Hi {{given_name}},

When someone lands on your store knowing exactly what they want, can they find it in seconds, or are they forced to click through menu after menu until they give up?

Every shopper who cannot find the product they came for is a sale walking out the door, and it is often your most ready to buy visitor.

💡 This week's 80/20 rule - Add a clear, working search bar to the top of your website so visitors can type exactly what they want and jump straight to it.

🧠 Online shoppers behave like foragers, following the strongest scent straight to their goal. That is the idea behind information foraging, and a search box is the shortest path there. It pays off too, because visitors who use site search convert up to 3x more often than those who only browse.

A search query is a shopper telling you exactly what they want to buy. When they have to hunt through menus instead, many give up and leave. Searchers do not just buy more often, they also tend to spend more, with higher order values than browsers, because search gets them to the right product before they lose patience.

It's like the difference between asking a clerk "where are the running shoes?" and being pointed straight to the aisle, versus wandering the whole shop hoping to stumble on them before you run out of time.

🎯 Hookain – This online shisha and tobacco retailer made search the main way customers navigate its huge flavour range instead of burying it in menus. After putting a smart search bar front and centre, its conversion rate more than tripled, climbing from three percent to over ten.

🧴 Freshly Cosmetics – This natural beauty store found its default search was frustrating shoppers, so it swapped in a smarter one. Customers embraced it fast, tripling their use of the search engine, and the store now runs at an overall 20% conversion rate.

🧥 Blue Banana – This apparel brand noticed shoppers struggling to find products, so it upgraded its on-site search. From the very first weeks it saw the difference, lifting its conversion rate by 16%.

Add a search bar to every page
Put a simple search box in the top header so visitors can jump straight to the page or resource they need. On a site with lots of services, guides, or FAQs, this beats making people dig through menus.

Make the box obvious
Use a visible input field with a magnifying glass icon and placeholder text like "Search services or articles," not a tiny hidden icon. If people cannot see the search, they will not use it.

Fix empty searches
Check your search logs for terms that return nothing, then add those pages or set up synonyms so a search for "pricing" also finds your "rates" page. Every dead end is a visitor you nearly lost.

Learn from what they type
Your search queries are a free list of what visitors actually want. Review the top searches each month and use them to shape new pages, service names, and FAQ answers.

Give search top billing
Place the search bar in the centre or top of every page, not tucked away in a corner. For a store with more than a handful of products, search is how your most ready to buy shoppers move.

Turn on autocomplete with images
Set your search to suggest products as people type, and show a small thumbnail and price next to each suggestion. Seeing the item helps shoppers pick the right one in a second.

Never show a dead end
Make sure a search that finds nothing still shows something helpful, like popular products or a "did you mean" suggestion. Add synonyms so "sneakers" also finds "trainers" and "runners."

Make it work on mobile
Keep the search box easy to reach with a thumb and quick to open on phones, where most shopping happens. Fast, tappable autocomplete matters even more on a small screen.

1️⃣ The rule change: Add a clear, working search bar to the top of your site so visitors can type what they want and jump straight to it.

2️⃣ Why it works: A search query is pure buying intent, and shoppers who use search convert far more often than those who only browse.

3️⃣ The result: Your most ready to buy visitors find what they came for in seconds, so fewer of them leave empty handed and more of them check out.

🔎 For this week's website review, let's look at More Than Meeples. More Than Meeples is a friendly independent board game, puzzle, and pop culture shop based in Brisbane, Australia, with a large online catalogue.

💡 The Good:

Search front and centre
The search bar sits dead centre in the header and fires off live suggestions the moment you start typing. For a store with thousands of titles, putting search right in the middle is exactly the right call and this week's rule in action.

Plain navigation and breadcrumbs
The menu labels are clear, Tabletop Gaming, Puzzles, Accessories, Graphic Novels, and product pages carry breadcrumbs like Home, Board and Card Games, Strategy Games. You always know where you are and how to get back.

Trust built in
A real Brisbane store address, ten dollar flat rate shipping with free over three hundred, a genuine no drop-ship in-stock promise, and a back in stock email capture on sold out items all take the risk out of buying.

🔧 Suggestions:

Add thumbnails to autocomplete
The search suggestions are a dense, text only list, so a search for Catan returns a wall of near identical names. Adding a small product image and price to each suggestion would help shoppers spot the exact expansion they want in a second.

Speed up the homepage carousel
The New Release Board Games block on the homepage opens on a spinning loader before the products appear. Prioritising that section and lazy loading what sits below the fold would cut the wait and stop the layout jumping.

Darken the back in stock button
On a sold out product, the Subscribe Now button uses white text on a pale blue fill, which is hard to read. Deepening the blue so the label clears the 4.5 to 1 contrast mark would make that call to action easy to see.

See you next time for another simple, high-impact strategy!

The LOGO Editorial Team