There has been some buzz as of late over ways to convert visitors who would otherwise leave the site for any number of reasons. In a recent article from Practical Ecommerce they talked about converting users that land on a 404 page. Most of the time they will get a 404 page if you remove an item from the store and or site and the visitor clicks on an old, for example on a search results page. The page they are attempting to view is not available and they will see a 404 error.Now if you just change the URL of that item i would hope that you used a Canonical link. Only when you remove the item from the store, the visitor types the URL wrong or clicks a bad link will they see a 404 page on your site. In this article I will re-hash some of the concepts presented by practical data and show you how to create a custom 404 page!
First, we need to build the 404 page. This will work for anyone with an online store or site but is geared toward a Yahoo! store. Go into the store editor, and from there click on the “Contents” link at the top. Now click on “new,” enter 404 for the ID and “main.” for the type, then hit “Continue.” This will take you to the edit page for a new object called 404. From there you will need to give it the name of your template, if you don’t use custom templates then just type “storetemplate.” If you use custom templates, type in the name of your custom template.
You may have noticed this page looks just like your home page. It has specials and other options, but for now we are only going to use the message box but you can use the specials box too and add item id’s to that box and they will show, note that the contents box will not work! So lets add the page title like 404 and we will add a message that is along the lines of
“We are sorry but this page is not here any more, you may have gotten here from an old like but for your troubles We have a coupon for your next order, type “ENTER COUPON NAME HERE” on check out and receive 5% off your order.”
Hit update and lets publish.
Now that the site is publishing we can go to the store manager and to the coupon manager to make the coupon. once you are there it’s pretty easy, so just make a standard type coupon that does not expire and any other options that you need to add. Hit the create button.
next on the list is making this page show up as the 404 page, the default setting in a yahoo store is the index page, and that is nice and all but this is better to help you find user that go to that page and keep customers. In the store manager on the far right hand side of the page you will see a link named “Preferences” and in there is a nice easy way to set up the 404 page, just choose the “Use a custom Store Editor error page” and type 404 in the box and hit “change”, wow! that was easy, now we need to “Publish order settings” and you are done! Now you can track people that use that code and see how many convert that land on that page, you can even see how many land on that page with stats at a glance or better with Yahoo Web Analytics.