1. Customer expectation and industry standard: VMM users no longer evaluate search in isolation, they compare it directly to Blinkit and Zepto. Fast commerce has raised the baseline. Sub-second results, intelligent query handling, and near-zero irrelevant results are now the minimum a user expects. Every point VMM falls short of that standard is a reason to switch, which makes this a retention and competitive risk before it is a product one.
“app is very slow to load and can’t search proper product, app needs to update like blinkit and all, work on accurate searching”
2. Search integrity: the credibility gap When VMM's search or filters UX is not up to the mark, results show products that cannot be fulfilled, or orders get cancelled post-placement, users loose trust in the search process. Every mismatch between what search surfaces and what VMM can actually deliver costs a future session.
“ui is laggy, whenever I try the filter option or payment it loads for 2–3 minutes”
“After installing it and placing an online order, I received a call asking me to cancel the order because the items I selected were not available”
3. Where the industry is headed: AI-native search Search is moving from keyword lookup to intent understanding, and VMM's competitors are already there. Hinglish queries, spelling tolerance, and category-level inference are live on platforms VMM users switch to. The next frontier is personalised, context-aware search that anticipates what a user needs before they finish typing.
“wasted a lot of time searching for products and placing the order”
Search is not purely a discoverability problem. A user who finds exactly the right product through search, only to encounter a slow app, an out-of-stock item, or a broken payment flow, is a lost user and they rarely return to search again. Improving search in isolation optimises a single step in a broken journey.
Therefore, the prerequisite to rebuilding search is fixing upstream and downstream failures:
Once these are stable, search improvements have somewhere to land. Until then, better search just exposes the cracks faster. Assuming upstream and downstream are fixed, the output metrics will be defined as follows
Sessions × Query success rate × Result-to-cart rate × Cart-to-order rate × AOV