Download the full playbook as a PDF: fifteen pages, no form, no email, no gate.

Findability

Internal search is the highest-intent surface on the site, and the least loved. A customer who searches has told you exactly what they want. If your search returns nothing for a plural, a synonym, or a slight misspelling, you are turning away the customer who was ready to buy. Run your twenty most-searched terms before peak and watch what happens. It is the cheapest audit you will do all year.

Merchandising

Category pages are where margin is made. The order products appear in, whether stock-outs are pushed down or stranded at the top, whether the bestseller a customer expects is on the first row or the fourth. Under peak load, poor merchandising costs you a lot, and it costs you silently, because nobody complains about a product they never saw.

The customer test. Could a stranger, arriving cold, understand what you sell, find what they came for, and see what you would most like them to buy, without being told. If not, Q4 media spend does not fix it. It amplifies it.

On the checklist

  • Internal search handles plurals, synonyms, and misspellings.
  • Our twenty most-searched terms all return useful results.
  • Category pages push stocked bestsellers up, stock-outs down.

Before peak arrives

This playbook is the front-end read a house can run on itself. The Barking Cat Review takes the whole house apart, shop front and back office, finds the binding constraint, and puts commercial numbers against it before peak arrives.

Back to Bulletproof for the Golden Quarter