Apple is one of the most visited ecommerce sites. They have an image of being slick and user friendly. I had high expectations of their website – which they meet for the most part: their product pages show off their products wonderfully and it is easy to shop. However their search is terrible. I was searching for the technical specs of the iPhone, typed in “ipone” and got no results. They don’t have any spelling correction.
I then typed it in correctly and was gobsmacked when I saw no results.
Finally I got some results when I searched for phone:
Even when I searched for an old product the search results were disappointing. The top two results are press releases (one from New Zealand of all places). They don’t have any images, prices, sort options, and only very limited filtering options. This is not what you’d expect from one of the top Internet retailers.
2 comments. Leave new
True, it’s a bit slack…
The actual Apple Store search seems a bit more fully featured, but the ranking is still fairly poor at a glance.
http://store.apple.com
I think this blog is excellent….thanks for pointing out the pitfalls of Apple’s search. I am also stunned that they have no spellchecker nor categorisation where users can refining the search results. One positive about Apple is that they do have a good blog using Jive Forum which has a good layout and design. Keep up the good work on the SLI blog.