Blog
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eCommerce Websites: Rethinking “No Results”
August 8th, 2011
As I wheeled my heaping grocery cart to the checkout stand, the cashier cheerfully asked me “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” Most weeks I answer the question automatically – “Yes, thanks”. But yesterday, glancing at my full cart, the question broke through into my conscious thoughts. Even as I was walking out the door, the grocery store was taking advantage of one last touch point with their customer (and also taking one last shot at increasing their sale).
This got me thinking about the importance of making sure buyers (or users) can easily find what they are looking for. In the retail world, Target stores have the red phones that can either page a salesperson to your location or connect you with a store operator. Barnes & Noble stores have information desks where you can go for help should you need it. Home Depot has their orange-aproned associates throughout the store offering their assistance.
Web interactions, on the other hand, tend to happen without much human interaction. Some e-commerce and service websites offer a “live chat” feature, but it’s far from the norm. For the most part, people are on their own to find a product or service on the web. Luckily, today’s enterprise search platforms offer many features that can help. Autocomplete, autosuggest and autocorrect all attempt to drive people to results. Faceted navigation, bread crumbs and breadboxes can help users navigate through results. Relevancy rankings and related content can help tailor results to each individual.
But even with all of these advances in search engine technology, sometimes a person’s search will still return zero results. Unfortunately, this ‘No Results Page’ is often simply a message and an offer for the user to ‘Search Again’. Why do sites give up this chance to help their users find what they seek?
Sites can easily translate this somewhat frustrating experience into an opportunity to create a touch point with their users. Rather than focusing on what the site doesn’t have (“no results found”), feature what it does have. Use the ‘No Results Page’ to display sale, new or most popular items. Homedepot.com, zappos.com and crateandbarrel.com are all good examples of this strategy. Or, employ a partial matching algorithm – if there are no matches for all of the user’s search terms, display what matches for some of their terms. Ebay does a great job with this.
Give users the opportunity to browse through the site’s categories and/or content. They might discover what they are looking for. Walmart and Office Depot offer browsing on their no results pages.
In his book Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success, Greg Nudelman states, “In my experience, the effort and ingenuity a product team invests in the no search results page is indicative of its overall dedication to customer success.” (I thought it was a great read and a very valuable resource for today’s UX and design teams.)
Attention span on the web is notoriously short. Don’t let people leave your site empty-handed. Make sure that they found ‘everything they were looking for today’.
(Check out my colleague’s blog on the error page for a similar take on using error messages to your advantage.)
Kris Delta
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Tags: e-commerce, search
3 Responses 
Very intriguing article. I wonder if there is a way where user/ customer information can be collected in a database and a reply with an email can be sent to the potential customer later. This will not only help build and tie customer Loyalty, but also help avoid loosing a valuable customer.
Great comment. I do know that several of the Enterprise Search Vendors have either released or are working on creating Social Solutions for their products. Endeca partnered with Facebook for a webinar titled “Building Your eCommerce Experience with Social Design”. The webinar detailed how a customer might be able to see which of their Facebook Friends had purchased an item. Your idea of sending users an e-mail following a ‘no-results’ page could be another option that the vendors add someday. Thanks again for the great input!
Kris explains why companies like Zappos are so successful. By showing concern for your customer at every step of a transaction, you build an authentic relationship with the customer.