A shopper comes to your site with a product in mind and a high intent to purchase. They go straight to your search bar, enter the item they’re looking for, and instantly land on a no results found page. At best, they might attempt a couple of variations of their search term before ultimately giving up and heading to a competitor. 

Any instance of no results found is a lost sales opportunity. With an abundance of creative ways to prevent customers hitting this dead end, there’s no excuse for a dull, conversion-killing no results found page. 

Why were there no results found, anyway?

It’s probably one of two reasons. The first is that you have a relevant product to offer, but your search experience is poorly configured. This is easy to rectify with the right site search solution. Stay on top of your no results reporting, clean up your product data, set up search redirects for common keywords, implement ‘did you mean’ suggestions for common misspellings, and don’t let it happen again. Check out our Ultimate Ecommerce Site Search Guide to learn more about avoiding this outcome. 

The second reason is you simply don’t carry the product in question. It happens. But that doesn’t mean the shopping experience has to end there. On occasions where you really don’t have relevant results to display, there are a number of approaches you can take to keep the shopper engaged and browsing.