HawkSearch (vendor — concedes against interest) — for catalogs of "just a few dozen products," basic search and navigation are adequate

Claim: "If your online catalog has just a few dozen products, basic search and navigation tools might be adequate."

Source: HawkSearch (vendor — sells search software, incentive to inflate need; here it concedes against interest), "If They Can't Find It, They Can't Buy It" (accessed June 2026).

Confidence: Industry-consensus (vendor-against-interest, corroborated by Prefixbox (vendor — faceted-search software, concedes against interest) — skip faceted search if catalog <200 products; implementation cost outweighs UX value and Luigi's Box (vendor) — independently corroborates the skip cutoff: "smaller catalogs with only a few hundred products may not require this level of complexity").

Why this matters for Candid: When a search-software vendor tells you not to buy their software, the floor of the recommendation is credible. Use as the first skip-threshold citation for SMB clients with small catalogues. Anchors R2 — Skip faceted search when the inventory is small (~under 200 items), stable, and shallow; a static list is fine.