How 3 links led to an increase in ecommerce conversion rates

The Client - Countdown Supermarkets

Countdown has 180 stores spread across New Zealand which collectively sees 3 million customers every week. As part of the Woolworths group, Countdown employs more than 21,000 New Zealanders, making it one of the country’s largest private employers.

The Product Discovery & Optimisation team has been working with Catchi for the past 3 years, driving engagement and revenue on the commerce site via continuous experimentation.

Challenge - What do we do with ‘no search results’ users?

The idea to optimise the “no search results” page came about when the Countdown Product Discovery & Optimisation team reviewed users’ search behaviour and spotted an opportunity to improve the customer experience as a number of searches were returning no results. There are about 25,000 “no results” searches a day.

The original “no search results” page came back with useful information on how users can improve their search and also possible scenarios why nothing came up (e.g. restricted items like alcohol will only show up if user is logged in)

Most people who hit a dead end search tend to give up searching, so the ‘tips’ on the no search results page are only relevant to those who bother to continue refining their search. The challenge was to get those users who are compelled to leave after their dead end search to continue engaging with the site. Here is an opportunity to get them browsing other products instead of exiting the site and performing a search on Google (which could lead users to competitors).

When coming up with the ideas for the variants, these were the key considerations to keep in mind:

  • The Variant needs to provide users with some form of control and autonomy since they are likely to be frustrated after hitting a dead end
  • It also needs to encourage users to browse in such a way that flows naturally and doesn’t feel too jarring to their previous search experience
  • It needs to be clean and minimal and not be a drastic change from the existing page so that it can be a realistic implementation
  • Hypothesis

“We believe that adding promotional tiles to the no search results page will result
in more visitors locating products and we will have proven we’ve succeeded when
overall “Add to Cart” increases.”

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Case Study provided by Catchi