The search function on your ecommerce site is producing results that would embarrass the product team if they spent thirty minutes using it as a customer.
I say this not because site search is the most important commercial problem you have but because it is one of the most reliable indicators of how the commercial system treats the customer who already has the strongest purchase intent in your entire funnel.
A customer using site search has already decided to buy something. They are not browsing. They are looking for a specific product or category and they are giving you the most valuable signal available in your data, the exact terms a high-intent customer uses when they are ready to purchase. What you do with that signal in the next three seconds is either converting a near-certain transaction or sending them to a competitor.
The percentage of site search sessions that end without a transaction in your business is a conversion gap with no acquisition cost attached to it. That is the rarest thing in ecommerce. Most senior operators I speak with have not looked at it recently enough.
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