Internet Retailer: After analyzing failed searches, Fingerhut boosts conversion rates 26%

You've seen it too many times before: conducting a search on an e-commerce site brings up nothing. Customers aren't sure if the company really doesn't have the product available, or if it just has a cruddy search function. When direct marketer Fingerhut installed a tracking package to see which searches failed, it was horrified to find how poorly its search worked. It didn't even have stemming capabilities, the function that allows a search for "CD" to pull up "CD-ROM." After fixing the system, where a majority of its searches had pulled up no results, Fingerhut saw conversion rates boosted by 26 percent.