This is low-hanging fruit not just for online stores, but for many kinds of sites, especially those that don't specialize in search. For example, I often have to use the site Grants.gov, which you'll recognize if you've ever had to submit or deal with research grants. And the search engine is <i>terrible</i> and frequently doesn't work at all.<p>The last time this happened, it inspired me to write a blog post about how to use Google for site-specific search: <a href="http://blog.seliger.com/2010/10/24/google-faster-than-grants-gov-finding-the-capital-fund-education-and-training-community-facilities-program-and-the-fy-2011-recovery-implementation-fund" rel="nofollow">http://blog.seliger.com/2010/10/24/google-faster-than-grants...</a> . Most of our readers aren't technical and probably don't know how to do this, but it can make search much, much better.<p>But that's for Grants.gov, and grants.gov dispenses money, which highly motivates its users. If you're trying to get users to pay you, on the other hand, you'll need to pay more attention to their experience.
Thanks for your input and sorry the site has been down part of the evening. I have no access to the web server right now but it will be back up tomorrow.
Dan