THE IMPACT OF SEARCH QUALITY ON E-COMMERCE SALES
Loading...
Date
2026-05
Authors
Myropolskyi, Mark
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Manuscript
Abstract
This capstone project examines the impact of internal search performance on customer behavior and e-commerce outcomes using real search data from EVA.UA. Internal search is treated not only as a navigation tool, but also as a mechanism that shapes product discovery, customer experience, and the allocation of economically valuable traffic. The study aims to understand whether query popularity, query characteristics, platform differences, or traffic concentration across demand segments drive search-related business performance.
The empirical analysis is based on a large real-world dataset that includes more than 42 million search events and more than 6 million unique queries, as extracted from the original raw data. After data cleaning, the study applies query-level and event-level analysis to evaluate search demand distribution, conversion patterns, add-to-cart behavior, platform differences, weighted and unweighted performance metrics, frequency deciles, and revenue concentration proxies. Numeric SKU-like queries and low-quality noise were filtered out to reflect genuine customer intent better.
The results show that search traffic is highly concentrated in a small subset of high frequency queries. The top frequency decile accounts for a disproportionate share of total search traffic and revenue proxy. However, conversion differences across frequency segments are relatively small, which suggests that revenue concentration is driven more by traffic allocation than by substantially better query performance. The analysis also shows that query length has a non-linear relationship with conversion: medium-length queries tend to perform best. In contrast, very long queries yield unstable results due to a low sample size. Platform analysis reveals meaningful behavioral differences: web demonstrates the highest purchase conversion, iOS shows the highest add-to-cart rates, and Android underperforms on both conversion and downstream funnel efficiency.
The findings suggest that the major business opportunity is not limited to further optimizing already dominant queries, but also to improving the exposure and handling of underutilized demand, especially on mobile platforms. These results contribute to understanding how internal search influences e-commerce performance and offer practical implications for search optimization, product discovery strategy, and customer
experience management.
Description
Keywords
Internal search, E-commerce, Conversion, Customer behavior, Platform analysis, Search optimization
Citation
Myropolskyi, Mark. (2026). THE IMPACT OF SEARCH QUALITY ON E-COMMERCE SALES. Kyiv: American University Kyiv. URI: https://er.auk.edu.ua/handle/234907866/185