Miallies
The main menu sent customers to Narnia
A receipt about a store menu linking customers to an empty product page while the actual products were alive somewhere else on the site.
What happened
A creator store had products live on the site.
Real products. Buyable products. Photos, prices, descriptions, options, all the normal "yes babe, commerce is occurring" stuff.
But one of the most obvious links in the main menu sent customers to a product listing page that looked empty.
As in:
No results found.
Which is a tiny sentence with the spiritual energy of someone locking the shop door while making eye contact.
Because if a customer clicks the main menu looking for products and gets No results found, they are not going to think:
ah yes, perhaps the live catalogue exists elsewhere in the information architecture.
No.
They are going to think:
oh. Nothing is for sale.
And leave.
Fair, honestly.
What caused it
The products were not missing.
That is what makes this so rude.
They were alive and well somewhere else on the site, having a lovely time, apparently hiding from the main menu like it owed them money.
So the store had:
- one obvious menu path leading to an empty page
- another path where the actual products lived
- customers expected to develop clairvoyance at checkout
Which, as a sales strategy, feels ambitious.
This usually happens when a store grows in layers.
A page gets made. A collection changes. A homepage button gets updated. An old menu link stays behind like a Victorian ghost.
And because the owner knows where everything is, it does not look broken from the inside.
But customers do not live inside your admin panel.
They click the obvious thing.
And if the obvious thing opens into an empty cupboard, the site has basically said:
thank you for your interest, please perish.
What changed
The fix was boring in the best possible way.
Point the main menu link to the place where the products actually are.
Then remove, redirect, or clean up the empty product listing so it stops sitting there like a cursed waiting room.
No giant rebrand. No dramatic rebuild. No 47-page strategy deck called "Pathways to Purchase Excellence."
Just:
make the buying path lead to the things people can buy.
Groundbreaking. Brave. Possibly too powerful.
What got quieter
The customer journey got quieter.
Less:
wait, is anything available?
Less:
where did the products go?
Less:
I swear I saw something here before?
Less accidental abandonment from people who did exactly what the menu told them to do and got punished for it.
More:
I clicked the obvious product link. I saw products. I kept going.
That is the whole point.
Sometimes customers are not confused because they are flaky.
Sometimes they are confused because the store put the products behind the wrong door, handed customers a map to an empty room, and then wondered why no one bought anything.