Zappos Rocks, Their search not so much!
So this evening I decided I wanted to pick up a pair of Nike running shoes. I have been looking at the Nike+ shoes as they can tie into my ipod. I found a pair I liked at Nike, called Nike+ Zoom Jasari. Then I hopped over to Zappos to purchase, as I am a loyal shopper and a big fan.
I did what every consumer does when they know exactly the product they are looking for on a retailer’s site, I searched. I used the search terms Zoom Jasari.
Instead of getting back a couple of shoes that fit my query, or even a “hey we didn’t find what you were looking for”, I got back the following page:
This page is really useless to me, unless I want to sort through every Men’s Athletic shoe Zappos has. I didn’t even know what this page was at first glance.
So I then tried to be more specific and added to the search query: Nike Jasari, hoping it might return something a littler better, as I was giving the site the brand and the name of the shoe. I got back the following page:
What I got back is the Nike brand landing page. I didnt ask for it, as if I wanted to scan through all 467 Nike mens shoes Zappos sells I would have done that from the get go. This is a common practice for search: Mapping search queries to specific pages. It makes sense some of the time, but having worked on a number of high end online retail sites, I have seen it overused which I feel leads to a less than optimal experience.
I think a better experience would be to display results and maybe have links to appropriate brands, or if there is no product available as in my initial query, why not just tell the customer, so they dont spend 30 minutes search for naught.
I still love you Zappos, but I guess I’ll buy them directly from Nike… :(
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