Independent search relevance diagnostics for mid-market e-commerce brands.
Built for VP Ecommerce, Director of Digital, and Head of Site Search at $20M-$200M GMV Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce brands.
You are in one of these windows
- Post-BFCM audit: the gap between vendor-reported relevance and actual conversion data.
- Search-vendor renewal in 6-12 months. You need leverage and an independent benchmark.
- CRO initiative: search is a known lever and you need to know what to prioritize.
- Replatforming decision: you need a baseline of current performance before you change anything.
Vendor-supplied relevance reports do not answer these questions. The vendor is grading their own work.
Search relevance audit for one brand against its existing search vendor (Algolia, Constructor, Bloomreach, Coveo, Klevu, Searchspring, Lucidworks, or platform-native).
Top 500 queries, single vendor. Judgment set, NDCG@10, click-position-1, conversion-correlated relevance, quick-win recommendations.
Everything in Basic plus multi-facet analysis and merchandising rule review (boost/bury, synonyms, redirects).
Deliverables
- Written report (24 pages): relevance methodology, query coverage analysis, NDCG@10 and click-position-1 measurement, conversion-correlated relevance findings, prioritized remediation against the existing search vendor
- Judgment set: top 500 head and torso queries with graded relevance judgments (CSV, client retains for future vendor evaluation cycles)
- Quick-win recommendations list: 5-10 specific config or merchandising changes deliverable in under two weeks of internal work
Process
- 130-min discovery call
- 2SOW + 50% deposit
- 3Days 1-3: query log ingestion and judgment set construction
- 4Days 4-7: measurement runs and conversion correlation analysis
- 5Days 8-10: report writing, walkthrough, delivery
- 6Final invoice on delivery
Why this exists
61% of leading US and European e-commerce sites perform below an acceptable search level, and 70% require users to search by the exact jargon the site uses (Baymard Institute, 2024 E-Commerce Search Usability Benchmark, 257 sites).
68% of shoppers say search needs an upgrade, and 42% report results that are technically relevant but not things they would buy (Constructor, Beyond Relevance, 609M shopper searches, $9.8B attributed revenue).
The same gap is documented at production scale in academic benchmark datasets (Wayfair WANDS, Amazon ESCI).
Site search and discovery is an active board-level conversation at the enterprise tier in 2026, with dedicated sessions at Shoptalk Spring 2026 featuring named speakers from LVMH, Macy's, Ulta Beauty, and Perplexity. The mid-market wave is assumed to follow on a 6-12 month lag.
Procurement velocity matches digital-team velocity. VP Ecommerce and Director of Digital signature authority typically clears below $25K in 2-4 weeks via corporate card, ACH, or net-15 invoicing. CRO budget, peak-season post-mortem budget, and search-vendor renewal evaluation budget all absorb this spend without full procurement.
The structural gap
None of OpenSource Connections, Sease, Pureinsights, Bounteous, Vaimo, or the search-vendor services arms (Algolia, Constructor, Bloomreach) publishes a $7,500-$9,500 fixed-fee, time-boxed search diagnostic SKU. The price point is structurally vacant at the published-pricing level.
| Competitor | How TensorOpt differs |
|---|---|
| Algolia / Constructor / Bloomreach / Coveo / Klevu / Searchspring / Lucidworks services | Vendor-aligned, not independent. TensorOpt is the outside reviewer of the same vendor's relevance quality, with no incentive to grade their own homework. |
| OpenSource Connections | Enterprise multi-month engagement model. No equivalent fixed-fee SKU is publicly priced at this tier. |
| Sease | Solr/Elasticsearch-led. Not productized for $7,500-$9,500 fixed-fee diagnostic on Shopify Plus or Adobe Commerce stacks. |
| Pureinsights | Enterprise platform license model. No $7,500-$9,500 diagnostic SKU; the license fee alone is comparable to the TensorOpt wedge. |
| Bounteous | Enterprise implementation tier; case studies imply $50K-$500K+ projects, not sub-$10K diagnostic. |
| Vaimo, Born Group, BlueAcorn iCi, Ranosys, Atwix | All anchor at enterprise implementation tier. None publish a sub-$10K, time-boxed search diagnostic SKU. |
Built by a practitioner
Built and delivered by Laszlo Csontos, author of Designing Hybrid Search Systems (Leanpub, 2026). Previously: production search at scale at a prior platform role, spanning embeddings, hybrid fusion, and taxonomy inference.
Sample report
Sample report on WANDS (Wayfair, ECIR 2022, 24 pages). Walks through query coverage analysis, judgment construction, NDCG@10 with bootstrap CIs, vendor-metric-vs-independent-metric gap analysis, and a Q4 readiness appendix.
Sample report built on public benchmark data. Real client engagements produce identical structure on the client's own retrieval pipeline.
Who this is not for
Not a fit for brands below $20M GMV, brands without a production search vendor in place, or buyers seeking a full replatforming engagement. I measure and recommend; I do not replatform.
Available after the diagnostic
- Q4 Readiness Audit$25,0004 weeks
Multi-vendor benchmark against last year's BFCM query mix, full merchandising review, and an A/B test design for Q3.
- Relevance Retainer$5,000/mo, 3-month minimumOngoing
Independent reviewer kept on the top 500 queries with quarterly judgment-set refresh and pre-peak advisory.
Ready for an independent diagnostic?
30-minute discovery call covers your search vendor, your query mix, the trigger that brought you here, and a walkthrough of the sample deliverable.