Product Ranking by the Numbers: Why Most Shoppers Never Click at All

A shopper searches using exact terminology; no issues there. The results load, but most of the time, they never click a single one. It’s easy to assume that means something about the search failed. But the data tells a more nuanced story about how ranking shapes what customers actually see.

We pulled data from 4,000 online stores across 15 e-commerce verticals. Here’s what we found.

Most shoppers never click a single result

69% of customers don’t interact with any search result at all. That’s true across every vertical we looked at, which means it isn’t something a single industry can optimize its way out of alone.

Part of the explanation is simple: stores already show price, discount, and availability directly in the search results. A shopper can get everything they need without ever opening a product page. That’s not necessarily a failure of search. Sometimes the results are doing their job well enough that a click becomes unnecessary.

But it also raises the stakes on getting product ranking right. Shoppers are deciding without ever clicking through. That makes the results list itself the product page.

Almost nobody goes past page one

Think about how often you Google something, then scroll to page two. Rarely, if ever. The same holds for online stores. 88.7% of customers stay on the first page of results. Only 9.7% go to the next page, and just 1.6% jump anywhere beyond that.

If a product isn’t on the first page, most customers will never see it. Poorly optimized ranking essentially buries a product and removes it from the shopper’s decision entirely, regardless of how good a fit it might have been.

Bad ranking costs almost as much as no results at all

You can reduce how often a search returns zero results. But should the goal be eliminating that number completely? The data says no, not on its own.

When you compare the search exit rate to the no-result exit rate across verticals, the gap is often small. Books & Games sees a 33% exit rate on searches generally and a 40% exit rate specifically after a no-result search, a 7-point difference. Several other verticals show a similar pattern. Showing irrelevant results turns out to be nearly as damaging as showing nothing.

Take a shopper searching “chocolate.” They expect to see chocolate. If the results show chocolate-flavored yogurt instead because full-text search matched on a shared word rather than genuine relevance, that shopper is looking at a results page that’s technically not empty but functionally useless to them. The search doesn’t need to simply return more results. It must return the right ones.

How far shoppers scroll before giving up

Since almost nobody makes it past page one, the exact position of a clicked product inside that first page becomes the metric that actually matters.

On average, shoppers click a result sitting somewhere between position 6 and 18, depending on the vertical.

Luxury Goods is the clear outlier here: the average click-through position is 29.2, nearly triple most other verticals, and at the 95th percentile, it climbs to 128.75. Luxury Goods shoppers are willing to dig far deeper into a results list than anyone else, likely because these are considered purchases where browsing and comparison matter more than speed.

Compare that to Pets, where the average sits at 8.2, and the 95th percentile is just 22. Pets shoppers expect to find what they want fast, and if it’s not near the top, they’re gone well before Luxury Goods shoppers would even start feeling impatient.

Filters change the numbers when shoppers actually use them

Most customers never touch a filter. But when they do, the effect on conversion is dramatic. A single filter can increase conversions 18 to 20 times in top-performing categories like Travel, Books & Games, and Sports & Outdoor.

The common reasons why people don’t use filters include:

• they don’t notice the filters are there
• there are too many options to sort through
• the filters don’t feel relevant to what they’re searching for
• they simply expect their search query alone to be enough to get them the right result

That points to a design problem more than a shopper behavior problem. A modern site search should adjust filters dynamically based on context. For example, screen size options for someone browsing TVs or connectivity options for someone browsing headphones, rather than showing the same generic filter panel regardless of what’s being searched.

Ranking and click behavior by vertical

Here are all autocomplete statistics at a glance.

Frequently asked questions