Search paths and the empty-result tax
How empty and thin search results quietly tax discovery inside commerce apps.
Browse grids get the design love; search often carries the high-intent shoppers. Empty results, synonym misses, and poorly ranked variants send those shoppers out without a PDP view you can recover.
Pair search success rates with the next action: refine, exit, or category hop. A “successful” search that never reaches PDP is still a discovery failure.
Catalog path reviews should always include a short empty-result appendix. Merchandising cannot fix what analytics never named.