3: Ask for advice.
This one’s my favorite, because it starts with a situation we’ve all been in: buying a gift without knowing exactly what to buy.
You don’t know the product category or the brand. You just know a little about the person you’re buying for, so you try something like:
“What should I buy for someone who loves anime and gaming?”
What happens when you ask your store that question, inside the search bar you have on your ecommerce?
Does it help you discover relevant options, recommend something, or give you useful information to make a choice? Or does the search engine simply give up?
Here’s why I wanted you to try this.
People don’t arrive at your store knowing how your catalog is organized, which exact words appear in your product descriptions, or even the names of the products that could help them.
They know their problems, their interests, their wishes, and the situations they’re shopping for.
That’s what they bring to the search bar. Yet so much of ecommerce still depends on customers figuring out the right words before the store can help them.
What if we reversed that?
What if the store adapted to the customer?
Imagine relevant products appearing as someone types, even when their language is imperfect or they don’t know the right product name. Imagine that person being able to ask a buying question and receive an actual recommendation based on your inventory.
And what if the store could also show *you* which questions customers were asking but weren’t getting good answers to?
Those are the possibilities I’ve been exploring with our team, and on October 29, we’re going to demonstrate them live.
We’ll use a basic WooCommerce installation, so you can see what this looks like without needing a complex, expensive custom-built ecommerce website. We’ll also show you the experience on mobile, where clumsy search interfaces can become especially frustrating.
We’ll also demo a Shopify store with a different set of products.
I’d love for you to join us.
The Store That Understands – The End of Search As We Know It
A free live workshop on the future of ecommerce product discovery. You need to get a ticket below to be able to join live.
- Thursday, October 29, 2026
- 12 PM New York / 4 PM London / 5 PM Central Europe
In 75 minutes, we’ll walk through real examples, explain what’s changing, and give you a practical Search Experience Scorecard you can use to decide what to improve next.
If you’d like to try the technology yourself, we’ll also provide additional free credits during the event. No purchase necessary.
Yes, I want to be there for sure →
If you build ecommerce stores for clients, I especially encourage you to try the three tests on one of those stores. What you discover could open up a new way to create value for your clients.
Try the three searches, and see what they tell you.
- Did the store understand what you meant and find something useful?
- Did it return products that made no sense, or nothing at all?
Here’s the thing: your customers shouldn’t have to learn how your store thinks before they can find what they need.
The more naturally someone can search, explore, and get help choosing a product, the easier you make it for them to buy.
