CE Phoenix Cart Forum

What do you do, if anything ?

On no Product found page- Ask the customer if they would like to forward us their query, we should have a field prefilled with query, with a customer email input field and submit.
Regds./
radhavallabh

- If they search a product that is old/not available anymore / status inactive - Show alternative product(s) (if any) - and show contact_us link.

- If they search a product that is / was not in our catalog - show a message "call us - mail us" with button link to contact_us.php (which customers only do if they really need something we can provide but is otherwise not available / findable on the www. Yes - those products exist )

Before we had possibility to add alternative (links) and fuzzy search but that is quite impossible to maintain.

We also used a PHP function (Levenshtein (? - long ago I worked on that - might be another function)https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php) which could show the closest search result - worked quite okay.

All in all - this is a complicated matter IMHO.

Tx for posting guys.

It is a complicated matter, but imagine the possibility of;

1. a button maybe in the header "can't find it? contact us", which;
2. opens a modal window, which;
3. asks for name/email and their question and allows extra questions and even a customer image upload, which;
4. pings the shopowner by email or maybe by slack telling shopowner that have a request to attend to, and;
4a. a nice reporting page in the admin area showing these requests, which;
5. allows shopowner to respond (immediately) by email, including links to products
5a. if the customer who asked is registered, push a queued email for a a day away, including the similar data as the immediate email

and even

7. a shopside "gallery" page of pictures sent in by customers, along with your response and links to alternative products.

How cool would all that be ?

Good - but I would prefer new Options/attributes system ... and Templatable Admin

What you mention above is off course nice - but not on top of my list

A

All we have done is added in some text to the bottom of the advanced_search.php page advising customers to contact us if they are unable to find a product. The link is in the form of a button to the contact us page so a big call to action. Simple and seems to get results if they get to the advanced_search.php page.

We use the typeahead addon for the search and was wondering if something can be put in there, but never got round to it.

We also use the out of stock addon which enables us to show products with a zero stock and removed the buy button. There is also a category with discontinued parts in which we link to alternative parts which keeps the products searchable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipRdVC5hZc

All done with zero core code changes.

Nice - Seems to be helpfull!

Yes, it's a pretty nice way to have customers (and potential customers) contact you.
Some of my description above does not exist;

4. email does, but slack does not (would just be a hook)
5a. queued email does not (would need a QE scheduler)
7. does not. I thought this was an excellent idea as it's free content for shopowner.